In the opening scene of the movie Goodfellas, an anonymous man is stabbed and shot to death in the back of the main characters’ trunk. Just moments later, however, you’ve forgotten about the dead, bloodied man in the trunk when the camera zooms in dramatically to Ray Liotta’s face and he utters the words that begin his glamorous story, “as far back as I can remember, I always wanted to be a gangster.”
I’ve resolved to watch one classic movie per week in an effort to learn more about the art of film.
While my experience with film is largely confined to the romantic-comedies section of Netflix, I guess that the best way to expand my knowledge is to watch the movies that seem to have left a resounding impact on both Hollywood and film history as a whole. To watch the ‘classics’.
When Martin Scorsese’s Goodfellas came out in 1990 it was positively received, nominated for six Academy Awards, and assumed the status of ‘classic’ within a few years. Based on the 1986 book Wiseguy by Nicholas Pileggi, Goodfellas tells the stylish and turbulent story of mob associate Henry Hill (Ray Liotta) and his friends and family.
From Henry Hill’s earliest days, he is fascinated by the life of the mobsters across the street from his cramped, crowded home. Impressed by the mobsters’ wealth, power, and seeming ability to ignore the laws that control normal society, Hill becomes associated with the criminals, running errands for them and parking their Cadillacs. The film tells the tale of his subsequently increasing levels of criminal behavior and the importance of the relationships and connections that govern his life.
Even from the opening scene’s murder and subsequently aggrandized image of Henry Hill, violence and crime are made into something attractive. Henry Hill is handsome, charismatic, and generally likable.
His criminal acts don’t much mar the likability of his character, and in fact, make him more attractive to some; his future wife Karen, most notably, who claims that she is ‘turned on’ by Henry’s violent attack on a neighbor (???).
To be clear, the film does not condone violence (in fact, the film leaves a distinct impression of its overall ugliness and destructive nature in the end), but rather transforms it into something exciting and entertaining. And therein lies one of the reasons I find this film to be so resonant - it manages to glamorize crime while also demonstrating how it destroys and denigrates the lives of its participants.
It tells the story of how (I would assume) it feels to be involved in the mob. The riches and power as well as the prison cells and cocaine addictions.
Goodfellas feels ‘classic’ to me because of its portrayal of something completely out of the ordinary through an ordinary perspective. It tells of unimaginable crimes as belonging as regularly to a part of a character’s day as getting up in the morning. The stark ugliness of this fact makes the film both shocking and emotionally turbulent, leaving it to pester you for weeks to come.
