Scorsese once claimed that The Departed (2006) was his first plot based film. His previous films (Taxi Driver (1976), The King of Comedy (1983), The Last Temptation of Christ (1988) etc.) have been more of character studies. Similarly Goodfellas is a character study of what a gangster’s life was like in the 60’s and 70’s. The film is based on the book, ‘Wiseguy’ by Nicholas Pileggi which in turn was based on real life people and events. Scorsese first got hold of the book and it was the flavor it was written with that drew him to make a film on it. The whole point of the film is to examine the inside working of these mob families. Called by Roger Ebert as the ‘best mob movie ever’, Goodfellas was instrumental in inspiring a lot of mob related films and TV series. One major inspiration was the TV series Sopranos, where the creator called the Scorsese film his Quran.
Goodfellas is an excellent example of the insane camerawork and editing in Scorsese movies (and I mean that in a very positive way). One very characteristic aspect of the film was freeze frame. In theory, freeze frames shouldn’t work. Imagine when you’re watching a movie and suddenly the picture stops but the sound and music keeps going on. It is supposed to jerk the audience out of the flow. Not with Scorsese however. He used it as a way to tell the story more efficiently if anything. It is almost as if you are sitting down with Henry over a few drinks and he is telling you his life story and then stops the flow of events to explain you more about how he figured out Jimmy wanted to kill Morrie.
I am generally a big sucker for long shots (maybe that is why Rope is my favorite Hitchcock film). So naturally, the scene where Henry takes Karen out for their first date just kept my eyes wide open and a big smile on my face. Long shots, if pulled off correctly invest you more into the mood of the film. Just like in that scene, you feel you are walking behind Henry and Karen when they enter the club from the back entrance and go through the kitchen. The way through the kitchen and Henry stopping by everyone to say hello sold the idea more convincingly of him being an influential person.
I cannot talk about the camerawork in the film and not mention the iconic Vertigo effect/ Hitchcock shot/ Dolly zoom used in the film. This is when Henry meets Jimmy towards the end of the film to discuss Henry’s case. When they are sitting in the booth, you would notice there is a very strange fluid like movement between the foreground and the background. This is the Dolly zoom or otherwise known as the Vertigo effect, since it was first seen in Vertigo (1958) by Hitchcock. This shot implied that there was something wrong, a certain bad vibe that the protagonist was feeling.
The music is beautifully interwoven into the story. Scorsese handpicked all the songs used in the movie himself. If you notice, as the movie progresses from the late 50’s to the 70’s, so does the music. We start the movie with Tony Bennett’s ‘Rags to Riches’. If you have seen the movie enough (or are obsessed with it like in my case) then it is very hard to listen to that song without Henry’s voice describing his childhood ringing in your head. The beginning of the movie itself has 3-4 songs playing behind the voice over. The music complements the mood of the film as it goes on. It becomes romantic and loving when we see Henry wooing Karen, promiscuous when Henry is with his mistress, dirty rock when we see De Niro smoking a cigarette (looking for the next person to kill), soft sympathetic music when we see the dead massacred by Jimmy and uptempo jazz and rock to underline the chaos of a coked out Henry running around. Using music to tell the story is just one of the many things possible in movies and Scorsese uses this to his advantage.
Along with the music and the camerawork, I feel that food played a big role in the film. The ‘dinner in prison’ scene has to be one of my favorite scenes from the movie, if not THE favorite. The little things that Scorsese adds to his scenes are the small strokes defining his big masterpiece. The razor cutting garlic technique was a small detail in the book but he dedicated an entire shot to that. In fact the whole film would have worked without such an elaborate dinner scene in the prison altogether. However it is because of these unnecessary details that we realize what grandeur life they were living in the prison, thus making that scene almost necessary for the film.
After the Godfather films, Goodfellas can easily be considered the next essential mob related film to know. It laid the basic ground rules on which later mob related cinema or TV series were made. The reason why some people might find Goodfellas as boring and clichéd today is only because this film was one of the big ones to define that genre. Watch it for the significance it holds and if not then just watch it for Robert DeNiro and Joe Pesci coming together in a Scorsese movie.
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