by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2018 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
The film was GoodFellas,
the rather stupidly titled 1990 gangster epic directed by Martin Scorsese and
written by him and Nicholas Pileggi based on a non-fiction book Pileggi had written called Wiseguy. Wiseguy
told the real-life story of Henry Hill (Ray Liotta), whom we meet in 1955 at
age 15 and who tells us, first off, that the only thing he ever wanted to be
was a gangster. He wanted to be a gangster not only because they had money,
wore fancy clothes and drove big, expensive cars but because he felt being in
the Mob would give him a feeling of belonging, of being part of something bigger than himself. Of
course he knew that crime in general and murder in particular — both killing
other people and constantly having to look over his shoulder to avoid being
killed himself — were part of the deal, but the way Scorsese and Pileggi
portray him he’s more amoral than
immoral. Along the way he hooks up with two other crooks, Jimmy Conway (Robert
De Niro, top-billed) and Tommy DeVito (Joe Pesci), and the three rise in the
ranks of organized crime under the sponsorship of local mobster Paul Cicero
(Paul Sorvino).
I’d never seen GoodFellas before and I don’t think Charles had, either — both of us had been put
off by the film’s reputation for wall-to-wall violence (and I had the
complicating factor that my then-roommate and home-care client was of Italian
ancestry and regarded movies like the Godfather films and GoodFellas to be group libels against his entire ethnicity —
and when I pointed out that their directors, Scorsese and Francis Ford Coppola,
were Italian-Americans themselves, he practically declared them traitors to the
race) — but GoodFellas turned out
to be far less violent than its reputation. There’s certainly some serious bloodletting
in the movie, but only as much as we need to realize that as lovable as these
people seem to be sometimes, they’re also cold-blooded killers and thieves. GoodFellas was acclaimed as an instant classic almost as soon
as it was first released in 1990 (and we were watching it on a DVD that came to
a dead stop in the middle of the film — I realized that Warner Bros. had split
this 2 ½-hour film over two sides of a DVD — obviously this was the first DVD
release since modern discs can easily accommodate a movie this long on just one
side) but I found it good but not great. The main problem with it is that it’s
simply boring: after a while the various antics of the Terrible Trio seem to
look pretty much the same — they plan a robbery or a drug deal or a murder,
execute it, then go back to their wives and significant others (as in the
classic gangster films of the 1930’s, monogamy is not part of the deal, and some of the weirdest parts of
the movie show the jealousy of Hill’s wife Karen, played beautifully by
Lorraine Bracco, over his various paramours: the sheer ordinariness and
banality of Henry Hill’s marital conflicts becomes an odd counterpoint to the
nasty shit he has to pull to make a living) and lead what appear on the surface
to be normal suburban lives until the next caper.
We’re told that the gang pulls off a robbery of the Lufthansa
terminal at Kennedy Airport but we don’t see a frame of the crime actually
going down — in a previous era’s movies like The Asphalt Jungle, The
Lavender Hill Mob and The Killing the details of how the super-robbery was executed
were the prime focus — its only dramatic purpose is to stick the various gang
members with a $6 million pile of cash they can’t spend until they fence it
(for a considerably lesser sum of money) and can safely distribute it once it’s
been laundered. The tensions of sitting on an enormous pile of cash they can’t
spend, and in particular how the other gang members rebel against Conway’s
insistence that they can’t touch the loot at all until some unspecified time in
the future, tears apart the gang and leads to the murder of Tommy, the most
openly psychopathic of the three principals. Tommy is actually lured to his
killing site by the promise of being “made” as an official member of the Mafia
— Conway and Hill both lament that they can never be “made men” themselves
because they’re Irish (Hill’s mother was Sicilian but half-breeds don’t count —
only the Mafiosi are really out
to entrap Tommy and kill him because he killed a “made man” several reels before
without asking the requisite permission from the Mafia family he belonged to
first. Indeed, in one of the film’s most chilling scenes Tommy picks on a young
guy who’s working as a waiter in one of their underground poker games and
shoots him in the foot, and when that doesn’t relieve his anger shoots the poor
kid several times in the chest, killing him and leaving the other gangsters
present the unpleasant and unnerving task of disposing of the body. (Quite a
lot of the film includes black humor about this necessary but yucky task facing
people who kill other people for a living; in one grimly amusing scene, the
three leads have to dig up a body they previously buried because a big condo
building is about to be built on the lot and they have to move the corpse so it
isn’t accidentally discovered when the foundation is laid — and Conway and
Tommy take the task in stride but Henry Hill gets sick at the smell of the
decomposing body and heaves at the gravesite.)
GoodFellas (I have no idea why the official title was listed
with a capital in the middle as if it were a computer program — at least in the
poster art: in the opening credits themselves the title is in all caps and
imdb.com lists it as Goodfellas,
capitalized normally) is clearly the work of major filmmakers, and the
direction and acting are impeccable (whatever you think of Scorsese, he knows
the Mafia as a subject forwards and backwards — and has since his film-student
days at New York University, where he made a half-hour short called It’s
Not Just You, Murray!, which like GoodFellas and several of Scorsese’s other films is a Mafia
story taking place over decades). It’s just a rich but not especially
satisfying meal, lacking the philosophical weight of the first two Godfathers (at least as I remember them, since I haven’t seen
either since they were new) and with a not particularly interesting protagonist
— had Henry Hill had more self-doubt he would have been a considerably more
interesting character: instead he’s just a rather dull man who finds
fulfillment in a life of crime and then, when he’s finally busted (largely
because he drifts into drug dealership and then into drug use — like a number
of other Scorsese protagonists, including Leonardo di Caprio’s character in The
Wolf of Wall Street, he’s undone when drug
addiction makes him sloppy), he decides to rat out his former friends in the
Mob and ends up driving a bulldozer as his job after the feds have relocated
him into witness protection (though one of the where-are-they-now end titles say
he attempted to get another drug deal going in 1987, two years after he
testified against Conway and Cicero, and got arrested in his new federally
provided identity) and lamenting that his new career just doesn’t have the dash
or fulfillment of his old one.
