As far back as I can remember, I always wanted to be a gangster.
Henry Hill in GoodFellas (narration)
Table of Contents
Why GoodFellas?
GoodFellas is the fourth movie in the list of movies I am using for project CineCat. I am glad for that since after Schindler’s List I really needed a bit of a palate cleanser and this movie is definitely one of those. Coincidentally, I also just read a book about Irish gangsters before I watched this movie so a gangster/mob movie is a perfectly complementary with that.
This is my first time watching this movie but I have heard references made to this movie over the year. Names like Ray Liotta & Joe Pesci have come up in music and specifically Benny the Butcher songs which often reference this movie, The Godfather, and the HBO TV show The Sopranos. So I am glad to finally be able to know what those rappers are talking about. I’ll be watching The Godfather soon enough as well, its on the list.
Joe Pesci is someone I am a little bit familiar with since the movie Home Alone was one that I watched a few times growing up, in fact I’ve seen all three Home Alone movies. So when Joe showed up in GoodFellas and started talking in his signature voice, it was a big ol’ Leonardo pointing at the TV moment.
Let’s get into it.
The Movie
GoodFellas is an American biographical gangster film depicting the life and rise of Mafia associate Henry Hill over the course of three decades. It is based off of the non-fiction book Wiseguy by Nicholas Pileggi who also was one of the co-writers on this movie along with the director Martin Scorsese.
It is hard to muster any feeling but apathy about this movie. Everything about it is really well done—the performances are fantastic, especially from Joe Pesci, the cinematography is excellent, the Copacabana tracking shot being a prime example of that. The plot itself while not particularly intriguing kept me interested most of the way through the movie, especially in the last quarter of the movie as things start to fall apart.
My apathy here comes from the fact that I continue to be a very character driven person when it comes to media, it is something I have made clear in my book reviews over the past few years. I can overlook a lot of faults if there are characters I care about and that’s where GoodFellas falters. I don’t care about any of these characters so even if the movie is technically very good, a masterpiece even, as a holistic package, it was not something that moved me.
And it doesn’t have anything to do with all the characters being terrible human beings. They are all gangsters—they lie, murder, steal—that is to be expected. But I can root for an antihero, the book I read before this All Them Dogs, had a main character Wardy who was an Irish gangster that I found myself caring about even if I found him morally reprehensible.
The primary character of GoodFellas—Henry Hill progresses in a downward slope throughout the movie, over the three decade timeline the movie takes place in, we see Henry deteriorate as a person more and more, we see him become increasingly abusive towards his wife, becoming more of a cold-hearted killer like his partner in crime Tommy. And in the end, when he is sitting at the bottom of the hill, he…well let’s just say the ending of this movie wasn’t satisfying in any sense of the word.
At the core of it, I just did not find Henry Hill interesting as a person. He is morally reprehensible but not in a way that I find interesting. Even the movie’s attempt at giving him further character depth by use of the narration voiceover doesn’t quite work for me. It’s just more Henry and it isn’t a vehicle for introspection, if anything it accentuates everything he does with a level of self-aggrandizement that is as unappealing as it is uninteresting.
Concluding Thoughts
GoodFellas was technically fine, extremely proficient even. Great performances from the main cast, great cinematography and reasonably good pacing. Ultimately, my apathy towards all of its characters left me feeling empty at the end of it. I had a bit of a hard time writing this review, not because the movie was a difficult watch but I didn’t have much to say about it.
I am sure I will be watching other Martin Scorsese movies in the future and I hope I care more about them than I did for this one. As far as gangster movies are concerned, I am looking forward to watching The Godfather and seeing how that classic movie compares to GoodFellas.
Well at least now I get all the GoodFellas references in hip-hop songs. That’s all from me, see y’all in the next one.
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