Declaring that Goodfellas is a great film is not exactly groundbreaking. It won so many awards that you could give one to each of the people Jimmy wacked after the Lufthansa heist.
But I’m not just saying that Goodfellas is a provacative, compelling film. I’m saying that it’s so good that I can literally watch it no matter what. Am I having a terrible day? Goodfellas. Am I having a fantastic day? Goodfellas. Am I just having… a day? Goodfellas. It works for any occasion, at least for me.
The journey of Henry Hill from broke Irish kid to professional criminal to scatterbrained cocaine dealer to cooperating witness is practically a hero’s journey. In its time it was a fresh and original take on the gangster genre. Unlike many that came before it (The Godfather, Once Upon a Time in America), Goodfellas dispenses with any kind of “loss of innocence.” The closest it comes to such a moment is when kid Henry helps a man who’s been shot by giving him towels from the barber shop and Tutti tells him he’s a real jerk for getting the towels all bloody and that he should not have gotten involved. Yet even this is not a loss of innocence as much as a simple formative moment – Henry’s sense of normal incorporates the fact that clean towels are more important than a human life and goes on to act accordingly.
What makes this film so unique and compelling is not the violence it is so famous for – it is the normalcy. Violent crime is just another day at the office. When Jimmy strangles Morrie with the telephone cord to persuade him to make his weekly payments, Henry laughs like the whole thing is a joke. When Tommy endures the insults of Billy Bats and then tells Henry to “keep him here,” Henry doesn’t need to ask why. In many jobs, office politics results in slower promotions or hurtful gossip. In this job, it can get you killed.
Tommy, ably played by Joe Pesci, serves as a means for Jimmy and Henry to vicariously become accepted as full members of the criminal organization they serve. The film itself begins with Henry’s famous narration, “As far back as I can remember, I wanted to be a gangster,” and while he is certainly a gangster, he’s not a full member. Not the way that Tommy is about to become.
But the making ceremony itself is a ruse, and Henry’s illusions about being a real member of Paulie’s family are sprayed across the floor along with Tommy’s brains. Not only will he and Jimmy never be real members, their best friend is dead and the two of them are partly to blame.
The first time I watched this film, the sudden tonal shift from Tommy’s death to the later years when Henry is strung out on cocaine and forgotten dreams seemed jarring. Several dozen rewatches later, I am convinced that this is genius. Tommy’s death was a sudden event that shook Henry’s life to its core. We don’t need to be spoonfed Henry’s gradual descent into the seedy world of drug-dealing. We can work backwards from here. Henry has become fully absorbed in the madness and violence of his criminal life and this sudden shift is a far more effective way of letting the audience feel the weight of Henry’s grief and regret.
The final act of Henry’s career as a professional criminal is much grimier than the rest of the film. His last day as a free citizen is spent in a frenetic, drug-fueled series of errands, some illicit and others mundane, as he drives all over town trying to break even on his various criminal enterprises. The whole point of being a criminal was to gain access to the good life without being born rich or working a bullshit job. Henry himself describes his fellow working class stiffs with almost no sympathy whatsoever.
“To us, those goody-good people who worked shitty jobs for bum paychecks, who took the subway to work every day and worried about their bills, were dead. They were suckers. They had no balls. If we wanted something, we just took it.”
Henry Hill
After being busted for dealing coke, and after his wife becomes convinced that Jimmy tried to arrange her murder, Henry decides to violate the one ethical code which he had thus far lived up to: it’s time to rat on his friends.
A further irony of Henry’s ultimate transformation is that his character finally becomes sympathetic. What took him a lifetime to build took only a few moments in a courtroom to destroy, and now he’s just another schnook like the rest of us. Thus we see the ultimate precarity of the professional criminal – the slender thread upon which they balance their lives.
Which brings me to my final point – Goodfellas paved the way for many other criminal biographies thereafter, some good and some bad, but what gets especially overlooked is its influence on The Sopranos. Tony is a lot like Henry in many ways – he has good instincts, he’s quick to use overwhelming violence when he deems it necessary, and he also walks upon the slender thread between power and prison.
Interestingly enough, the gangster whom Tony Soprano was loosely based upon also ended up becoming a witness for the prosecution and going into protective custody. Part of me wonders if he and the real-life Henry Hill ever bumped into one another, and whether they would even know if they did. Would they see something in that passing stranger’s eyes that reminded them of their old life, or would they both see just another schnook?