GOODFELLAS
[Spoilers]
A film review by John Locke
Copyright 1995 John Locke
The boldness--the effrontery--of GOODFELLAS' opening scene, the non sequitur of disturbing brutality and cheery music, assaults our conventional expectations of criminals and murder. More subtly, the opening lays out the design of the film; it's a paradigm of the film's method.
Three men--Henry (Ray Liotta), Tommy (Joe Pesci), and Jimmy (Robert DeNiro)--are driving along a dark highway. They hear a thumping and pull over to investigate. The noise is coming from the car's trunk. Henry raises the lid cautiously to reveal a barely struggling body wrapped in bloody tablecloths. Tommy pulls a butcher knife from inside his coat and savages the defenseless victim. Jimmy empties his pistol into the body. As Henry closes the trunk, his voice-over narration breaks in. The frame freezes on his expression, a look of troubled, yet guarded, astonishment. But the narration offers a different sentiment: "As far back as I can remember, I always wanted to be a gangster." To complete the contradiction, the music kicks up, a brassy number with Tony Bennett optimistically singing of going from "Rags to Riches." (1)
The unexpected explosion of violence is characteristic of director Martin Scorsese; the key to understanding GOODFELLAS, though, is in what follows--Henry's expression, the narration, and the music.
Techniques
==========
When the action freezes on Henry's face, the scene has been grounded in the point of view (POV) of the film's central character. The scene switches from the director's omniscience to a representation of Henry's experience. Above all, GOODFELLAS is concerned with the POV of its characters and not with any reciprocal views from the world outside of them. If the method of the film is consistent, then the film becomes the POV of its characters, and not the director's or the screenwriters' (2).
Narrative POV -------------
Scorsese employs a battery of techniques in seeking this consistency. Foremost (and most apparent) is the narration which sets the film up as a story told in the first person. Primarily, it will be Henry's story and he levels with us as if we were trusted associates. (3) He is generous with insights about himself and the mob world. Because his story is restricted to his POV, his narrative speculations become an important source for understanding events for which he is not an eyewitness, like the Lufthansa robbery and its aftermath. The design of the film does not allow Henry to be abandoned in order to reveal plots going on behind his back.
The introduction of Karen (Lorraine Bracco), Henry's future wife, to the story adds a second narrative voice, which allows us to see aspects of the gang life that are exclusively female, like the hostess party in which the wives discuss their husbands. Karen narrates those scenes on her own, narrates other scenes in which Henry is present, like their wedding, and in one case talks over a scene that features Henry but not her--a nice economy allowing the story to move forward on twin tracks. (This points to an interesting side benefit of narration. The story can move forward while the on-screen action fills in background detail. Consider the prison scene where the new convicts--Henry, Paulie (Paul Sorvino), et al.--cook up a fine Italian dinner. Overlaid on this seemingly abnormal portrait of prison life, Henry's narrative provides a general explanation of wiseguy privilege. The strength of this scene is suggested by alternative ways of handling it without narration: the narration is simply deleted and the essential lack of action bogs down the pace of the story; the wiseguys unnaturally--since they take it for granted--explain their status to each other; or pace is maintained by turning the wiseguys into wisecrackers, something they're not.)
Visual POV ----------
The narrative takes us inside the speaker's mind, but it remains for the camera to show us what they see. This entails risk for the director--if the shot selections are repetitious, or the techniques otherwise too obvious, the film's spell may be broken. (4) Scorsese avoids monotony by tailoring his techniques to the needs of each scene--the film is buoyed by the frequent introduction of fresh ideas but it rarely feels experimental or overly controlled.
Scorsese telegraphs the film's concern with vision (and, through it, POV) in the beginning. The first shot following the credits (the opening described above precedes them) is a close-up side view of the adolescent Henry's face, revealing an angular reflection on the surface of his eye. The second shot pans across a street scene. The next two shots--Henry seen from opposite sides of the window he gazes through--clarify the linkage implicit between the first two. The reflection on the eye is the window; the street scene is what Henry sees through it. The camera's aim then returns to the outside, focusing now on the cabstand across the street, a front for the neighborhood wiseguys; its significance as the object of Henry's intense interest having been demonstrated.
Usually the camera--objectively--remains outside the characters, but grounds the scene by periodically moving in to identify a single character's POV. Much of the poker party scene, early in the movie, is a single shot that picks up young Henry making a sandwich at the cold cut table and follows him through the room. With crowded poker tables between him and the camera, he becomes lost from view. The camera picks up Paulie standing elevated on one side of the room. It lingers on his face and then continues toward the door, arriving at the right moment to see Jimmy's jubilant entrance and the swarm of glad-handers it attracts. This closes the continuous shot. The camera suddenly cuts back to Henry, rapt with wonder by Jimmy's magnetism. In a few moments, the scene has managed to deliver three unique perspectives: Paulie, the gang boss, surveying his empire from on high; Jimmy, the young success, accorded respect fit a returning war hero; and especially Henry whose "before" shot shows him paying his dues to his elders, and whose "after" finds him dreaming of the rewards his work will one day earn.
In other ways the camera is more direct in identifying a POV. It may peer over a shoulder to see what the character sees, providing an unobtrusive transition from an objective stance. Or the camera may actually substitute for the eyes of the character to create an absolute identification. In those cases, the advantage of momentarily gaining the character's sight, ideally, compensates for the potential jar resulting from the literal disappearance of the character from the scene. When Karen visits Henry in prison, the camera becomes her eyes as she signs the registry. The focus skids from line to line across the open pages to zero in on the signature of Henry's mistress, a recent visitor. Now Karen's surrogate, we find our pulse quickening with hers as suspicion is aroused and then confirmed.
A more dramatic example occurs at the end of the scene in which Tommy is to be inaugurated a "made man." We sense his anticipation as he leaves home in the back of a limousine for this formal affair. We share the anticipation of Henry and Jimmy as they await the good news. We see the door that Tommy will enter. We see the doorway from the other side, ostensibly from the POV of his benefactors, as Tommy enters the room and smiles. The shot quickly switches to show what Tommy sees, an empty room, and as he utters his last words, we realize the true nature of the ceremony with the shock and dismay that he does.
On a few occasions, the camera switches back and forth between what two characters see, such as when Henry meets Karen's mother. The quick juxtaposition of the two facing off across the threshold of the front door seems to strip bare a confrontation--each threatens the other's notion of Karen's best interest, but neither can say so. Another scene opens to the sight of Karen aiming a pistol toward the audience. When the camera switches to her POV, it is Henry we see and she is straddling his torso pointing the gun in his face. When the scene opens, we are placed in Henry's position, not only in seeing what he sees but in sharing his confused awakening to a strange situation. The camera toggles between them, building tension, before being withdrawn to the edges of the room to let the scene play out. A less formal application is the scene in which Tommy kills Stacks, the lethargic truck driver. We first see the quick, businesslike murder from Tommy's POV. Tommy walks behind Stacks, who is putting on his shoes, and while casually conversing shoots him through the head. After the scene winds down the murder is replayed in slow motion from Stacks' side. Stacks does not see what's coming, of course, but the switch in angle reveals Tommy's blank expression and the full horror of his dispassionate brutality.
GOODFELLAS features a pair of set-piece tracking shots, lengthy sequences in which the camera is completely surrendered to a unique POV. The first is a serpentine glide through the Bamboo Club. The camera substitutes for a character's vision--presumably Henry's, since he narrates the scene, but at first we are not actually shown who it is. A number of the customers turn to greet the character/camera as Henry names them off, giving us the insider's tour of a gangster enclave. The shot proceeds into the kitchen where Henry emerges into the frame as the POV. Contrasted with the grounding technique used elsewhere, the disembodied portion of the shot, where no visual identification with the POV is established, is mildly unsettling. Perhaps that portion of the shot is not intended to be taken literally--it's a device for illustrating the gang's milieu rather than a scene from the story. (5)
The second great tracking shot is roughly symmetrical to the first. Rather than moving from the inside of a club outward, it reverses the direction, documenting a journey from the street, through the back door of the Copacabana, through the circuitous underworld of the kitchen, and into the club. This time, though, the camera hovers behind its subjects, Henry and Karen, looking over their shoulders, seeing what they see and at the same time allowing observation of their reactions; the shot merges their POVs as walking side by side "merges" them as a romantic pair. She and Henry have just started dating and this is Henry's way of impressing her. She gets the insider's tour--the premeditated POV--we received in the other shot. This scene is quite a bit longer, though, clocking at over three minutes. The very length of the walk is itself impressive and our excitement builds with Karen's as Henry shakes hands with the help they meet along the way, liberally hands out tips, and garners the best table in the house for Henny Youngman's floor show, his familiarity with the Copacabana staff proving him the ultimate insider. (As long as this scene lasts, the soundtrack for it is even longer, extending into the next scene. As Henny Youngman's monologue continues, the thieves are shown at work in the airport demonstrating the true foundation of Henry's success, a counterpoint to the invented explanation he has just given Karen and a reminder that we have greater access to Henry's POV than Karen does.)
Restrictions of POV -------------------
Telling the story through POVs shapes the way the story will be presented; it also delimits the story's scope. If the film is to be utterly consistent in its approach, we will see nothing that our selected few characters can't see, we will know nothing they can't know, what is a mystery to them must remain a cause for speculation to us. In some respects, this may disappoint the audience--tantalizing questions go unanswered. However, the ultimate effect of conveying POV is to bring the audience as close as possible to the experience of the character; and not to engender feelings in the audience that the character can't have, as, for example, in a suspense film where the audience is aware of dangers unbeknown to the people on the screen. (6) In GOODFELLAS, the luxury of being places our characters aren't, of possibly hearing secret plans made against them, is not permitted. Consider the scene, late in the film, in which Karen visits Jimmy's warehouse to ask for money. It comes at a point in their acquaintance when mutual trust has been eroded by too much mutual insight. At the end of the meeting Jimmy urges the reluctant Karen to take some stolen Dior dresses from his office down the street. He directs her along the sidewalk and she seems afraid, uncertain whether his insistence is something other than generosity. Looking through the store front she sees shadowy figures, then suddenly shouts excuses to Jimmy, and screeches away in her car. What would have happened inside the office? (After all, the scene builds up to that question.) Karen's panic prevents her from finding out, so we can't, either. The scene links us with her discomfort, not her surroundings. Her paranoia is the point.
Tommy's execution leaves more serious questions unanswered: Why is he whacked? Who made the decision? GOODFELLAS bears no loyalty to the murder mystery's injunction that loose ends will be tied up by the end of the tale. Henry's narrative insight into mob politics draws the line between the known and the unknowable. He speculates that Tommy was killed for the Billy Batts murder and "a lot of other things." If killing Batts had been enough, Tommy would have gotten it years earlier. If a precise accounting of the "other things" and the timing of the murder remain open questions in Henry's mind, then they must in ours. Conveying his perspective, even when it includes his ignorance, takes precedence over filling in historical details.
(At some peril, one can occasionally venture into the area of what a story omits, a question with an unbounded answer. For example, Tommy's death leaves certain issues unresolved, such as the effect his disappearance has on his mother, a person whose affection for him has been established. After Tommy is whacked she never reappears in the story. We do not learn, through her, what obligations of friendship Jimmy or Henry may have felt toward tying up the loose ends of Tommy's life. However, the absence of evidence allows us to infer--with no reliability--they felt none.)
The Apogee of Style -------------------
GOODFELLAS reaches the apogee of its style in the depiction of Henry's manic bender on the day of the fateful bust that ends his career in the Mafia. We are tipped off to the significance of the upcoming sequence when the screen goes blank, labeled with day, date and time, down to the odd minute. With the story having spanned three decades, adroitly eclipsing years at a time, the finicky precision sets the tempo for accelerated action, motivated by the acceleration in Henry's mind as he attempts to keep pace with an unceasing series of minor problems. He must deliver guns to Jimmy, hide the guns after Jimmy rejects them, retrieve the guns, pick up his brother from the hospital, score drugs, deliver drugs, appease his mistress, shop for dinner, prepare dinner, eat dinner. And on and on. All the while, he boosts himself with cocaine and cigarettes, then smooths out the jags with Valium. He drives recklessly from place to place, squealing the tires around every corner, barely avoiding an accident at one point. It's excitement on an achingly personal scale.
His narration coolly recollects the day but within the sequence his dialogue speaks a feverish anxiety over the mounting details and an obsession with the question of paranoia--who is and who isn't imagining the dangers threatened by the potentially tapped phone and a mysterious helicopter that keeps appearing above him in traffic. His eyes are pitted, his hair uncombed. Henry's brain is on overload about to blow and Scorsese enhances the scene with a variety of techniques to put us in a similar state: rapid camera movements, quick cuts, and bursts of fast music that accentuate Henry's moods and drug-peaked moments. The camera moves around every room, from person to person, to phone, to door. It overloads the screen with the details on Henry's mind, like the panning shots across the kitchen counter that show the sloppy array of dinner ingredients; it zooms in and out on the helicopter, it rushes up to Henry's face as he snorts coke; it zeros in on every action, Henry's foot on the brake, his hand with a gun, holding a pill, his nose on a mirror. The camera seldom stays still and the exhilaration of the scene is incredible--a non-toxic amphetamine rush. Putting us into Henry's head on this day generates vertiginous thrills, like a camera strapped to the nose of a roller coaster. (Henry's, and the scene's, catharsis comes when a quest for a lucky hat collides with the bust and Henry's choices are no longer his own. But as if Henry's state wasn't enough, the scene gets a second wind from Karen who runs around the house getting rid of drugs and a gun while the cops pound on the door.)
Issues
======
The decision to bind the story to specific POVs imposes an additional structure, indeed, a discipline, on GOODFELLAS beyond the chronological recounting of lives and events. The story is channeled through the experiences of its characters, bringing their thoughts and feelings to life on the screen, offering their lives to be felt as well as witnessed. This lends the film a kind of pure subjectivity, in the sense that it portrays Henry's side of the story, in its unabashed candor, and not Scorsese's spin on it. The film conveys a sense of unsanitized honesty, unfettered by editorial intrusion--and so it is for the most part. But Scorsese's detachment is not as complete as it might first appear. There are ways in which his attitude toward the subject shapes the tone of the film.
The Soundtrack --------------
An area which gives the director wide editorial latitude is the musical soundtrack and in GOODFELLAS music serves a variety of purposes. But let us begin by conceding that music is something of an institution in film. We have been conditioned to expect its presence and are likely to be aware of its absence. But music can be an alien presence, adding a dimension to the action that stands at cross-purposes to the self-conscious realism of a film like GOODFELLAS. If a movie is a window onto another world, then the musical soundtrack is on the audience's side of the window. On the other side of the window, life's true soundtrack is composed by nature or human activity (of which music forms some part). When Henry careens toward a rear-end collision in traffic and the soundtrack blasts the frenetic drumbeat of "Magic Bus," we're not hearing something that is actually part of the scene, but rather a stylized interpretation of Henry's state of mind--his inarticulated POV, perhaps. Let us also concede, finally, that we walk on thin ice in challenging such a universally entertaining aspect of film as music. Other techniques in GOODFELLAS employ artifice--freeze frames, for instance, and slow motion--though these tend to be illuminating distortions rather than additions of content. But the use of music is of particular interest here because the impetus of the film--without sacrificing drama--is toward a high degree of realism.
Obviously, music helps in setting the mood for a scene, or reinforcing a mood otherwise indicated. When Jimmy sits at a bar and contemplates whacking Morrie, his face slowly contorts, he anxiously moves a cigarette in and out of his mouth, and the urgent rock of "Sunshine of Your Love" amplify what Henry describes as Jimmy's mind "going in eight directions at once."
This effect is in marked contrast to the upbeat music that ends the opening scene (Batts in the trunk refusing to die quietly) which, rather than reinforcing the grim mood of the scene, completely contradicts it. In the opening, we are rudely thrown off-balance and alerted to the film's disturbing revelation that in the gang world crime, violence, and even murder, is not necessarily tragic to its participants; it is usually banal and, to the wiseguy, potentially amusing. Other disconcerting moods are set in the scene in which Batts is battered to the tune of Donovan's "Atlantis," and in the sequence wherein the corpses of the Lufthansa accomplices are discovered to the piano section of "Layla." In both instances, the violent debasement of the human body is counterpointed with fairly calm melodies. These scenes make a memorable impression by voiding film violence cliches and creating novel sensations.
As widely noted, GOODFELLAS offers a flip side to the "Godfather" saga. "The Godfather" revolves around the power struggles among the mob's ruling elites--political warfare. Most of the crimes in the series are assassinations and high-level conspiracies. GOODFELLAS explores the plebeian turf, portraying the life of the street hood, the stick-up artist, the guy that hustles the wealth the mob's influence depends upon. The differences are indicative of the caste system separating the officers from the foot soldiers, and the soundtracks for the two movies reinforce the social disparities. The Godfather features a gentle, even proper, score; Nino Rota's lovely Sicilian pastorales honoring the royal blood lineage of the "dapper dons." GOODFELLAS employs the street sound of rock `n' roll: angry young man music, jukebox music, top-forty dating music--American music, at its roots, because with the exception of Tommy our characters lack a full Sicilian birthright. These wiseguys spend no time dreaming of a higher social status that is automatically closed off to them; their status is derived from an association with the elite that manifests itself as first class service and front row seats. They affirm their worth in bars and nightclubs, the music that plays there forms the self-chosen soundtrack of their lives. (7)
Cracks in the Edifice ---------------------
As thus far discussed, the soundtrack supports the development of the story--Henry's story--and its themes. Scorsese places the choices of music, as he does other details, in the service of the film's grand plan. But not exclusively. There are moments in the film, a number of them musical, when Scorsese drops reminders of his presence. Except for the most observant, they are subtle enough to escape notice on an initial screening of the film. In that respect, they form mere hairline cracks in the edifice.
The first examples are jokes that require connecting a few lyrics of the accompanying song with the on-screen action, something we're not apt to do automatically, especially when the music submissively bops along in the background. For instance, when complications arise from Billy Batts' disappearance, we hear, "Whatever happened to/that boy that I once knew?" As the wiseguys dig him up in the dark, the song continues, "Walking in the sand/the night was so exciting...," while Henry retches from the smell. Over the prison cooking scene, Bobby Darin sings, "Somewhere, across the sea...," to underscore that incarceration, for wiseguys, may be more of a forced vacation than a punishment. In another instance, the humor is neatly integrated into the film's method. We see a baby lowered onto a blanket from the POV of whomever is holding it. The opening lyrics of the Rolling Stones' "Monkey Man" start up: "I'm a flea-bit peanut monkey/all my friends are junkies." Then the camera switches to the baby's POV. We see the smiling faces of Henry and Karen, who have become cocaine dealers and users, and Lois, the family baby-sitter/drug courier. (8)
Scorsese steps in for another, albeit non-musical, jest during the Batts exhumation. Henry explains the dilemma in greater detail: Batts was a made man for the Gambino organization and therefore "untouchable" by wiseguys from other mobs. We then take a short flashback to the fateful night in Henry's bar. The camera takes Batts' POV on the floor to show Jimmy's knee rising for another stomp to the midsection, and Henry trying to restrain Tommy from doing likewise. Untouchable, indeed.
The Comedy of GOODFELLAS --------------------------
These subtle jokes impinge on a basic question: In what sense is GOODFELLAS a comedy? Tommy, in his classic scene, asks the same when he demands of Henry, "How am I funny? In what way am I funny?" The question is profoundly deeper than Tommy realizes, for his tale of hostility and violence invokes unbridled laughter from the wiseguy audience. But his sudden inexplicable aggravation instantly alters the mood of the gathering from love of violence to fear of violence.
The scene heats the film's volatile brew of violence and humor to a boil. (9) With violence always a possibility, tension mounts--in the film's audience as well as in Tommy's--from not knowing which way the action will break. At Henry's expense, Tommy exploits the ambiguity for a laugh. In the process he unwittingly exposes the fragility of trust between even close friends in the mob. Henry can't tell whether Tommy is about to harm him! It's a social consequence of consorting outside the law. What qualifies one for deceit disqualifies one for trust. At the end of his career, Henry carries the logic through: "Your murderers come with smiles."
Thus are the lives of the wiseguys absurd, backward, dark mirrors of the norm. Rules are inverted, outrages accommodated. A breech of manners tempts death. Loyalty turns on a dime. And on this unstable platform comedy makes its stand. Their lives are so eccentric that comic complications arise naturally. Paulie fears wiretaps, so overfed stooges trot through the rain to conduct his business from phone booths. Henry pinches his nose while hosing the stench of a rotting corpse from his trunk. After warning the participants in the Lufthansa theft not to spend their cuts ostentatiously, Jimmy is dismayed when Johnny Roastbeef shows up in a new Cadillac with a new wife wearing a new fur. As Johnny dumbfoundedly pleads his innocence--"but it's a wedding gift"--we recognize the utter impossibility of preserving the secrecy. When the newlyweds are found sitting in the front seat of their new pink Caddy, shot to death, the fur coat now a shroud, mob justice is revealed. In GOODFELLAS the anecdotes may be amusing, but the punch lines are frequently grim.
But it isn't enough to say that GOODFELLAS is a comedy because many of the situations are comical. Only to each other are Henry and associates acceptable as amusing "good fellas"; seen from distances outside the film's purview, they are punching, knifing, choking, shooting thugs, organically feeding on weakness like bacteria on an open sore. Seeing the story from the POV of the participants tempers the ugliness. The wiseguys are the best candidates to find humor in their own cruelty or misfortunes. When they laugh--no questions asked--at Tommy's endless tales of confrontation with cops or anyone else unlucky enough to have crossed his path, it's gangland shoptalk: belligerence as a working condition, a cost of doing business, violence as an agreeable duty. But Tommy tells tales within a tale. It's the more polished Henry who shines brightest as a storyteller. He's an insider who can talk outward. He carries the story as none of his circle, lacking his charm and perception, could. His enthusiasm, his shameless confession that times were great, even at their worst, makes GOODFELLAS work, at least part-time, as a comedy. Henry's glee is infectious.
In short, what drives the film's humor are the conditions and consequences of gang life as only a gang insider could possibly know them. It follows then that Scorsese's teasing observations--musical and otherwise--add a different brand of comedy to the film, a detached, ironical view whereby the director steps outside the subject and looks back in, grinning. The technique tampers with the natural balance of comedy and violence by tilting the story more toward the comical. The intrusion is too minimal to change the overall effect of the film but it is indicative of the director's relationship to the subject. He dissociates from Henry and crew by registering views that don't belong to them. The detachment inhibits us from confusing Scorsese's immersion in Henry's story as identification. Instead, we are reminded that when Henry speaks, it is really Henry we hear. Henry has earned Scorsese's honesty, but sympathy remains an open question.
The Soul of the Wiseguy -----------------------
Another interesting exception to the film's method occurs in the last, brief scene. The former Henry Hill, his character rewritten by the FBI, has been teleported from the murky underworld to banishment in a primary-colored suburbia. Siberia? As the scene opens, he steps out of his tract home, in bare feet and a bathrobe, to retrieve the newspaper. While he meditates on what an ordinary shnook he's become, a frontal shot of Tommy blasting away at us with a pistol is interposed.
It's a striking image, but an odd passage, sacrificing plot for theme like no other shot in the film. It cannot be clearly identified as a flashback to a specific event, or as a reminiscence of Henry's. At a minimum, it symbolizes the criminal life Henry has left behind; but does it mean more than that? To outward appearances, Henry now looks every bit the law-abiding shnook. Is the interposed image Scorsese's revelation of the lawless heart within? If so, why show Tommy and not Henry himself engaged in some memorably blissful illegality?
Perhaps the choice suggests some scepticism at who most truthfully represents the soul of the wiseguy. Tommy is a litter of crude emotions, free of the sociability that may restrain or conceal Henry's viciousness. Tommy measures his self-respect by the fears of those he intimidates. Like a human Geiger counter, he constantly monitors his environment for the slightest whiff of disrespect. Self-conscious of his height, he seeks out physical imperfection in whomever he suspects, particularly speech impediments which he has learned to induce through verbal intimidation, e.g., Spider, the bar boy, is reduced to a "stuttering prick" as a prelude to attack. Tommy's the essential hoodlum, loyal to his basest instincts, always seeking weakness to prey upon, never reluctant to err on the side of too much force. Though Paulie describes Tommy as a "bad seed," Henry reveals no particular animosity or affinity toward Tommy; apathy might better describe his feelings, an apathy that expresses itself in unedited and unflattering descriptions of Tommy's behavior, as Henry's story reveals it. Henry expresses more nostalgia about the life-style he has left behind than any of the people in it. The image of Tommy, gun blazing, may represent an idealized life that has been lost to Henry. Or is Scorsese tipping us off to the wolf in shnook's clothing?
Critically speaking, do Scorsese's musical and other ironic intrusions into the film's grand design constitute flaws, or do they merely elaborate the design? They appear to serve multiple purposes. They increase the comedy quotient. They also autograph the work, in effect, in a way the director's credit cannot. But most indicative is the irony; it detaches Scorsese from the characters whose story he tells; it bespeaks an underlying fear, perhaps, of close association, of being too sympathetic to the characters and, like one of the "beneficiaries" of their protection, working too much for their interests and not enough for his own. Perhaps the overriding irony is that Scorsese's artistry imposes a stern "law and order" on a work whose themes are crime and disorder, yet he violates his own rules in order to distance himself from the subject.
Henry -----
Recall the opening scene. The frame freezes on Henry's expression after he watches his pals finish the murder of Billy Batts: the camera records an epiphany. (The technique occurs elsewhere when, for example, Henry and Jimmy are walking along the sidewalk discussing Morrie's indiscretion. The action halts as Henry describes his sudden realization that Jimmy intended to whack Morrie.) The look the opening freezes on is one we see numerous times throughout the film. Always following some violent event, his face registers astonishment. But at the same time he controls his reaction; he will not, he cannot, express it and he is unwilling to oppose what he has seen. This is his act of belonging; it's the core of his criminality. Only by fully accepting the violent and often unjust world of organized crime is his role within it assured. As Jimmy sagely advises him after his first pinch, "Always keep your mouth shut." Henry always keeps his mouth shut (until he's finally trapped between suicidal loyalty and the law) and tolerates any excess of his brethren in return for the romance of being a gangster.
It seems a straightforward trade-off, and one he willingly reveals, but could there be more wrinkles to his character? Of necessity, we tend to trust Henry's version of things; he is our spy inside the secret world of gangsters. His candor elicits our sympathies. As for anyone, stating one's case is inherently persuasive; manipulating opinion in one's favor is normal, expected, but still seductive. Henry realizes his actions are questionable, so when possible he tugs favor back in his direction. For us he rationalizes a useful role for organized crime in society, explaining that it provides "protection for people who can't go to the cops." Another time he reassures Karen with a self-help gangster maxim: "nobody goes to jail unless they want to." In these statements is Henry consciously inflating his advantages or is he betraying a capacity for self-deception? Either way, it behooves us to weigh his evaluations against his motives for shading the truth.
Despite his larcenous activities, Henry possesses a friendly, likable persona. He smiles a lot, laughs a lot. Compared to Tommy, he seems roughly normal. (By the end of the film, it's easy to remember Henry as a witness to violence but never a participant, though this is not the case.) His charm inspires confidence, but it's striking to note how many of his important relationships are built on a foundation of deceit. It's practically the first thing we learn about him: he conceals his truancy from his parents so that he can spend his days with the local wiseguys. Later, he courts Karen with money and influence while hoodwinking her about its origin. He cheats on her throughout their marriage by keeping mistresses and accuses her of mental problems when she confronts him about it. He lies to his benefactor, Paulie, about a serious matter, the Batts' disappearance, and places Paulie at genuine risk by dealing drugs against his express orders.
At the same time, as he takes pain to point out, he does "the right thing." He pays Paulie a large tribute after the Air France robbery; he brings home "the most expensive" tree at Christmas. He's a parody of good citizenship. He satisfies the appearance of loyalty, yet falls short of the substance. He puts himself at odds with so many, so seriously, for so long--his wife, the law, the mob--that, in retrospect, his downfall was inevitable. (Only providence--and the FBI--gives him a second life.) His precariousness makes him an interesting character: he risks a pratfall at every step.
Given Henry's penchant for dishonesty, is it reasonable to take him at face value? Perhaps to bolster his credibility, he reveals much that shows him in a bad light, at least by conventional standards--the hijacks, the arsons, the record-breaking thefts. He knows he's a crook, that his life is well outside lawful norms, that his adventures are capital to a raconteur. However, he is not dispassionate about what he looks back on as the achievements of a lifetime: "We had it all just for the asking.... We ran everything." He exhibits too much pride to buy complete credibility from us; he boasts of acts that others might find shameful. It's fair then to wonder what he might not be proud of and how much of his life didn't make it into the story. Might he have motives to conceal parts of his life? Might he have edited his story to save embarrassment, or worse?
As a still-married man, he may have reasons to protect himself from his family. He admits to having mistresses, but in relation to his other extravagances the count seems low. Perhaps coincidentally, the two mistresses that figure in the story are both women that Karen found out about--the first a suspicion confirmed, the second a fellow arrestee from the crucial drug bust. Were there no others in the years of nightclubbing and business trips? Defying our reasonable scepticism, Henry leaves the impression that his extramarital sex life belonged to the domestic side of his life rather than the wild lawless side.
Henry's relationship to his fellow wiseguys may be more complicated, imposing further restraints. When Henry tells of paying tribute to Paulie, he wants us to know of his loyalty. He's a company man. He follows the rules. He's a law-abiding citizen--of the underworld. He asks for respect on the terms of his environment. When he goes against the rules, he purports to have a strong reason. Dealing drugs against Paulie's wishes is not primarily disloyal, it's the self-preservation of his family, a justification which can't be reasonably denied. If there's action in that middle area--where he works for his own greed and cuts out the mob leadership simply because he can get away with it--we don't hear about it. It's hard to imagine him as too virtuous to engage in double-dealing, yet this is the impression he leaves.
Henry may also have been circumspect with the authorities who have swapped him freedom for information on his friends. Perversely, an opportunity for virtue? The fates of many of his colleagues essentially rested on Henry's testimony. Did he condemn some because he had to, and spare others because he could get away with it? We can't know because his confessional can't go beyond his official biography, as the authorities know it.
Any or all of these factors would affect his desire to tell the truth. There are numerous ways in which honesty might betray his self-interest. Where does that leave us, the seekers of truth? To return to the opening scene one last time, of the three wiseguys, it is Tommy and Jimmy who brutally consummate the murder of Batts. Of the three, it is Tommy and Jimmy who beat up Batts in the first place. But, of the three, it is Henry who tells the story.
It boils down to a single problem: if he is shading the truth, and his admitted dishonesty and motives for further dishonesty make it likely that he is, how would a full reckoning of his story change our view of him? (10) How would it alter our impression of the inner realm of the mob, an impression the film seeks to convey? The heart of the film contains this enigma. We approach a set of truths through Henry's thoughts, his senses, his recollection of dark and unknown corners, yet he remains a mystery and the truth, elusive.
Getting at the Truth --------------------
Despite the exceptions noted, Scorsese adheres closely, in content and style, to the thoughtful design laid out for GOODFELLAS. The film allows a character (who in fact represents a real person) to present his side of his life in crime. The film includes no attempt to assess the truthfulness of the story or the morality of the storyteller. The resulting shameless enthusiasm of the character shapes the film's risky mix of violence and humor. Though an affront to conventional morality, GOODFELLAS depicts a life where threats and violence are a routine cost of doing business--the cold inverse of entertaining a client--and comic or tragic overtones result whenever events waver from their expected course. When the wiseguys laugh in reaction to some violent event, they take, in effect, an unconscious moral position on the acceptability of violence. In addition they illustrate how naturally violence plays a part in their lives. The crux of the film is that this authenticity is achieved by denying convention its voice.
The gangsters live in a rigidly insulated world. They are isolated from the lawful mainstream of society by an obvious need for secrecy. Within the mob, social stratifications divide them further. The wiseguys, the street hoods, the earners, are isolated from an upper echelon of made men who, in addition to possessing greater influence and rights of protection, also meet unbending standards of ethnic purity. Even among peers, secrecy follows from reluctance to ask uncomfortable questions, desire not to know incriminating information, or outright fear of betrayal. The family, too, must be kept in the dark: the wives about the girlfriends, the girlfriends about the other girlfriends, other relatives about the criminal life. The genius of GOODFELLAS is in how it recreates this insulation. It confines us to the narrow world of the wiseguys, knowing only them, and keeps the "safe" world we're familiar with on the outside.
We end up with an insider's view of the mob, which is necessarily deeper than the observer's and, for the sake of understanding mob life, the next best thing to actually being a member. By the end of GOODFELLAS, we are likely to understand crime and career criminals in a new and realistic way.
Still, we must acknowledge, as outsiders, our disadvantages for getting at the truth. We can never be assured that what the insider supplies is honest and, more than honest, accurate. The insider can be sincere and mistaken, suffering the same disadvantage when looking outward as the outsider does when looking in, and perhaps to a greater degree. The insider understands the benefits of being a criminal; he overlooks the ordinary pleasures that aren't achieved through crime. (Thus Henry's dismay at becoming a shnook.) He is trapped in the fortress of privacy. The battlements of secrecy the gang erects around itself keeps criminal activities private; just as significant, it also tends to keep the influence of conventional moral sensibilities at bay.
For Henry, the process of retreating into the secret world of the mob began at an early age; it's really the beginning of the story. His association with the neighborhood wiseguys earn him the satisfaction of being "part of something," the perquisites of membership, and the deferential respect of other boys his age; all of which overpower his parent's countervailing rectitude. After his parents quickly recede from the narrative, no further moral reference points are seen to intrude upon his complacency: no crusading cops, no Pat O'Brien-boyhood-pal priests, no sermonizing judges. In neither of the courtroom scenes do the judges take moral positions on his behavior. In Henry's story, the judges are silent (or at least unnoteworthy). Even the FBI, whose representative appears to take his responsibilities seriously, calmly deals away society's retribution against Henry as part of a plea bargain that nets them Jimmy and Paulie.
A more disturbing problem occurs when those we expect to uphold conventional morality not only remain silent, but actually accommodate gang activities. In GOODFELLAS, not only are the cops not crusaders, they're not necessarily committed to law enforcement at all. In one scene, police drive up while cigarettes are being unloaded from a stolen truck. We expect, much as a traditional crime movie would have delivered, a confrontation between natural enemies: the thieves run for cover or shoot it out in desperation, providing a dramatic demonstration of how society follows the blueprint laid down by the law. Instead the wiseguys don't even flinch. The cops are paid off in grins and booty, and any naive sentiments we may hold about the law are up-ended by the evidence of crime co-opting the enforcers to subvert order.
Mob Rules ---------
In such a setting, what then is the cost of immorality if neither individual conscience nor societal opposition exacts much of a toll from the immoral? The answer may lie in the rules the gangsters establish for themselves.
Among their rules, certain formal principles are recognized such as the hierarchy determining how authority passes down through the organization and its corollary, the rule for moving profits up the other direction. They recognize a formal dimension to loyalty, the idea that the gangster, when in trouble with the law, sacrifices himself for the greater good of the organization. As Jimmy puts it, "never rat on your friends," which has its obvious meaning and the broader implication that the existence of the organization must remain secret at all costs. (11) Failing to observe the rules, or even raising suspicion, exacts harsh punishment from the mob.
Though members of the organization, the wiseguys appear to operate autonomously from the leadership in much of their actions. To maintain peace within the ranks, they follow a number of informal guidelines: steering clear of each other's crimes or small neighborly gestures like not taking their wives out on Friday's girlfriends night. With their autonomy comes a wide discretion on the acceptable use of force. But force too has its limits. The mob distinguishes violence that is controlled and in the interest of business (or defending honor) from the savagery which follows when emotion runs amuck. Paulie disdains Tommy as a "cowboy" suggesting that Tommy does not and cannot keep close enough control of the distinction.
Murder, in the mob as elsewhere, is the king of violent crimes--an expedient end to a trouble, as one would have it. Mobsters tend to have more of the kind of troubles that murder suggests a fix for, and their code is broad enough to include it on the list of thinkable options. There are prohibitions against murdering made men and, presumably, cops, judges, lawyers, or other people of service to the cause. Their furtive instincts dictate a rule of thumb that indiscreet killing draws unwanted attention. Beyond that, granted by mutual consent, comes a virtual license to kill and with it the latitude to determine necessity. Here lurks the cost of the privilege: with killing allowed at individual discretion, life is devalued. The cost of devaluing someone else's life is to devalue your own.
When Tommy senselessly kills Spider, there will be no commensurate justice to vindicate his stolen life. He has no status, therefore no rights. (Unlike Billy Batts who, as a made man, warrants reprisal for his death through the grimly poetic murder of Tommy.) Spider's death, if anything, makes plain that gang association carries with it an implicit surrender of the protective rights that society promises its citizens through the justice system. In society, one has no right to murder and, as a complementary rule, the right not to be murdered. Within the gang's proletarian ranks, however, the order is reversed: one has a right to kill and, consequently, little right not to be killed. When Spider is killed the issue for the other wiseguys must be Tommy's judgement, not his morality; moral outrage at the deed has no basis within the self-government of a group that allows murder. The implications are played out in grand and cold-blooded style when Jimmy murders his Lufthansa heist co-conspirators one-by-one to avoid sharing the loot. Henry accepts it. He understands all along that his life is no more sacred than his fellow wiseguys' who are whacked when they least expect it. Your murderers come with smiles: you smile when you murder.
Crime-think -----------
GOODFELLAS creates an insulated environment, the paranoid subterranean society of organized crime, and traps the audience within it. While moving within its circles, we catch glimpses of a wider world we no longer belong to, that place where the sun shines too much and nothing ever happens. The immersion is total and too exciting to be claustrophobic. But having been drawn so completely in, can we then completely escape?
GOODFELLAS' seamless portrayal of POV lures us into an unconscious identification with the characters--to become one of the gang. We walk in their footsteps, see what they see. We live in their minds and lives. They influence us by carrying the debate while opposing views are kept silent. The tight focus on the wiseguy POV amounts to a de facto indoctrination into crime-think.
Morals swim in a relative sea. Without familiar reference points, we are tempted to forget who we are--who we have been--as we become intoxicated with the life that intoxicates Henry, a rags to riches American dream, brought to life by secret abilities. GOODFELLAS tempts our acceptance of crime by posing reasons for embracing it. Although our consciences tell us the wiseguys violate even the most liberal standards of decency and fairness, they still conjure a romanticism in their rebellion against the methodical system of obedience and routine that weights the ordinary life with tedium. We cannot deny the fraudulent underpinnings of a success built on theft; but the trappings--big cars, extravagant jewelry, silk suits, front row seats, the servility of waiters and doormen--are an advertizer's prophecy of making it in America. If our wiseguys are in rebellion, it's surely not against materialism. With the soiled corners tucked under, their lives could sell refrigerators. If upholding our common images of success was the only rule, they would be model citizens. Perhaps the real danger of GOODFELLAS is in discovering not that there are people so brutally different from most of us, but that these people are not different enough.
In the end, Henry has argued a case for organized crime by dwelling on the good life it brought him and by not repenting. Scorsese refrains from all but subtle commentary on the moral implications of Henry's argument, thereby shifting the burden of judgement to the audience where it uncomfortably belongs. GOODFELLAS presents an unfamiliar world and dares us to feel at home in it. Scorsese frames it as a moral wilderness and dares us to remain unaware.
--- Footnotes:
(1) The same scene, edited differently, reappears in the middle of the movie, in its correct chronological sequence. The second time around its disturbing power is diminished, though. By then we have grown up with the characters enough that the violence is not surprising. The scene assumes a new role as a dramatic watershed in the story, marking the end of a lengthy introduction to the characters, their world, and the rules they live by, and beginning the sequence of events that ultimately leads to their respective downfalls.
(2) The script was written by Scorsese and Nicholas Pileggi, based on Pileggi's biography of Henry Hill, WISEGUY: LIFE IN A MAFIA FAMILY (Simon and Schuster, New York, 1985).
(3) Henry and Karen are closest to their book versions of any of the characters. Tommy DeVito is a composite of the book's character of that name and Paulie's sons, whom Henry grows up with. Jimmy and most of the other characters are more or less based on characters from the book.
(4) In DARK PASSAGE (1947), for example, technique becomes overbearing. For a substantial portion of the film, we hear the protagonist's voice but see the world exclusively through his eyes--the camera. The other characters speak straight to the camera and the camera moves with the protagonist's head. The technique achieves the effect of concealing the protagonist's face before plastic surgery. But its side effect is visual claustrophobia--the film becomes a novelty.
(5) We tend to think of novels as a purely textual form of story telling; and of film as predominately visual. This scene illustrates one method of bridging the gap. The narration is a textual component, a background description of a group of minor characters. The tracking shot provides the visual component, a shot that would not stand on its own without the narrative embellishment.
(6) According to Alfred Hitchcock: "To get real suspense, you must let the audience have information." (Quoted from THE MEN WHO MADE THE MOVIES, Schickel.) Hitchcock describes two people talking casually at a table. A bomb is under the table. If unaware of the bomb, the audience gets a brief shock when it explodes. If made aware, they experience continuing anxiety in the wait. But making the audience aware divorces them from the experience of the characters. GOODFELLAS avoids this technique.
(7) The music forms the calendar, too, particularly in the first half of the film. Subtitled dates are used sparingly, so the songs, chosen to typify pop eras, date the rapidly moving story.
(8) Additionally, an odd surprise occurs at the end of GOODFELLAS as Sid Vicious' punk parody of "My Way" plays over the closing credits, appearing to take an oblique swipe at THE GODFATHER.
(9) Older crime movies tended to slant toward either a serious or comic extreme. Gangster movies--WHITE HEAT, THE ROARING TWENTIES, etc.--dramatized society's official prognosis for the criminal: crime never pays, a violent death is sure and shameful, and laughter, a symptom of sadism or madness. Giving the subject comic treatment--BORN YESTERDAY, GUYS AND DOLLS, or SOME LIKE IT HOT--precluded anything more violent than a sock in the jaw.
(10) It could be that while soft-peddling his own exploits, he is uncharitably frank about Jimmy and Tommy, and it is in their actions, perhaps, that we see the most truth.
(11) Confirming the success of that policy, the existence of organized crime was widely considered a myth in the late 1950's when Jimmy gives that advice. ---
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