![]() To say that Scorsese is “defending” this behavior would be ludicrous. And when his financial back is up against the wall, and he charters the yacht for a desperate voyage to Switzerland, which means that he’s soon cruising through the kind of 30-foot black storm waves that bedeviled Robert Redford in All Is Lost, it’s not enviable, it’s downright funny, because we think: This man has lost his mind. Some may stare at his existence and drool, but by the time he’s taken an overdose of Quaaludes and can barely talk, even as he attempts to drive his sports car back home (a scene that’s like GoodFellas by way of Jerry Lewis), we know that he’s gone way, way too far. Along the way, Belfort acquires a mansion and a helicopter and a yacht and a platinum-blonde trophy wife, and he does enough drugs every day to kill a horse. He’s got the touch! And we want to see him rise, the same way we wanted to see Henry Hill cruise to the front of that restaurant. As GoodFellas goes on, the freedom that Henry Hill saw in the gangster life begins to look like a trap, and by the end, when he’s coked to the gills, trying to escape his cronies and the law, no one in his right mind would want to trade places with him.Įarly on, when he’s clawing his way up and lands at an outlying Long Island brokerage, where he shows the losers in the office how to sell the hell out of mostly worthless penny stocks as if they were gold, we’re cued to admire the shameless, born-to-kill bravado of his pitch. In the classic “You think I’m funny?” scene, Joe Pesci’s is-he-kidding? tweaking of Henry isn’t just a goof, it’s a sinister preview of what every gangster ultimately faces: the Mob’s violence turning on them. ![]() To live by violence gets you treated like a king, but it’s also a brutal existence that gradually eats away at you. GoodFellas has a lot of moments like that, but Scorsese is too great a filmmaker to make the gangster life look easier than it is. It is, on some level, what all of us crave. That’s the Horatio Alger myth compressed into 30 ecstatic Scorsesesque seconds: Being a gangster isn’t just acting like a hoodlum - it’s rising up and flowing past the horde, fulfilling a fantasy of coming out on top. In Martin Scorsese’s GoodFellas, a pre-Quentin Tarantino movie that is turning out to be the post-Tarantino touchstone for how to make a drama about the lethal seductions of bad behavior ( Boogie Nights, The Sopranos, and American Hustle are all honorary sons of GoodFellas), Henry Hill (Ray Liotta), the shark/schlub wise-guy antihero, sucks the audience right into his dream of doing whatever the hell he pleases the moment he announces, in that opening voiceover, “As far back as I can remember, I always wanted to be a gangster.” To watch GoodFellas is to think: And who wouldn’t? A quintessential here’s why you want to be a gangster moment is the famous entering-the-restaurant tracking shot, in which Henry and his date, Karen (Lorraine Bracco), get to bypass the crowd by snaking in through the kitchen, only to land at the best table in the house.
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