GoodFellas Reviewed on Blu-ray
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"GoodFellas" is so good, even triumphant, in so many ways it's just about impossible to know where to begin. The movie is so rich and detailed that half an hour into it, I could hardly wait to see it again, because I knew that no matter how much I caught of what was going on, in the narration by Ray Liotta, the dialog by Nicholas Pileggi and Martin Scorsese (from Pileggi's book Wiseguy), Scorsese's careful direction, or the observant photography by Michael Ballhaus, I was missing some good stuff. A line here, a gesture there, a character mentioned in an early scene who doesn't recur again until much later in the two and a half hour movie. Some characters are mentioned who in fact never turn up, and you wrack your dizzying memory to remember who this or that guy was. Early on, the camera moves hypnotically through a nightclub -- a lot of the movie takes place in nightclubs and restaurants -- picking up Freddy No Nose, Frankie the Wop, Pete the Killer, Jimmy Two Times and other ordinary- looking guys with wild Mafia monikers. You stow them away, fascinated by this bizarrely comic parade of the wiseguys, but they never show up again. But that's okay, because "GoodFellas" is a true story, and in true stories, people do come and go on the tide of time; it's not all neat and structured, like fiction is.
The opening "flashforward" scene of "GoodFellas" more than sets the tone for the movie, it depicts what turns out to be the key moment in the mob life of Henry Hill (Ray Liotta), though he certainly doesn't recognize it at the time. Three guys -- Henry, Jimmy Conway (Robert De Niro) and Tommy DeVito (Joe Pesci) -- are driving aimlessly into the countryside around New York, when they hear a thumping from the car. Thinking it might be a flat, they pull over and open the trunk. There's a man inside, wrapped in white linen, bleeding all over the place. All three step back, shocked, and we're shocked too, maybe even laughing at this intrusion of violence into a peaceful nighttime ride. But our laughter is sliced off at the roots when Tommy pulls out a huge butcher knife, lunges forward and repeatedly stabs the dying man, then Jimmy shoots the body several times. Henry slams the lid of the trunk down, and his narration begins over a freeze-frame of his wide-eyed face. "As far back as I can remember," he says, "I always wanted to be a gangster."
After the credits -- the words roar onto screen and off, like speeding cars -- we return to the 1950s, when Henry was a kid (Christopher Serrone) living across the street from a taxi dispatching station, actually the headquarters of made Mafia capo Paulie Cicero (Paul Sorvino). Henry, who's half Italian (on his mother's side) and half Irish, is fascinated by the power and privileges and way of life of these men. (Scorsese wittily personifies the power at one point by showing the feet of a Mafioso getting out of a limousine, and the limousine sighing upward as his imperial weight is lifted from its springs.) He begins running errands for them, gradually being drawn into greater and greater positions of trust, becoming friendly first with Tommy, who's about his age, and later with slick, non-Italian gangster Jimmy Conway, who saunters into the Mafia-run restaurants, dispensing 20 and 100 dollar bills left and right. This is the life, thinks Henry.
And it is indeed the life he moves into. He and Tommy are soon working full-time for Paulie, occasionally helping Jimmy in his truck-hijacking operations. It results in all the money Henry can use, crowds of friends who treat him more like family, lots of women, fine clothes, and dizzying power. When he first starts dating Karen (Lorraine Bracco, who occasionally narrates her side of the story), whom he later marries, he takes her to the Copacabana. In one long, sumptuous take, objectifying Karen's dazzling introduction to Henry's social power, the camera follows them into the Copa, down the back stairs, through the kitchen where everyone knows Henry, into the club itself, where the maitre d' orders a table to placed at the head, and into their seats just as the show begins. Rarely has a long take of a moving camera been used so imaginatively, so expressively, and so thoroughly in the cause of storytelling and character development.
Henry loves the life, but he's never really quite in it. He is, for one thing, not Italian, and neither is Karen (she's Jewish), and so he can never enter the deepest recesses of Mafiadom. He's something of a pet to the Italians who really run the gang, loyal, amusing and useful, but never 100% trusted. Henry can't really get behind their casual attitude toward murder. And after a stretch in prison, he secretly ignores the advice of Paulie to stay away from dealing in cocaine, which ultimately causes Henry's downfall.
"GoodFellas" is a brilliant film, one of Scorsese's best; if it's not quite up to, say, "Taxi Driver," "Raging Bull" or "The Departed," that's only because it's very difficult to reach those pinnacles, even for the man who made the movies. Some are going to resent "GoodFellas" because Scorsese keeps the story narrowly to Henry's point of view, and so refuses to place any moral judgments on anyone's activities, except insofar that they disturb Henry..
Scorsese himself is obviously pulled both ways by this life. He's New York Italian, and grew up surrounded by the mob and its power. He cannot approve of what they do, but -- ahh! -- the way they do it, with lavish generosity, warm familial feelings, great clothes and lots of steaming food, that's heaven to Scorsese, and he makes all of it infernally attractive to us as well. Like Karen, we're swept along by the seductive intensity of the power of money, and the setting. At one point, after they're married, Karen tells Henry she needs some money. How much? he asks. Oh, about -- and she holds out her hand with her fingers an inch apart. Money isn't measured in numbers, but in inches. But Karen, in her narration, also tells us of the imprisoning qualities of this life: they vacation and socialize only with the same people, time after time after time.
As Henry's world and life begin to unravel, Scorsese steps up the pace. He begins leapfrogging over transitions, leaving out shots of people crossing rooms, just cutting from them over there to them over here, climaxing with a delirious, seat-clenchingly tense sequence of Henry, high on cocaine, trying to run all of a day's activities while under surveillance by what he supposes (correctly) to be a police helicopter. Everything becomes equally important to Henry as the hours tick by (spelled out from time to time on screen): getting the guns to Jimmy (who doesn't want them), getting his kids' babysitter onto a plane for her regular cocaine-smuggling run, stirring the spaghetti sauce, and looking after his wheelchair-bound younger brother. This scene is charged with tremendous power, and is also edgily funny, as almost all of the movie is.
Particularly in a disturbing, hilarious scene early on: Tommy, who's virtually psychotic, pumped up with sexual and murderous energy, tells a funny story to some guys in a restaurant. Henry laughs, casually telling Tommy he's a funny guy. Tommy takes immediate offense. "You think I'm funny? I'm here to entertain you? Am I a clown?" The laughter chokes off as we know -- from that opening scene (which takes place later, chronologically) -- that Tommy really could kill Henry on the spot. Joe Pesci, Jake's brother in "Raging Bull," is both a delight and a terror in this scene, as throughout, a wonderful performance of menace, stupidity and egocentric insanity. (This sequence is based on something that happened to Pesci himself.) He won the Supporting Actor Oscar for his work here.
Liotta is the center of the film -- De Niro, though excellent, is playing a supporting character -- and he never loses our interest. It's a careful performance, because he has to be both realistically a gangster, and to engage our interest, if not sympathies, enough to stay with him through the long film. Liotta fought to get the role, and it pays off.
Sorvino, a highly variable actor, has never been better; his frozen-faced Mafia chief is both warmly avuncular and terrifying. Lorraine Bracco is also very good in her Oscar-nominated role as Henry's increasingly-involved, increasingly-frightened wife. She's barely recognizable as Dr. Melfi from "The Sopranos" (which seems to have used this film as a casting guide; a lot of the actors here turned up there).
The film is so rich with incident and detail that you can get lost in just relating all that to people you want to see the film. You'll learn, graphically, why it is bad to go into business with the Mafia, no matter how important it seems to be at the time (and no, it's not because they will kill you). You will learn what Mafia wedding gifts are, and that most Italian kids are named Peter, Paul or Marie. You see before your eyes what the life of a gangster's wife does to Karen's taste in home decoration. Why, for a Mafioso, going to prison isn't all that bad a deal. You will see the stumbling blocks to becoming a "made man." And on and on.
Scorsese loves Coppola's "Godfather" films, but says they are like heroic, epic poems; his gang movies (this and "Mean Streets") are a bunch of guys standing on a corner, talking. That's far too casual an attitude toward the sheer exuberance and precision of Scorsese's filmmaking abilities. He's as proficient in his use of all the filmmaking elements available to a director as Steven Spielberg--who rarely chooses material as strong as does Scorsese. (On the other hand, it's just been announced that Scorsese's next project is a biography of Frank Sinatra.)
This Blu-ray disc is magnificent all the way around. First, the film hasn't looked this good, this rich, since its first weeks in theatrical engagements. The movie covers something like 30 years in Henry Hill's life, and we see clothing and interior decorations styles change with the years, from the dark blue and gray suits of the first years, to the richly colored blazers (De Niro even wears a purple one) of the middle years. Fabrics change, people's hair turns gray. The background colors change from the drab dark tones of the early years, to the gaudy, flamboyant wall decorations and grays and roses of Hill's most involved years.
The extras are also outstanding. There's "Getting Made," a making-of featurette made for the initial standard-definition DVD release of "Goodfellas" (or perhaps even earlier), that features many people involved in the movie. "Made Men: The Goodfellas Legacy" features on-camera quotes from other directors, including Jon Favreau, Albert & Allen Hughes, Joe Carnahan, Frank Darabont, Richard Linklater and Antoine Fuqua. Ther featurettes, like "Paper Is Cheaper than Film" and "The Workaday Gangster" (including comments by the real Henry Hill), are also worthwhile.
So are the two commentary tracks; one features many people involved in the film, including Scorsese himself (who cites the film's debt to Fellini's "I Vitelloni"), Mitch Pileggi, producers Irwin Winkler and Barbara de Fina, Cinematorapgher Michael Ballhouse, Editor Thelma Schoonmaker, and actors including Ray Liotta, Robert De Niro, Paul Sorvino, Joe Peschi, Frank Vincent and Lorraine Bracco. Another track is by Henry Hill himself, and Ed McDonald, the lawman who got Hill into the Witness Protection Program.
"Goodfellas" is very nearly a masterpiece, a film that not only seems to get better with each viewing, but which seems to somehow miraculous morph into a slightly different movie than you thought it was the last time you watched it. And this outstanding Blu-ray disc is the ideal way to own it for home viewing.
