Kerri Battles the AFI’s Top 100 – #92: Goodfellas

I’ve always had a mild obsession with the idea of the Mafia. When I was 13 and we took a family vacation to San Francisco, I couldn’t wait to see Al Cap0ne’s cell at Alcatraz.  In 10th grade English, when my class was assigned a research paper on a topic of our choosing, I wrote about 10 pages on the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre. I’ve spent the majority of my life telling my Italian mother that I know she’s keeping our real mob ties a secret from me because she has admitted to an uncle who used to run floating craps games and unofficially changed his name to something that didn’t end in a vowel so my great-grandmother wouldn’t die of shame when she read his name in the police blotter.  So, you know, I’m usually down for a good gangster flick. Goodfellas should be high on my list of all-time favorites. But it’s not. In fact, I’ve thoroughly disliked it every time I’ve seen it before. There’s only one “classic” gangster film that actually loathe more than Goodfellas (I won’t deign to name that one here since it’s not on the list, proving the AFI agrees with me) so I really thought I knew what I was getting into this week. Two and a half hours and one DVD-flip later, I couldn’t have been more surprised. Instead of reaffirming my contempt, the 5th(ish) viewing made me realize that everything I’d hated about Goodfellas before was basically everything that also made it awesome.

In case you only know it by it’s most iconic scenes, Goodfellas is the story of Henry Hill, a half-Irish-half-Italian kid who quits school at the ripe old age of too fucking young in order to begin his illustrious and lengthy career as a criminal. The two and a half hours or so of run time follow the path you’d expect your average gangster flick to take. We begin at humble beginnings, then quickly move to favored protege. We pass through big heists, big hits, girlfriends, a wife, more girlfriends, good times, jail time, and parole until finally we reach the mistake (fact: all criminals make one) that brings it all crumbling down to ruins. The story has been and will be done again and again. But Scorsese did it right. He did it so right that everyone else has been “trying to find inspiration” in Goodfellas ever since, including Marty himself.

As I’ve already mentioned, the basic story has been done before — ignored kid with a less-than-stellar home life finds a new family in The Family and makes it big, only to ultimately crash and burn. But Goodfellas is based on a true story and, by all knowledgeable accounts, is pretty fucking accurate. Henry Hill was a real life known associate of the Lucchese crime family, took part in the 1978 Lufthansa robbery at JFK Airport that netted over $6 million dollars, then turned state’s witness to avoid getting whacked. All of the characters portrayed in the film are closely based on real people, complete with their psychopathic tendencies and violent jealous streaks. The events, while nipped here and tucked there in true Hollywood fashion for the sake of runtime, are still pretty accurate to life. Scorsese just took the bits of Hill’s life that he found the most interesting and arranged them in such a way that builds a story that feels equally as true. You know where the story is going, but you keep watching because you want to know how and when these odious characters will finally get their due. You want to know exactly how much coke will cause Lorraine Bracco to completely lose her already tenuous grip on her shit. You want to know how and when that Shinebox fiasco is going to come back to bite Joe Pesci in the face… with a bullet. You want to know who Robert De Niro is going to take revenge on when it does. Above all, you want to know who makes the mistake that ruins them all. Well, that, and you want to know if that guy playing Tuddy Cicero is the same guy who played Vito on The Sopranos because you just can’t quite tell ….

I could never quite put my finger on what I hated most about Goodfellas until yesterday. It wasn’t until the credits rolled on my 5th(ish) viewing that I realized what it was. Goodfellas is the story of the rise and fall of a single crime family, yes, but it’s also an obituary to the Mafia life itself. This film came out in 1990 and portrayed the downfall of the first of the Five Families. The remaining 4 would follow suit by the mid-90s. A quick Google will tell you that 4 of the 5 bosses are currently serving almost comically long sentences. The Legend of the Mafia would have me believe that those bars don’t mean much but, really, when you’re serving an actual, literal 100 year sentence, how much influence can you really have? Let’s face it — The Mafia hasn’t been cool or relevant since John Gotti got pinched and handed life without parole. By the time Tony Soprano started telling us all he thought he got in at the end of the thing, the thing he was talking about  already seemed about as distant and real as dragons. Watching Goodfellas reminds me that it was once a living, breathing organism as real as unicorns (THEY ARE SO). But if we can’t watch it collect tributes and take bets and break kneecaps in the wild anymore, at least Goodfellas can accurately show us what it used to be like. And for that, Scorsese should be commended.

If you’re between the ages of  about 25 and 35 and don’t 100% get this joke, I’m truly sorry that your childhood just wasn’t that cool. — KS