Goodfellas

Released:  1990

Cast:  Robert De Niro, Ray Liotta, Joe Pesci, Lorraine Bracco, Paul Sorvino

Oscar Wins:  Best Supporting Actor (Joe Pesci)

Oscar Nominations:  Best Picture, Best Director (Martin Scorsese), Best Film Editing (Thelma Schoonmaker), Best Adapted Screenplay (Martin Scorsese, Nicholas Pileggi), Best Supporting Actress (Lorraine Bracco)

SUMMARY:  Henry Hill is an Italian-Irish boy growing up in Brooklyn when he gets a job in the local taxi stand, which is owned and operated by associates of the Lucchese crime family.  Henry is fascinated by the life led by the mobsters, especially the power they wield.  As time passes, he is given more and more responsibility at his job, and progresses into the world of organized crime.  By the time he is a young adult, Henry is well-versed in mob tactics (and money), and has no desire to live any other kind of life.  He falls in with the capo of the local mob, Paul “Paulie” Cicero (Paul Sorvino) and his two primary men:  Jimmy Conway (Robert De Niro) and Tommy DeVito (Joe Pesci).  Tommy is extremely hot-blooded, and tends to erupt into violence at the slightest provocation.  Jimmy is a much cooler character, and an early idol of Henry’s.  Jimmy’s main game is hijacking, which he is extremely good at.  Early on in his criminal career, Henry helps commit the Air France Robbery, which nets a huge score for the men.  After this, Henry’s star is clearly on the rise.  He spends most of his time with Tommy, so when Tommy is attracted to a girl who refuses to go out alone with him, Tommy convinces Henry to go on a double date with them.  Henry has a business meeting that night, so he virtually ignores his date, Karen (Lorraine Bracco), rushing her through the meal before dumping her at home.  When Henry blows off their second date, she publicly confronts him; although chastened, Henry is also attracted, and the two begin to seriously date.  Although Karen is Jewish (and Henry is not), they eventually get married.  Karen seems to be oblivious of Henry’s occupation when they are dating and at the beginning of their marriage, but she soon realizes what is really going on.  Influenced by her parents’ disapproval, Karen is repulsed by the life of a mobster and his wife, but over time, grows accustomed to the wealth and respect that she receives.  In 1970, a member of the Gambino crime family named Billy Batts is released from prison.  During a celebration over his release, Batts repeatedly taunts Tommy about his former profession as a shoeshine boy.  The hot-tempered Tommy leaves the party, then returns with a gun and shoots Batts.  He, Henry and Jimmy then attack the man, kicking him until they believe he is dead.  Once the moment has passed, Jimmy realizes that they are in potential big trouble:  as a member of the Gambino family, permission should have been obtained before killing Batts.  Since no permission was given, the Gambino family would be justified in going after the three men.  They decide to hide the body, and not tell anyone else about the crime, including their boss, Paulie.  They put Batts’ body in the trunk of Henry’s car and drive to a deserted area:  along the way, they discover that Batts is still alive.  Tommy stabs him with a carving knife multiple times, before Jimmy shoots him at point-blank range.  The three men then bury the body.  Batts’ disappearance is noticed almost immediately, but nobody knows what his happened.  Paulie questions Henry about it, but Henry holds true to his promise, and reveals nothing.  However, when Jimmy learns that the area is due to be dug up for construction, the three men have to exhume the body and move it, a task which makes Henry physically ill.

At home, Henry’s once-idyllic marriage is now a shambles.  Karen has learned about his mistress, Janice Rossi, and threatens Henry with a gun.  Henry decides that this is the last straw, and moves in with Janice; however, he is told by Paulie that because he is married and has children, he must go back home to his wife.  Before he does this, Henry is allowed to go on a job with Jimmy.  The job takes them to Florida, where they beat up a man who owes money to the family.  Unbeknownst to them, the man’s sister works for the FBI, and rats all of them (including her own brother) out.  Henry and Jimmy both receive 10-year prison sentences, though they serve them in different prisons.  With no way to support his family while in prison, Henry starts selling drugs, using his wife to carry them in.  This turns into an extremely lucrative business, and Henry intends to continue it when he gets out of prison, in 1978.  Paulie is against the drug trade, and explicitly tells Henry to give it up, but Henry ignores him and brings in more people (including Jimmy and Tommy) instead.  As his drug business grows, so does Henry’s own habit.  At the same time, the group has learned of a potentially huge score, involving the Lufthansa airline.  Though Henry is not involved in the actual committing of the robbery, he is in on the planning, and receives a cut of the record-breaking $6 million theft.  The size of the score makes Jimmy very nervous, and he warns the other participants not to spend the money on any large, obvious purchases.  The men ignore him, and buy cars and furs for their wives:  this only makes Jimmy more paranoid, and one by one, he has them killed.  Finally, the only men left from the heist are Paulie, Jimmy, Henry and Tommy.  The relationship between Jimmy and Henry has become strained (primarily because of Jimmy’s paranoia), but they share a happy moment when they learn that Tommy is going to become a made man (as part Irish, neither Jimmy nor Henry can be formally inducted into the family).  However, this turns out to be a trick, as Tommy is instead killed for the long-ago Batts murder.  By 1980, Henry’s life has caught up to him, as he is a full-blown drug addict.  On May 11, he notices that a helicopter seems to be following him around as he makes myriad trips through town, conducting business.  That evening, he is arrested, and learns that the Feds had been watching him for months.  Karen manages to bail him out; when he gets home, Henry starts searching for his latest drug shipment, which he intends to sell.  He is incensed to learn that Karen, believing the police would find it, has flushed all of the drugs down the toilet.  Consequently, Henry has virtually no money.  He swallows his pride and goes to Paulie, who gives him $3200 but also tells him that their association is over.  When he talks with Jimmy, Henry realizes that Jimmy has set him up to be killed.  With no other way out, Henry decides to cooperate with the authorities to bring cases against Jimmy and Paulie, then go into witness protection.  He does this successfully, but states at the end of the movie that he finds his new life boring and unsatisfying.  An epilogue states that Henry Hill was arrested on drug charges in 1987, but has been clean since then.  In 1989, he and Karen separated.  Paulie died in prison in 1988; Jimmy received a 20-year-to-life sentence, which he served in New York.

MY TAKE:   This movie is a lot like The Godfather, but it doesn’t glamorize the mob life nearly so much.  I see it as a cross between The Godfather and Scarface:  sometimes, it impresses you with the power and wealth the men possess, and at others it horrifies you with just what they do to get that money.  Essentially, it’s not as glamorous as the first, but not as gritty as the second.  Henry Hill’s life in the mob follows a pretty predictable pattern:  he makes his way up, becomes very successful, then experiences a tremendous fall from grace.  He manages to save his own skin only by ratting on the men he has spent his whole career with.  The thing that intrigued me about Henry is that while is definitely ruthless, he doesn’t have nearly as strong a stomach for violence as you might expect.  He’s more than happy to rough people up, but shies away from killing them, and is sickened by the rotting body of Billy Batts.  Granted, this reaction could be expected from most people, but given that Jimmy and Tommy have almost no reaction, it’s a little odd.  I did like that the movie was not just a bloodbath, that it showed the dynamic between Henry and the other people in his life.  For the record, I thought Karen was exactly right to flush the drugs down the toilet.  When the FBI is searching your house, and your husband has hidden the drugs in a kitchen cabinet, you should definitely get rid of them.  Perhaps if he hadn’t spent the gazillions of dollars he had earned in the past, it wouldn’t have been such a big deal.  Of course, being a career criminal, good decision making is obviously not one of his assets.

Fun fact:  Recently, Robert De Niro made a movie called The Family, in which he plays a former mobster who is now in witness protection.  The family is sent to France, and De Niro’s character is eventually asked to speak at a film club’s showing of an American movie (they think he’s a historical expert).  However, there is a mixup with the films, and instead, the club receives Goodfellas.  In the movie, this is amusing because De Niro is a former gangster who now has to talk about the movie without revealing his intimate knowledge of the topic; in real life, this is funny because De Niro is actually in Goodfellas.  Unfortunately, the movie does not show him discussing the characters or actors.  Pity.

RATING:  Excellent, and far less violent/graphic than I expected.