Martin Scorsese’s GoodFellas is a crime film we would recommend to almost anyone. Its gangsters are appalling company, but the performances make it hard to leave, despite some repetition and too little room for Karen’s perspective.
Martin Scorsese’s GoodFellas is a frightening, often funny crime film that earns its 145 minutes by taking an interest in how gangsters spend their days. Across three decades of mafia life, it follows men for whom making money is reason enough to get out of bed and almost anything else can be justified afterwards. Scorsese gives their routines enough attention that their company starts to feel familiar. That familiarity is what makes the violence so unpleasant.
Ray Liotta’s Henry Hill is the right guide because he can make explaining this life sound like recommending it. His voice-over is intimate and conversational, with little sense of a man stopping to consider how he might sound to outsiders. We laughed, then felt uneasy about laughing. Liotta delivers his account with such comfort that the casual treatment of criminal business becomes funny before its implications have properly registered.
Michael Ballhaus’s tracking shot lets the camera travel with the confidence of somebody who expects to be admitted. It is a showy piece of film-making, but the pleasure of that uninterrupted movement explains the attraction more efficiently than a speech could. Kristi Zea’s production design keeps the surroundings ordinary enough for the men to look at home. Their ease makes the behaviour harder to dismiss as something that happens only in crime films.
Joe Pesci’s Tommy DeVito is exhausting company, and that is praise for the performance. His humour has such aggression behind it that a laugh never quite settles the question of what he might do next. Robert De Niro, as James Conway, is less openly demonstrative; watching him listen can be as worrying as watching Pesci talk. Paul Sorvino’s Paul Cicero supplies the weight of authority without needing to compete for attention.
Editors Thelma Schoonmaker and James Y. Kwei keep the film quick without making every scene feel the same length. Conversations have enough room for a performance to become funny or uncomfortable, then the film is off again before the mood settles. There is a cost to the accumulation: repeated ugliness eventually wears down our capacity to be startled. A few later passages press the same point about these men after we have understood it, and speed cannot quite conceal that repetition.
The screenplay by Nicholas Pileggi and Scorsese is less generous to Karen Hill, played by Lorraine Bracco. Her narration gives her room to describe this society, but the film is so taken with Henry’s account that her perspective cannot have equal force. Bracco makes Karen’s presence count, even when the writing gives the men more to occupy themselves with. This reservation matters because a fuller sense of Karen’s experience would have shown us more of what their behaviour costs other people.
GoodFellas belongs among the crime films we would recommend even to someone who thinks the genre has nothing left for them. Its close attention to money, manners and male company is enough to distinguish it without pretending that criminals are especially profound. The violence is harsh, and the humour offers no reliable shelter from it. Watch it when a cheerful evening is not a requirement.
