“Who cares?” That question came into my mind about 25 minutes into watching Goodfellas and just stayed put until the seemingly endless film mercilessly concluded. Honestly, I’ve started writing this piece several times and I’ve had a lot of trouble getting past “Who cares?” Why did I spend my time watching an incredibly long movie about an awful person doing terrible things? Well, at least now I get all the references in cartoons.
About awful people doing terrible things, in reality there are plenty of good reasons to watch such a movie. I’ve seen and admired such films, several of which chronicled far more despicable tales (true and fictionalized) than the rise and fall of gangster Henry Hill, the protagonist of Goodfellas. I’ve even appreciated a good number of movies about mobsters and gangsters. The difference is that all these other films answered that pivotal question for me. For the most part, Goodfellas doesn’t. Even worse, when it does sort of answer, it says things I find utterly repugnant.
At this point I think it’s important to note that my critique of Goodfellas is going to be a moral one. The acting, direction, writing, photography, etc. are all excellent and deserve to be praised. But, considering how I felt about the film’s characters and its general vibe, the superb technique of Goodfellas felt like a gorgeously carved mahogany table, covered by a beautifully embroidered cloth, both under a meal of shit. I’m well-aware that many people will argue there shouldn’t even be moral critiques of films. I find that, in conversation, most people apply this argument rather selectively. However, even if the view is consistent, I simply don’t share it. Anyone who rejects non-cinematographic criticism of movies may want to stop reading now.
Next, I should head off another dismissal tactic I see creeping around the corner, that I think any stories about bad people need to be didactic lessons. I think no such thing, and I believe moral didacticism can sometimes be rather simplistic and irksome. However, I also believe the disdain expressed for it often represents a form of elitist contempt for a natural desire on the part of most people to see evil get punished, or at least condemned. Certainly that desire is frequently way too reductive, but I don’t see why some take such glee in running it down. Surely any halfway decent person can at least sympathize with the desire for straightforward moral clarity, however much they’ve learned that life and art are usually more complex. Maybe it isn’t always, but sneering at that desire frequently looks like juvenile contrarianism and/or smarmy “cleverer than thou-ness” to me.
Enough caveats! How can I hate such a great film? It’s best encapsulated by the beating up of the mailman; I almost stopped watching at that point. For those unfamiliar with Goodfellas, early in the film we are shown the young Hill getting involved with the world of organized crime. A letter from his school reveals to his parents that he has been cutting class. Hill’s father beats him up in response (more on Hill’s suffering later) and the gangsters Hill has been associating with devise a scheme to let him stay in the group. I fully expected them to threaten or attack Hill’s father and, frankly, they’d have had something of a point, and young Henry’s gratitude to them would have made some rough moral sense. Instead, they savagely assault the local mailman, forcing him to deliver any mail concerning Henry directly to them so they can hide it from his parents.
We can’t be sure if this event actually occurred. Goodfellas is based on Nicholas Pileggi’s book Wiseguy, a non-fiction account of Hill’s crimes, which I haven’t read. Hill had some communication with the filmmakers while Goodfellas was being produced and reportedly praised the film. However, elements may well have been fictionalized or amalgamated and it’s (very) possible that Hill simply lied about certain things. The bit with the mailman doesn’t seem like something that would require such deception, what with no political sensitivity or involvement of prominent people, so I’m operating as if the event happened more or less as portrayed in the film, although the implications of the scene’s treatment by director Martin Scorsese and the rest of the creative team are the same even if it was a fabrication.
Assuming he was real, I wonder what happened to that mailman. Did his wife have to explain to their children why Daddy would wake up screaming? Did he eventually go to jail because he’d committed a serious federal crime and was too terrified to tell anyone why? What were his hobbies, his interests? What was his name?
We don’t know any of this because the mailman is, in the words of the film, an “average nobody,” something Hill considers the epitome of disgrace. This is the theme running all throughout Goodfellas: Hill’s passionate quest to avoid being a nobody, to be important, to have control over his own life.
These are not desires to be waved away; certainly I don’t dismiss them. The vast majority of human beings who have ever lived have, and have had, only limited control over their own destinies. It is rather sobering to think of all the potentially brilliant writers, inventors, scientists, performers, teachers, and etc. who never had the chance to go anywhere because they were women, slaves, the wrong “race,” or because it simply profited someone for them not to be able to afford food and shelter. It is downright infuriating when one also factors in all the people who might not have had the potential of the aforementioned group, but would have been quiet heroes to their families and friends. Certainly some people flourish, in big and small ways, despite all adversity. But thinking honestly about the oceans of people who were (and are being) snuffed out because a decision was made or a fortune just had to get bigger would inevitably make most people pretty depressed. The next, less common step, is to get angry.
Henry Hill certainly gets depressed and angry over the circumstances he grew up in and he had a right to; I felt for him at that stage. Goodfellas shows us the Hill family struggling financially, with Henry’s younger brother disabled and needing constant medical attention. In my view, a society that allows people to potentially lose everything because they have medical problems is an abomination. In these early scenes, I definitely felt for the Hills, including Henry. I felt even more for him when his father is shown abusing him. Hill’s father has legitimate cause for misery but, with the classic, twisted mindset of a cowardly bully, he takes this misery out on Henry, clearly thinking, as bullies do: “If I can make this weaker person hurt, I’ll feel better. At least over him, I have power.” Again, assuming all this is more or less accurate, I’m sure Henry felt small, alone, and terrified.
He then proceeds to spend his life making other people feel small, alone, and terrified. He also genuinely relishes it, delighting in his ability to have power over people weaker than him. There is never so much as a hint that Hill feels the slightest hesitation about his actions. After all, according to Hill anyone he can victimize should be victimized since they have committed the ultimate crime of being, in the famous words of the film’s final scene “a schnook.”
The notion that he might have conquered his fears by banding together with people like the mailman, naturally never crosses Hill’s mind. He’s excited and eager to join the strong in stomping on the weak, because he sees that as the only thing worth doing and the only way to prove one’s worth. The concept that most people are “losers” and “nobodies” only on the surface, and only because of a system that devalues their humanity would be anathema to Hill. His reaction to thousands, millions of mailmen, bartenders, janitors and etc. joining hands and attempting to take power would have been a cruder version of Louis XVI’s thoughts on the declaration of the French Republic. For all his lamenting of his childhood experiences, Hill actually reveres the system that keeps him and his family in the dirt; he simply wants, in his own way, to benefit from it. His thoughts are not directed towards revenge against his father or anyone else, which would have been philosophically fair, if unfortunate. Instead, he looks at predators and bullies and says “How can I be like them? Who can I stomp on?” The mailman is simply the first manifestation of Hill’s desire to assert his own power, specifically by hurting those who cannot defend themselves. Hill’s worldview is clearly predicated on there being a face to smash with his boot.
Goodfellas gives us little time to stop and empathize with the various “losers” Hill and his friends dispense with, the treatment of the mailman setting the tone early on. We never get to know anyone outside Hill’s world well. For the most part we’re stuck with Hill and company as they demonstrate their greed, brutality, and racism. About that last point, to be fair Hill does appear perfectly polite to his brother’s black physician, suggesting he’s willing to put that particular element of “toughness” on the shelf if he thinks he can get something for it.
Once again, I’m drawn back to my “who cares” reaction watching these monsters parade across the screen. About the only recognizable stirrings of human emotion I felt after the mailman scene came from the occasional baffled wailing of Hill’s daughters, caught up in what must have been an indescribable nightmare for young children. Aside from them, virtually everyone on screen for longer than a few minutes was hideous and extremely dull.
It might be expected that I didn’t enjoy watching Hill get away with all this in the end, and I didn’t. Of course, Hill did get away with it and, even in fictional stories, there’s no reason a bad person shouldn’t be shown facing no justice for what they’ve inflicted. It happens a lot in life, after all, as the case of Hill demonstrates. I think it’s important to depict this and, again, I don’t expect stories to always be satisfying or pleasing in their conclusions. However, Hill’s own attitude to the fact that he avoids any significant consequences for multiple cold-blooded murders (among other things) is nothing short of jaw-dropping. He actually seems to view this as some kind of tragedy due to the fact that he can no longer take anything he wants and push other people around. Watching the final scene again, I found myself mouthing the words “What a fucking brat!” When I first watched it, I’ve rarely been happier for a movie to end. And yet this finale might contain the best refutation to my argument.
The strongest defense of Goodfellas from my moral charges would probably be that Scorsese and his collaborators are subjecting Hill to a great deal of irony. This reading might argue that we are meant to view Hill, not just as a monster, but as utterly clueless. For such an idiot, having to wait on lines and being prevented from grabbing any shiny object in sight would be far worse than any kind of severe punishment, because punishment would still leave his self-image as an important person intact. As such, Hill could be seen to have meticulously crafted his own Hell and cannot even appreciate how much he has escaped.
This defense is a tempting one and I would imagine it is what Scorsese and the other filmmakers probably believe. However, I think it is undone by the mood of the film. Throughout Goodfellas, I got the strong impression that everyone involved was entranced by Hill, that they found him fascinating, wild, and outrageous. This gets back to my point about the film’s technique, which is correctly praised as excellent and seminal. By welding all this so tightly to Hill’s version of his story without significant variation, the filmmakers, whatever their intentions, participate in a form of myth-making and seem to largely assent, not only to Hill’s take on himself, but to his attitude towards society. None of this means that the filmmakers are bad people, but I do think they were seduced. They then used their talents to seduce us on Hill’s behalf and on behalf of a mindset that not only worships crude “strength,” but perversely considers anyone who lacks its version of “strength,” namely the ability and/or willingness to destroy other people, to be guilty of an upside down version of sin. It is this kind of reverse morality that can help feed the poisonous and solidarity-defeating notion (which one finds far too often, even among generally decent people) that the real problem in the world isn’t barbaric injustice, sad as that might be, but rather the fact that so many people are “weak.”
Again, I’m virtually certain this is not what Goodfellas is trying to do; after all, few people hold the beliefs I just outlined (thank goodness), especially when given time to seriously consider them. But partially understood feelings can certainly take control, whatever one’s genuinely held principles, and I believe the filmmakers’ fascination with Henry Hill took over Goodfellas and allowed the film to become a conduit for Hill’s thinking. All the famous set pieces, the quotable lines, the iconic scenes, these craft a narrative about how amazing Hill and the other gangsters are. “Sure,” the film seems to be saying, “they’re bad, but aren’t they incredible? I mean, you can’t make characters like these up!” But is this true? Without Scorsese’s virtuosity, we’d just have a pack of creeps, all rather boring in the rare moments when they weren’t disgusting, and unfortunately that’s pretty commonplace. If the filmmakers indeed got this, they provide no moment of jarring clarity, no piercing break in the masquerade where the aesthetic pyrotechnics die down long enough for the ugliness and banality to wash over us. And while it can be problematic to judge a work of art by the reactions of audiences, the giddy fanboy tone I’ve often picked up from admirers of Goodfellas doesn’t suggest the film is prompting much in the way of introspection. To return to the concept of moral critique, plenty will say the film has no obligation to do any of the things I wanted it to. True enough, but I think it would have been a much better and more meaningful film if it had.
And so, as I watched a cruel man who hurt people suffer the horrific fate of not being able to get his favorite type of pasta anymore, I thought a lot about that mailman. Hopefully he was OK. In any event, and for what little it’s worth, best wishes to him and his family. As for Hill, who cares?
BABOUK FOREVER! 