Goodfellas (1990) Review

Official trailer

Goodfellas ranks among the greatest crime films ever made. Seen it twice across multiple decades. The 10 ratings are for a film that set the modern standard for mob cinema.

Martin Scorsese directing Ray Liotta, Joe Pesci, Robert De Niro, and Lorraine Bracco. Source material from Nicholas Pileggi’s 1985 book Wiseguy. Twenty-five years of New York mob life filtered through Henry Hill’s first-person voice.

Goodfellas is the mob movie I measure every other mob movie against. It’s funny and fast and frightening, it never once asks me to feel sorry for Henry Hill, and I can’t find a slack minute in it. My one small wish is that Karen got even more of the narration, because her half of the story is the part that stings.

The Setup

Henry Hill (Ray Liotta) wanted to be a gangster as far back as he can remember. He starts at age eleven running errands for the local mob in East New York. Across the 1960s and 1970s he moves up through Jimmy Conway (De Niro) and Tommy DeVito (Pesci) and marries Karen (Lorraine Bracco). He participates in the Lufthansa heist and gets into cocaine distribution. Then he gets arrested, flips and enters Witness Protection.

The film is told primarily through Henry’s voice-over narration with Karen taking over sections from her perspective.

The audience receives twenty-five years of accumulated mob life from the inside. It’s the earner’s view, not the boss’s. Henry was never made because he was half Irish. He stayed at the level where the actual work happens.

The Liotta Performance

Liotta plays Henry as a man in love with the life that’s destroying him. Henry is neither the smartest, the most violent nor the most respected character in the film, and he’s telling the story because he’s the one who lived long enough to tell it.

The performance handles three tones across the runtime. The young Henry full of wonder at the Bamboo Lounge. The middle Henry running operations and making money. The late Henry coked out and paranoid the day of his arrest. Liotta makes the same character feel like three different people without breaking continuity.

The breakdown scene in the prison after Tommy is killed shows what Liotta could do. Henry hears the news and the camera holds on his face while he tries not to cry.

He fails. The scene is one of the great single performances in mob cinema. Liotta’s death in 2022 ended a career that never quite got a role this good again.

That prison scene is the one that stays with me longest. Liotta lets Henry’s face do everything, and I think it’s the finest acting in a film stuffed with fine acting.

The Pesci Performance

Joe Pesci as Tommy DeVito won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor. The award was earned. Pesci plays Tommy as a man who’s funny enough that you forget he’s also dangerous. Then he kills somebody and you remember.

The “Funny how?” scene is the proof. Tommy responds to Henry’s casual compliment by pretending to take offense. The scene runs three minutes. The audience doesn’t know if Tommy is joking or about to shoot Henry. Henry doesn’t know either. The release is Tommy laughing, but the laugh doesn’t erase the question. Tommy could have gone either way. That’s the character.

I think “Funny how?” is the scariest scene in the movie, and nobody fires a shot in it. Pesci keeps me doubting him right up to the laugh and a little past it, and that lingering doubt is exactly what makes Tommy’s later killings land so hard.

Tommy gets killed because he killed a made guy without permission. The Mafia rules permit a lot of behavior, but they don’t permit that. Tommy thinks he’s getting made. He’s getting buried.

Pesci plays the scene small. Tommy realizes too late. He says “Oh no” and gets shot in the head. The character deserved the death and Pesci played it without overselling.

The De Niro Performance

De Niro plays Jimmy Conway as the senior figure Henry looks up to. Jimmy is patient. Jimmy is professional. Jimmy is also willing to kill everybody who worked the Lufthansa heist to avoid splits and witnesses. The performance keeps both sides operating without forcing either.

The scene where Jimmy realizes Henry might be flipping is the De Niro performance in miniature.

Jimmy invites Henry to come pick up a shipment of clothes. Henry knows what the shipment is really for. Jimmy knows Henry knows. De Niro plays the conversation without saying any of this directly. The audience receives the murder plan through what Jimmy doesn’t say.

De Niro and Pesci have done four films together for Scorsese. Raging Bull, Goodfellas, Casino, The Irishman. The chemistry across those productions represents one of cinema’s longest creative collaborations. Goodfellas is the one where their joint performance peaks.

The Bracco Performance

Lorraine Bracco as Karen Hill earned Academy Award nomination for Best Supporting Actress. The role is bigger than supporting. Karen has her own voice-over narration. Karen has her own arc from civilian to mob wife to coke addict to government witness. The film treats her as a co-protagonist.

The voice-over from Karen’s perspective makes Goodfellas honest about mob life. Henry sees the glamour. Karen sees the bills. Karen sees the other women. Karen sees the FBI on her lawn. Henry’s narration tells you what the life looked like from the inside. Karen’s narration tells you what it cost.

The scene where Karen pulls a gun on Henry in their bedroom shows what Bracco could do. Karen has been pushed past her capacity. She wants Henry to admit he’s cheating. She also half-wants him to talk her out of shooting him. Bracco plays both wants in the same moment.

The Scorsese Direction

The Copacabana tracking shot is the most discussed technical achievement in Goodfellas. Henry takes Karen through the back entrance of the club, through the kitchen, into the main room, where a table is set up for them in front of Henny Youngman. The shot runs three minutes in a single take. Steadicam operator Larry McConkey shot it. The shot shows Henry’s status through choreography.

Scorsese shot Goodfellas with cinematographer Michael Ballhaus. Ballhaus had worked on Fassbinder films before coming to Hollywood. The European training shows. Goodfellas doesn’t look like other 1990 Hollywood productions. The camera moves in ways American cinematographers weren’t yet moving cameras. The film looks like nothing else in mob cinema before it.

The Soundtrack

Goodfellas doesn’t have a score. Every musical cue is a licensed song placed for narrative effect. Tony Bennett. The Crystals. The Shangri-Las. Cream. Donovan. Derek and the Dominos. Each song is from the period the scene depicts. The soundtrack is a chronological document of American popular music from 1955 through 1980.

The “Layla” sequence is the soundtrack technique at peak. Jimmy has decided to kill everybody from the Lufthansa heist. Bodies are turning up. The piano coda from Derek and the Dominos’ “Layla” plays over the discovery sequences. The music is gentle. The images are corpses. The contrast is the scene.

The “Layla” sequence is my favorite use of a pop song in any crime film. That gentle piano over the bodies makes me feel sick and delighted at once, and I can’t think of another director who’d have dared it.

The Ending

Henry’s last voice-over is the film’s argument. He’s in Witness Protection in suburban America. He misses the life. He doesn’t miss it morally. He misses the action, the respect, the everything-on-credit operation. Now he has to wait in line at the supermarket like a schnook.

The ending refuses the moral arc most mob films apply at the end. Henry didn’t learn anything. Henry didn’t become a better person. Henry just lost his old life and resents the new one. The honesty about that resentment makes the film work. Scorsese isn’t interested in pretending the mob life cost Henry his soul. The mob life cost Henry his lifestyle. Henry would go back tomorrow if they would have him.

That ending is exactly right. A redemption speech here would have ruined the whole film for me, and Scorsese gives Henry a grudge against the supermarket line instead. Liotta’s sulking in that last voice-over makes me laugh, and it’s the most honest thing anybody says in the picture.

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Is Goodfellas as good as people say?

A 10, and it isn’t close. Liotta, Pesci, De Niro and Bracco are all at full strength, Scorsese shows off in the best possible way with the Copacabana shot, and the licensed soundtrack does more storytelling than most scores. The Funny how scene and the Layla sequence alone would earn most films an 8. Goodfellas set the modern standard for mob cinema, and every mob movie since has had to answer to it.

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