Goodfellas: A Review

Life is easy with gangsters; almost everyone offers a shortcut to everything a gangster desires. With Goodfellas, film maker Martin Scorsese made an undeniably masterpiece of a film, let alone an arguable best of its genre, look as easy.

Goodfellas is a story of Henry Hill and his tale of about thirty-years of wheeling, dealing, and living a mob’s life told within two hours of cinema. The film starts with a young Henry deciding to grow up and realize his ambition of being a gangster. While the Godfather throws Michael into this kind of life out of hierarchal necessity, Henry in the Goodfellas laid out his plan from the beginning.

Unlike the Godfather, Goodfellas distilled its characters into a rather more human bunch of mobsters with the same murderous tendencies. When Tommy (Joe Pesci) killed made-man Billy Batts, after which he and his trio decided to dump him in some vacant lot they knew, probably having a stop-over in mom’s house to pick a shovel and have dinner while a dead man is on a parked car’s trunk are not the type of mobsters previous genre films would have treated their characters. The miracle is it worked without reducing the compelling attribute of the situation.

A steady stream of narration by Henry and a couple of other significant characters guided the structure and formation of the plot all throughout. The characters in the Goodfellas were built excellently. The trio of Ray Liotta, Robert DeNiro and Joe Pesci were each defined well to the extent that no point over the course of the film would you confuse yourself as to why this character does things the way that we’ve been shown.

A gaggle of characters were introduced just as frequent as they disappear through various brutal erasures. Knives were stabbed at chests, bullets went flinging onto somebody’s toes and people were left rotting inside garbage trucks. It’s necessary in a mob flick but Scorsese did it in a grand style. Incorporating popular music instead of orchestra scoring and using stop-motion visuals while the narration is continuing often is a gimmick that unintentionally leads to crappy entirety but Scorsese is no mere director. He crafted it and succeeded. No contest.

One must wonder how on this planet Scorsese not managed to win the Oscar statuette that year. Had this been an issue inside the Goodfellas plot, Henry and his mob would have stabbed the non-voters immediately.