A Look At Goodfellas By Scorsese

Martin Scorsese decided to make Goodfellas after watching a few videos on MTV. His response was something like “You think THAT’S fast? I’ll show you FAST!” And the rest is history. With this film, Scorsese flipped the very concept of film making on its head and made a film faster and more full throttle than any that had come before it.

Before you go blaming Scorsese for the quick-cutting and shaky-camera work of Saw 57 and The Bourne Something Or Other: Film makers will always find ways to make movies confusing and incomprehensible. Scorsese laid out a blueprint on how to make movies that were fast, but that were also coherent, sensible and which made sense. This film will excite you without nauseating you.

The film focuses on Henry Hill, a real life gangster of the Lucchese crime family, following him from his youth to his “retirement” from the crew. It’s essentially a biopic, though of course, you won’t believe for a second that the movie is based on real events simply because of how strange and bizarre some scenes are. The truth is, though, gangsters could be much more imaginative than your average screenwriter. It’s not just film people who can be creative.

Of course, the film isn’t a documentary, it’s not all fact and no story. But… The movie actually tones it down in some ways. The characters were often much, much more brutal in life than they ever aspired to be in the film. DeNiro’s Jimmy Conway, for example. In the film, he’s shown as the level headed one, capable of violence, but not anxious for it. Not so with the real life Jimmy Burke, who would stuff children into refrigerators to scare their parents who owed them money.

Joe Pesci’s Tommy DeVito is a whole other story. In the film, he has a hair trigger temper and murders several people over relatively minor insults. In real life, Tommy DeSimone didn’t need minor insults. At one point in their youth, he and Henry Hill were walking down the street and, seeing a man neither of them had ever met before, DeSimone said “Henry, watch this!” and pulled out a pistol and shot the man in the head, killing him instantly. Hill reportedly said “Tommy that was cold”, to which Tommy replied “Well I’m a cold cat!”

So… You could almost say that the film sugarcoats it for us.

The film’s pace isn’t just about being stylish or cool or different, it’s about putting us into Hill’s state of mind. He develops a cocaine addiction over the course of the film’s second act, and this is when everything starts spiraling out of control. The film just keeps getting faster and faster until it finally crashes, and we crash with it, down into Hill’s sober, sombre reality when he is betrayed by his friends and put into the witness protection program.

If you haven’t seen it yet, check it out alongside Casino, a similar, truth based story of mob history. Similarly, we see DeNiro playing the more level headed gangster to Pesci’s loose cannon. Goodfellas matches up with The Godfather part II on every level but pathos, which it more than makes up for with sheer energy.

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