Defining Favourites: GoodFellas (1990)

You're gonna like this guy. He's all right. He's a good fella. He's one of us.

Photo: Warner Bros.

Welcome to my Defining Favourites, a section dedicated to essays about films that I feel confident in calling favourites in some way or another - akin to Roger Ebert’s “Great Movies” reviews. These essays are for paid subscribers, so if you would like to read more beyond the free preview, please consider subscribing.

Directed by Martin Scorsese
Screenplay by Martin Scorsese, Nicholas Pileggi, from the book Wiseguy by Pileggi
Produced by Irwin Winkler
Starring Ray Liotta, Robert De Niro, Joe Pesci, Lorraine Bracco, Paul Sorvino
Premiere Date: September 9, 1990
Running Time: 146 minutes

GoodFellas is a fitting title for a film all about finding good company. And of course, for someone like Henry Hill, it just so happens that he thought he found such while being alongside mobsters. But that’s also where the crux of Martin Scorsese’s biopic of the former mobster finds its energy, because it’s a movie all about that allure of climbing to the top especially when it seems like the odds would seem so stacked against you based on which part of America you come from. It’s also perhaps what best informs how Martin Scorsese could make a movie out of the life of Henry Hill in turn; for what we’re made to watch is a movie about the promise of belonging, despite the grave cost it might end up having on your own life in turn.

In creating a portrait of the life of the mobsters that had ruled the parts of America where Henry Hill was from, it only fits that Martin Scorsese approaches such a film with the same sort of energy that would have been so enthralling for a very young Henry Hill. The moment when Ray Liotta first narrates “As far back as I can remember, I always wanted to be a gangster,” only feels like a perfect summation of the position in life where a young Henry Hill can come from so that he would end up looking up to the many mobsters that have been present in his life as a child. From here onward, it’s not hard to see why GoodFellas has maintained such a strong presence in the present-day pop culture landscape – because it’s very much all about how these values define America on the whole.