Scorsese Watch: Goodfellas (1990)

Watched:  01/31/2025

Format:  4K

Viewing:  Unknown

Director:  Martin Scorsese

Goodfellas (1990) is one of my favorite movies, but I don't watch it all that often. It's not a comfort watch for me - it's a "everyone shut up, I'm watching a movie" movie.  And I take great delight in letting this particular movie run from start to finish.   I'll catch bits of it on cable, but I honestly don't think I'd sat and watched it end-to-end since pivoting my blogging to nigh-all-movie-conversations back around 2012.  It also is likely I did watch it and then forgot to write it up, which used to happen a shocking amount (I now make a stub as soon as a movie is over so I remember to write a post).

I saw Goodfellas in the theater during its initial release.  Oddly, I saw it in San Antonio, where I did not live.  My brother was there interviewing with the university he eventually attended.  I was still in the middle of high school, and my mom was elsewhere, but I have zero memory of how that translated to The Admiral taking Steanso and myself to see a Scorsese movie.  I remember, also, that The Admiral *hated* it, and Steans and I were all but high-fiving at the end of the film.

Intellectually, I know this is a good movie, but...  man, in this blog's opinion, there's not a wrong note in the whole thing.  Acting is astounding from everyone, and you're talking a massive cast.  

Based on an alleged true story by Nicholas Pileggi - the names changed probably to keep anyone from getting bumped who worked on the movie - it tracks the life of a New York Irish/Italian kid who finds work with the local crew of organized crooks and tracks him for decades, through the very high highs and the lows.  It's not the fictional honor-bound world of The Godfather, it's bad people doing bad things and corrupting everything they touch.  And loving the life.  

The cast of this movie has become iconic, in the true meaning of the word.  Simpsons based a whole group of characters on the performances and looks of some.  In 1993, Animaniacs brought us Goodfeathers, a cartoon aimed at children where the joke was "what if it was Tommy, Jimmy and Henry from Goodfellas as pigeons?"  

But, man, the movie has dozens of characters, basically breaking every rule of what they tell you an audience wants or can handle - but it's also vital for understanding the world Henry is in.  Ray Liotta was mostly famous at this point for five minutes in Field of Dreams, and is, frankly, amazing as Henry.  Of course we have DeNiro as Jimmy, and Joe Pesci would ride his role as Tommy to a decade-plus of superstardom.  Folks often talk about Paul Sorvino as the head in this, and he is truly great.  But I'm always stunned Lorraine Bracco's Karen - Henry's wife who starts as a nice girl and winds up as a partner in crime, gets so little mention.  She's every bit as great as anyone.

But there's dozens more.  Signal Watch fave Debi Mazar appears in the back half, and I still remember my eyes popping out of my head at age 15 watching this movie that the actual Henny Youngman plays himself (I had recently learned of Youngman and was trying to learn how to do one-liners, and never figured it out).  But who could forget Scorsese casting his own mom, Catherine, in the movie as Tommy's mother with her cooking and paintings?

maybe one of my favorite scenes in movies

Unlike most crime epics, Goodfellas is kind of all over the place in ways modern reviewers might find tonally confused.  It's a black comedy much of the time.  I mean, there are very real-life crimes committed by real-life people, who really did awful shit in recent memory when the movie came out.  But the movie knows these are dumb bastards and the best way to show that is to laugh at them.  

And, when they're laughing, the audience isn't.  Think of every time Henry is laughing to tears - someone is being hurt, someone is powerless before absolute thuggery.

As much as I like me some fancy photography in a movie, shot-over-shot, this is maybe one of the top movies I'd pull out to show a film-class how you use the camera to tell a story without cueing the audience that "you are now looking at a cool shot" while definitely having amazingly cool shots, and driving the narrative with camera motion.  Constant camera motion. Credit Michael Ballhaus for creating a visual language that - if it existed before this - got thrown into high gear in the 90's and hasn't ever really let up.

And one can't not mention the astounding editing of the film, which makes all of that motion and makes it into story, thanks to the great Thelma Schoonmaker.  Not to mention, how Schoomaker pulls out shots for those stills, and finds the moments when to cut - leaving some beautiful longshots in the movie, whip-pans and other bits that make it all feel immediate and engaging.  And, most improbable, somehow she managed to keep all of the dozens of characters straight, and made it easy to follow.

I do remember the chatter in my film classes in the mid-90's about the technique in the film and choices like the film stock used.  I wish we'd spent more time on it, to talk about how the camera helps tell the story, not just in the Copacabana sequence (brilliant) but with how Ballhaus and Schoonmaker make sure you get how very, very bad Henry's world is going before he'd officially busted.

All of this is propelled by Scorsese's trademark use of music.  This and The Departed I think are his top uses of pop soundtracks, but in particular, this one marks the years and pop culture moments that place the film in a place and time, from Bobby Vinton to the Stones, it hits exactly the tone needed.  And, of course, the piano outro to Layla.   

A YouTuber I follow is an opera performer who has a rich background in classical music and a stunning lack of knowledge of pop and rock, who does analysis and reacts to music her audience throws at her.  It just so happened that she decided to listen to Layla on the same day I watched Goodfellas, and her musings on the piano portion of the song were kind of interesting as she discussed what she thought you should do with the music versus what Marty did.  

Anyway, I really don't think I have to sell you on Goodfellas.  It was up for best picture in 1991 and lost to Dances With Wolves, because: Academy voters sure love to vote for a certain kind of movie.

But here in 2025, Goodfellas feels as relevant and fresh as it did in 1990 when I saw it as a teen.  It's extraordinary movie-making, and where the Oscar winner was building a kind of American myth, Scorsese was busily examining our romantic mythology and tearing it apart.