Critics reviews

GoodFellas is music. It’s like a concept album. I don’t know which album specifically – but an album all its own. And it’s not just a Martin Scorsese mix-tape, it’s something the director manipulated through his vision – as his own production – he laid the tracks.

It often seems to clasp the key to understanding (second-generation, male) America in an unattainable 1.85:1 crucible... Scorsese's crucial narrative achievement is the meticulous setting of each sequence to diegetically-appropriate pop music as if it were an arranged marriage, and vividly portrays Hill's climactic coke/ziti-fueled breakdown as the ultimate Stones/Nilsson megamix.

Scorsese's realism is a hallucinatory realism, and the most extravagant moment in "GoodFellas" captures the mind-bending force of violence on Henry Hill himself. The younger man's bravado ultimately gives way to a middle-aged man's paranoia, and, in a scene where he fears for his life, Scorsese creates an image—one of the most inspired moments in his career—that's borrowed directly from Alfred Hitchcock's "Vertigo."

GoodFellas, at its core, is about the overriding appeal of violence as a source of personal power. It demonstrated that appeal more convincingly and viscerally than any film had done before or has done since. The film's persuasive potency was a product of its relentless jauntiness and black humor: the unalloyed verve with which Scorsese, through his brilliant cast, told even the ugliest of stories.

The repetitiveness of the sequences can't be ignored, but Scorsese uses that repetition to thematic effect, emphasizing the lack of power these egotistical men truly wield within the organization... The spectacular visual style masks the banality of what it documents, an approach mirrored in the acting.

It was a seminal work for Scorsese as well as for American movies... It serves as both the final film in one trilogy (Who's That Knocking at My Door, Mean Streets, Goodfellas) and as the first film in another (Goodfellas, Casino, The Wolf of Wall Street). It's the transitional movie in which Scorsese crystallizes several of his obsessions, leaves others behind, and finds his new subject that would define all of his best films to come: the corrosive effects of rampant materialism on the soul.

While many of Goodfellas' best formal tricks hearken back to both its creator's formative influences (from Edwin S. Porter on down) and his own idiosyncratic innovations (a combination of uncomfortable intimacy and strident distancing devices; pop tunes used as conduits to characters' inner lives), it's the uncanny sense of imminence—a character edging to the brink of ruin; a pop-gangster film canon on the edge of forming—that is the movie's true legacy.

Martin Scorsese's 1990 film Goodfellas is perhaps the greatest gangster picture ever made. It is nearly unrivaled in its texture, its details, and its expansiveness. And, given that it so thoroughly encapsulates its gangster life-style and so methodically relates the lives of its gangster characters, it comes as no surprise then that, as part of such a system, it also covers territory always present (explicitly or implicitly) in the gangster crime film: masculinity.

GoodFellas dazzles foremost as a piece of pure craftsmanship. In tracking Ray Liotta's Hill as he works his way up through the organization, conspires with vicious lowlifes played by De Niro and an unforgettable Joe Pesci, and suffers a precipitous fall from grace, the film's style and texture shifts with the times.

It is certainly one of the most interesting and subversive of all gangster films, combining elements of the musical and black comedy in its story of the rise and fall of an unrepentant mob henchman. The film combines Scorsese's typically ambivalent view of violence, displaying it in all its nastiness while at the same time positioning the viewer (through editing, camera angle, and music) to identify with it.

Scorsese made a crucial decision; his trilogy is nonfiction. "True crime" always entails a certain trade-off. You gain in authenticity, but you cannot rearrange the narrative to give it artistic cohesion, artistic shape. You are left with happenstance and inadvertence—with the messiness, the loose ends and false leads, that attend any human life. Scorsese, however, finesses the difficulty. His visual logic provides a guideline through the chaos. And for him, anyway, the mess is the message.

Superbly shot on location, with uniformly fine performances and Scorsese's direction at its most sinuously muscular, GoodFellas disappoints only in the slightly perfunctory use of Henry's wife as a second narrator (her comments offer stronger counterpoint in Pileggi's original) and in the necessary truncation of the book... These reservations are minor, though, in a fascinating, intelligent, and in some ways groundbreaking movie.