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THE GREATEST
REVIEW OF GREATEST REVIEWS
Excerpt from Roger Ebert's 1990 Chicago Sun Times review
"For two days after I saw Martin Scorsese's new film,
"GoodFellas," the mood of the characters lingered within
me, refusing to leave. It was a mood of guilt and regret,
of quick stupid decisions leading to wasted lifetimes,
of loyalty turned into betrayal. Yet at the same time
there was an element of furtive nostalgia, for bad times
that shouldn't be missed, but were.
Most films, even great ones, evaporate like mist once
you've returned to the real world; they leave memories
behind, but their reality fades fairly quickly. Not
this film, which shows America's finest filmmaker at
the peak of his form. No finer film has ever been made
about organized crime - not even "The Godfather," although
the two works are not really comparable.
"GoodFellas," scheduled to open Sept. 21 in Chicago,
is a memoir of life in the Mafia, narrated in the first
person by Henry Hill (Ray Liotta), an Irish-Italian
kid whose only ambition, from his earliest teens, was
to be a "wise guy," a Mafioso. There is also narration
by Karen, the Jewish girl (Lorraine Bracco) who married
him, and who discovered that her entire social life
was suddenly inside the Mafia; mob wives never went
anywhere or talked to anyone who was not part of that
world, and eventually, she says, the values of the Mafia
came to seem like normal values. She was even proud
of her husband for not lying around the house all day,
for having the energy and daring to go out and steal
for a living.
There is a real Henry Hill, who disappeared into the
anonymity of the federal government's witness protection
program, and who over a period of four years told everything
he knew about the mob to the reporter Nicholas Pileggi,
whose Wiseguy: Life in a Mafia Family was a best-seller.
The screenplay by Pileggi and Scorsese distills those
memories into a fiction that sometimes plays like a
documentary, that contains so much information and feeling
about the Mafia that finally it creates the same claustrophobic
feeling Hill's wife talks about: The feeling that the
mob world is the real world. Scorsese is the right director
- the only director - for this material. He knows it
inside out. The great formative experience of his life
was growing up in New York's Little Italy as an outsider
who observed everything - an asthmatic kid who couldn't
play sports, whose health was too bad to allow him to
lead a normal childhood, who was often overlooked, but
never missed a thing.
There is a passage early in the film in which young
Henry Hill looks out the window of his family's apartment
and observes with awe and envy the swagger of the low-level
wise guys in the social club across the street, impressed
by the fact that they got girls, drove hot cars, had
money, that the cops never gave them tickets, that even
when their loud parties lasted all night, nobody ever
called the police.
That was the life he wanted to lead, the narrator tells
us. The memory may come from Hill and may be in Pileggi's
book, but the memory also is Scorsese's, and in the
23 years I have known him, we have never had a conversation
that did not touch at some point on that central image
in his vision of himself - of the kid in the window,
watching the neighborhood gangsters.
Like "The Godfather," Scorsese's "GoodFellas" is a long
movie, with the space and leisure to expand and explore
its themes. It isn't about any particular plot; it's
about what it felt like to be in the Mafia - the good
times and the bad times. At first, they were mostly
good times, and there is an astonishing camera movement
in which the point of view follows Henry and Karen on
one of their first dates, to the Copacabana nightclub.
There are people waiting in line at the door, but Henry
takes her in through the service entrance, past the
security guards and the off-duty waiters, down a corridor,
through the kitchen, through the service area and out
into the front of the club, where a table is literally
lifted into the air and placed in front of all the others
so that the young couple can be in the first row for
the floor show. This is power.
Karen doesn't know yet exactly what Henry does. She
finds out. The method of the movie is a slow expansion
through levels of the Mafia, with characters introduced
casually and some of them not really developed until
later in the story. We meet the don Paul Cicero (Paul
Sorvino), and Jim (Jimmy the Gent) Conway (Robert De
Niro), a man who steals for the sheer love of stealing,
and Tommy DeVito (Joe Pesci), a likable guy except that
his fearsome temper can explode in a second, with fatal
consequences. We follow them through 30 years; at first,
through years of unchallenged power, then through years
of decline (but they have their own kitchen in prison,
and boxes of thick steaks and crates of wine), and then
into betrayal and decay.
At some point, the whole wonderful romance of the Mafia
goes sour for Henry Hill, and that moment is when he
and Jimmy and Tommy have to bury a man whom Tommy kicked
almost to death in a fit of pointless rage. First, they
have to finish killing him (they stop at Tommy's mother's
house to borrow a knife, and she feeds them dinner),
then they bury him, then later they have to dig him
up again. The worst part is, their victim was a "made"
guy, a Mafioso who is supposed to be immune. So they
are in deep, deep trouble, and this is not how Henry
Hill thought it was going to be when he started out
on his life's journey.
From the first shot of his first feature, "Who's That
knocking at My Door" (1967), Scorsese has loved to use
popular music as a counterpoint to the dramatic moments
in his films. He doesn't simply compile a soundtrack
of golden oldies; he finds the precise sound to underline
every moment, and in "GoodFellas," the popular music
helps to explain the transition from the early days
when Henry sells stolen cigarettes to guys at a factory
gate, through to the frenetic later days when he's selling
cocaine in disobedience of Paul Cicero's orders, and
using so much of it himself that life has become a paranoid
labyrinth.
In all of his work, which has included arguably the
best film of the 1970s ("Taxi Driver") and of the 1980s
("Raging Bull"), Scorsese has never done a more compelling
job of getting inside someone's head as he does in one
of the concluding passages of "GoodFellas," in which
he follows one day in the life of Henry Hill, as he
tries to do a cocaine deal, cook dinner for his family,
placate his mistress and deal with the suspicion that
he's being followed.
This is the sequence that imprinted me so deeply with
the mood of the film. It's not a straightforward narrative
passage, and it has little to do with plot; it's about
the feeling of walls closing in, and the guilty feeling
that the walls are deserved. The counterpoint is a sense
of duty, of compulsion; the drug deal must be made,
but the kid brother also must be picked up, and the
sauce must be stirred, and meanwhile, Henry's life is
careening wildly out of control.
Actors have a way of doing their best work - the work
that lets us see them clearly - in a Scorsese film.
Robert De Niro emerged as the best actor of his generation
in "Taxi Driver." Joe Pesci, playing De Niro's brother
in "Raging Bull," created a performance of comparable
complexity. Both De Niro and Pesci are here in "GoodFellas,"
essentially playing major and very challenging supporting
roles to Ray Liotta and Lorraine Bracco, who establish
themselves here as clearly two of our best new movie
actors. Liotta was Melanie Griffith's late-arriving,
disturbingly dangerous husband in "Something Wild,"
and here he creates the emotional center for a movie
that is not about the experience of being a Mafioso,
but about the feeling. Bracco was the cop's wife from
out in the suburbs in "Someone To Watch Over Me," a
film in which her scenes were so effective that it was
with a real sense of loss that we returned to the main
story. The sense of their marriage is at the heart of
this film, especially in a shot where he clings to her,
exhausted. They have made their lifetime commitment,
and it was to the wrong life.
Many of Scorsese's best films have been poems about
guilt. Think of "Mean Streets," with the Harvey Keitel
character tortured by his sexual longings, or "After
Hours," with the Griffin Dunne character involved in
an accidental death and finally hunted down in the streets
by a misinformed mob, or think of "The Last Temptation
of Christ," in which even Christ is permitted to doubt.
"GoodFellas" is about guilt more than anything else.
But it is not a straightforward morality play, in which
good is established and guilt is the appropriate reaction
toward evil. No, the hero of this film feels guilty
for not upholding the Mafia code - guilty of the sin
of betrayal. And his punishment is banishment, into
the witness protection program, where nobody has a name
and the headwaiter certainly doesn't know it. What finally
got to me after seeing this film - what makes it a great
film - is that I understood Henry Hill's feelings. Just
as his wife Karen grew so completely absorbed by the
Mafia inner life that its values became her own, so
did the film weave a seductive spell. It is almost possible
to think, sometimes, of the characters as really being
good fellows. Their camaraderie is so strong, their
loyalty so unquestioned. But the laughter is strained
and forced at times, and sometimes it's an effort to
enjoy the party, and eventually, the whole mythology
comes crashing down, and then the guilt - the real guilt,
the guilt a Catholic like Scorsese understands intimately
- is not that they did sinful things, but that they
want to do them again."
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