Review of GoodFellas (1990) by Meritcoba — 20 Apr 2016

No doubt Goodfellas is a film with good actors, some of which play characters which seems to be written for them. There is Joe Pesci for example, who plays a most hateful gangster. He is the kind of man that pumps another man full of lead because it is funny to see him twitch. A sociopath you want to be far away from you as he can be. Preferable in hell or something where he and his kind belongs.

Goodfellas oozes crime, deceit and violence. The main guy is played by Ray Liotta whom I find hard to like because he looks at you with a creepy stare. There is Robert de Niro, who plays Robert de Niro very well, and makes me feel uneasy by the slick manner that lays as a thin veneer over his violent nature. Non of the characters actually endear: they are nasty people who cause grief and this makes the movie so hard to like.

The key to the world of mobsters is that there is no save ground. You are in constant fear for your live or from the law. It is a eat or be eaten world. In the end it is the choice that Liotta faces: deliver yourself to the one or the other. One means death, the other means prison, another kind of death. Liotta gets away, but he doesn't seem to be happy with it. Yeah, it sucks to be a nobody. That his wife divorces him after 25 years of marriage might say something or nothing at all. She was as wacky as he was.

The events make for a good movie with a good story perhaps, but also a very unlikable movie which I wouldn't have watched if I had known. Perhaps this is a kind of revision of the Godfather that actually makes some of these criminals to likable. Perhaps Scorsese wanted to correct this by making a gangster movie with lurid abject people you can't really connect with. If that was the purpose he succeeded very well indeed.