•
Rating:
The film begins with the shot of the hood of a car traveling at night on the streets of the outskirts of New York... The three "goodfellas" inside the car, two Irishmen and an Italian, Henry Hill, Jimmy Conway, and Tommy, hear noises and pull over to check if they have a flat tire. Henry opens the car hood to reveal a bloody man thrashing about wrapped in plastic. Jimmy and Tommy finish him off with knives and revolvers. Henry closes the hood, as if nothing happened and says: "As far back as I can remember, I always wanted to be a gangster"...
From this shocking beginning, the story of Henry Hill, played by the brilliant Ray Liotta, rewinds from the odd jobs he did for the mob as a boy to his meeting with Jimmy and Tommy, his marriage to the Jewish Karen, and back to the murder with which the story starts. The story rewinds at an incredible speed, thanks to the fantastic editing of Scorsese, which after the initial shock draws us into the mafia world, describing its rules in detail, with an objective and detached analysis, narrated through the voice-over of Henry Hill, fascinated by this world that promises wealth and power. The mobsters in Goodfellas are ignorant, rough, empty; their only interest is money. Scorsese shows us bungalows, designer clothes, jewelry, cars... the mafia is a state within a state; it is the dream of capitalism. Thus, we see how Scorsese’s portrait is realistic, far removed from the epic of The Godfather. Yet everything is told in a classic way, and despite the shocking, very pulp beginning, all the murders happen in silence. "When the guys decide to off you, they do it quietly, you don’t even notice, you’re just dead... and maybe the one who has to kill you comes forward with a smile, he’s someone who just a few days ago was your friend..." says Henry as the executions unfold, quick, cold, sudden.
Thus, we return, driven by Scorsese's great pace (the film lasts two hours but you never get bored!), to the murder from which we started, and the second part of the film shows us the slow decline of the "goodfellas." Despite Jimmy’s manic and paranoid precision (played by De Niro), for whom being a mobster is a job like any other, with its ironclad rules not to be broken, the criminal empire of our protagonists, (working under the boss Pauli, who moves the mannequins placidly and calmly) is thrown into crisis by the homicidal madness of the fanatical and bloodthirsty Tommy (the extraordinary Joe Pesci, Oscar for Best Supporting Actor), and Henry’s passion for cocaine and women. In the mafia world masterfully directed and perfectly reconstructed by Scorsese, ordinary evenings at the bar, family lunches, marital spats, extramarital affairs intersect with murders, heists, robberies, extortions, periods in prison, drug trafficking, collusion with the "healthy" world, and corruption. Scorsese shows us all this with skillful mastery, with great naturalness... This is a great film, a must-see not only for gangster movie lovers...
Loading comments slowly
