Made Men

by Glenn Kenny

  Pauline Kael was very high on the movie: “It’s like Raging Bull made in a jolly, festive frame of mind,” she wrote in the September 24, 1990, issue of the New Yorker. “[Scorsese] loves the Brooklyn gang milieu, because it’s where distortion, hyperbole, and exuberance all commingle.” It’s Queens, not Brooklyn, at least for the most part. But as someone said in another movie, “Forget it, she’s rolling.”

  “Is it a great movie? I don’t think so. But it’s a triumphant piece of filmmaking—journalism presented with the brio of drama. Every frame is active and vivid, and you can feel the director’s passionate delight in making these pictures move.” Great movie or not, Goodfellas got Kael excited, and in her review, her discursive enthusiasm practically flails; she supports her assertions with delightedly recounted detail. The notice is worth seeking out and reading in its entirety.

  In the Chicago Sun-Times, after saying that no finer film had ever been made about organized crime than this one, Roger Ebert wrote, “It isn’t about any particular plot; it’s about what it felt like to be in the Mafia—the good times and the bad times.” His counterpart at the Tribune, Gene Siskel, also gave it a rave. Even the notoriously dyspeptic Rex Reed called it “great entertainment.”

  Gossip columnist Liz Smith, in the New York Daily News of September 21, effused over the picture’s New York premiere screening: “Seldom have I been to a more impressive premiere than the one at the Museum of Modern Art this week for Nick Pileggi’s GoodFellas, based on his true-to-life book Wiseguy. Madonna arrived and seemed thrilled to be in the VIP audience along with her fellow Italian actors and peers. [...] You can read the analytical raves for GoodFellas everywhere but just let me say this is one of the best movies I have ever seen! [...] The person who has really ‘arrived’ with GoodFellas is author Pileggi, a much-respected, well-loved, and really excellent writer who has paid his dues with years of reporting. Pileggi and his famous wife, writer Nora Ephron, are a celebrity phenomenon. But not just for ‘celebrity.’ These two deserve their success.” And in the September 29 Times, op-ed columnist Russell Baker mused on the amusement early audiences seemed to derive from Goodfellas: “More amazingly, the chuckles became big belly laughs as the movie proceeded to expose a society, New York society, in fact, so utterly corrupt that the cops are bribed by a few cartons of cigarettes, truckers connive blandly with hijackers, and judges give most-favored-perpetrator treatment to gangsters. In this society everybody is entitled to rob New York blind without risking retribution, except from an associate with an ice pick to slide in the back of the neck or a sweet old Italian mom’s butcher knife to plunge into a solar plexus.

  “What was going on in that audience? Are New Yorkers, who pay top dollar for absolutely everything, including their government—are New Yorkers so resigned to being blatantly robbed that when Mr. Scorsese rubs their noses in their humiliation, they can only laugh?”

  * * *

  Between the reviews and a not spectacular but largely solid box-office take—a $6.3 million opening weekend in 1,070 theaters, and an ultimate domestic take of almost $50 million, representing a modest profit off a $20 million budget—Goodfellas gave Warner executives fresh enthusiasm for another “edgy” film on its roster. In her book The Devil’s Candy, Julie Salamon writes of the studio’s 1990 year: “Warner Brothers hadn’t been having a good year. None of its pictures had ‘opened.’ Martin Scorsese’s GoodFellas was the one bright spot; the movie had gotten great reviews and might have Oscar possibilities. But it wasn’t exactly a huge hit, though it was doing better than they’d expected, financially.”

  Salomon’s book is an unsparing account of the making of The Bonfire of the Vanities, an adaptation of Tom Wolfe’s novel directed by Scorsese’s contemporary and friend Brian De Palma. The film, a Christmas holiday release for Warner, would prove a critical and financial boondoggle. But, prior to its release, Salomon says, “GoodFellas had now become the beacon of hope for Bonfire. GoodFellas had scored poorly in test screenings. As [Warner advertising president Robert] Friedman put it, ‘On an A to F scale it got at best a C-minus in the preview process.’ Reviews saved it. ‘They weren’t good, they weren’t great,’ said Friedman. ‘They were brilliant. So critically, GoodFellas was an A movie, and that’s what put it over.’” The same would not hold for Bonfire, though. The picture was both a critical and box-office fiasco and has proven more resistant to revisionism than several other poorly-received-in-their-time De Palma movies.

  As for the aforementioned Oscars: Scorsese’s relations to the Academy Awards had and has long been fraught. It need not be entirely relitigated here, but these relations of course in part stem from the filmmaker’s status of being with Hollywood but never quite of it. But let’s just take it back to the Academy Awards ceremony of 1981, honoring the films of 1980, which had to be postponed by a day after an assassination attempt on then US president Ronald Reagan. Said assassination attempt was perpetrated by a disturbed young man named John Hinckley, Jr. Among several other symptoms of his unbalanced mental state was a fixation on the actor Jodie Foster, with whom he had become obsessed after seeing her play a teenage prostitute in Scorsese’s Taxi Driver.

  This fact was not known when the Oscars actually took place the following evening. Scorsese’s Raging Bull had eight nominations, and the movie took home just two awards. One for Robert De Niro, for Best Actor, and the other, for Editing, going to Thelma Schoonmaker. Besides that, the picture was largely overtaken by Ordinary People, a family drama directed by the actor and megastar Robert Redford, making his debut in that capacity. Thus touching off one of the great (in terms of scale, if not intelligence) debates in awards history, centering on the conviction that Scorsese and company were robbed.

  Ordinary People is a better than decent picture; it’s not How Green Was My Valley but it’s not nothing, either. In any event, it’s not quite the self-evidently protean achievement that Raging Bull was—it’s hardly as difficult, for one thing—and this makes people mad. This really began the longtime “Scorsese Was Snubbed” meme.

  In his spectacular autobiography (the second half of his autobiography actually—its predecessor, A Life in Movies, only takes things up to the mid-1940s) Million Dollar Movie, Michael Powell describes an evening in his courtship of Thelma Schoonmaker, to whom he was introduced by Scorsese: “I made an Irish stew. I congratulated her on her Oscar. She was outraged. ‘I didn’t deserve it, and you know I didn’t deserve it. Marty should have gotten the Oscar, not me.’”

  * * *

  At the 1991 Oscars, honoring the films of 1990, Goodfellas garnered six nominations, including Editing (Schoonmaker once more, of course), Adapted Screenplay, Director, Best Picture, Supporting Actress (Lorraine Bracco), and Supporting Actor (Joe Pesci).

  And as if history were (perhaps farcically) repeating itself, the movie was all but shut out by Dances with Wolves, another directorial debut from another male movie superstar, this one Kevin Costner. An earnest epic of the American West with a special emphasis on Native American issues (as refracted through the view of a white man, played by Costner), the movie does not have quite as many now-hold-on-there defenders today as Ordinary People does.

  The contemporary critical fallout from this was pronounced. From Mason Wiley and Damien Bona’s Inside Oscar, 10th Anniversary Edition: “Janet Maslin denigrated the Academy as ‘an organization capable of deeming Kevin Costner a better director than Martin Scorsese (the evening’s single biggest outrage).’ Gene Seymour of Newsday demanded to know ‘What is it going to take? What wheels does Martin Scorsese have to grease? Who does he have to buy off? Or knock off?’ Premiere characterized Scorsese as being ‘angry and disappointed’ over his loss and he told the magazine, ‘I wish I could be like some of the other guys and say, “No, I don’t care about it.” But for me, a kid growing up on the Lower East Side watching from the first telecast of the Oscars, there’s a certain magic out there.’ Two Scorsese veterans expressed their opi
nions. Harvey Keitel reasoned that ‘Maybe he got what he deserves—exclusion from the mediocre.’ Taxi Driver’s Jodie Foster said, ‘When you look at the ten old ladies who put down Dances with Wolves instead of GoodFellas—I don’t know. The Oscars are like bingo. Who cares?’”

  Joe Pesci won the Best Supporting Actor Award, and graced the ceremony with a terse acceptance speech: “It’s my privilege. Thank you.” Not the shortest Oscar acceptance speech, but as of this writing it is in the top ten. Appearing as a presenter later in the show, he pronounced, “I still can’t talk.” In the backstage press scrum, Pesci said that nerves made him tongue-tied. “There were so many people to thank, I was afraid that if I started I couldn’t stop and I would get booed.”

  * * *

  Goodfellas would not see its first home video release, on VHS tape, until December of 1992, over two years after its theatrical release. So far four iterations of the movie have been released on DVD/Blu-ray. It has performed well on home video: according to the website The Numbers, as of November 2009, Goodfellas had sold 68,873 units. Dances with Wolves, as of January 2011, had sold 22,023 units. So Scorsese’s picture has that going for it. Throughout the 1990s, the movie was referenced so consistently and constantly, it seemed, by standup comics and in some sketch comedy that it felt like something that everyone had seen.

  Its influence on other films is difficult to quantify. Certainly Quentin Tarantino got a lot out of it. The opening scene of his feature debut, Reservoir Dogs, in which its criminals sit in a diner and talk shit about their tipping practices and their sexual fantasies of Madonna, is a resourceful spin on the banter in Goodfellas, for instance the trash talk about Sammy Davis, Jr., in one of the Copa scenes in Scorsese’s picture. Tarantino has also benefitted from the way Scorsese juxtaposed horrific violence with laugh-out-loud black humor, and has received disapprobation from cinema moralists about it.

  * * *

  In 1997 Premiere magazine, in its tenth anniversary issue, pronounced Goodfellas as one of “Ten Movies That Rocked the World” during those ten years. Martin Amis contributed an essay commemorating the movie, writing, “In its dealings with the Cosa Nostra, Scorsese’s camerawork displays all its inimitable edginess and urgency; but we shouldn’t overlook the director’s steely moral wit. His goons see mob culture as a vibrant alternative to the schmuckville of nine-to-five. Scorsese insists, however, that they are money’s slaves, and money’s fools. And he has them bang to rights.” (I suppose I ought to disclose that I was an editor at Premiere at the time, and that I commissioned this essay.)

  “It’s no secret, [show creator] David Chase has said many times there would be no Sopranos without Goodfellas,” Michael Imperioli told me when I interviewed him. “The Godfather had this towering mythical storybook aspect; Goodfellas is a very contemporary street movie. These are in a sense people you know, people who live next door to you, and I think that really makes it resonant in a specific way.” The hook of The Sopranos, which premiered on HBO in 1999, was that of a mobster seeing a psychiatrist; this is also the plot of the Harold Ramis movie, Analyze This, made in the same year and starring Robert De Niro. De Niro would play the same cartoonishly neurotic mobster in 2002’s sequel, Analyze That. In 2012 The Family, directed by Luc Besson, explicitly references Goodfellas in a meta-movie moment that almost defies description.

  * * *

  Bill Hader, the actor and director whose HBO series Barry, about a hit man pursuing a new life in acting, deftly balances horror and (often absurdist) humor, told me that the hierarchies within the ranks of wiseguys in Goodfellas have loose analogies in the world of comic performance. “The guys in that movie, the way they relate to each other, is the way comedians relate to each other. It’s a weird hierarchy, and there’s something about the trivial points in the arguments they get into. Then there’s that feeling of status and respect among comedians, that’s kind of like when Jimmy Conway comes into the room when Henry is a kid. When somebody comes in the room, there’s that. I was never a standup, but if I was somewhere and Steve Martin was there, it’s not so much feeling starstruck as it is massive respect, something to live up to. Which, in crime, is kind of messed up, but has a little more moral standing in comedy.”

  Hader still marvels at the audacity of some of the film’s scenes: “After Tommy shoots Spider to death, he actually jokes about it, saying, ‘What can I say, I’m a good shot.’ No matter how terribly Tommy acts he can’t help be himself, and sometimes watching the movie with an audience you hear that the line still gets a laugh. But the key to that is letting emotions and character lead the way, and not thinking in terms of genre. That’s the ultimate lesson for a filmmaker.”

  Eight

  THE EVENTUAL TRAGEDY OF HENRY HILL

  In his book Conversations with Scorsese Richard Schickel observes to the director, after Robert Warshow’s essay “The Gangster as Tragic Hero” comes up, “I’m not sure I completely buy into that in a movie like Goodfellas; there’s actually nothing very tragic about these guys.” Scorsese agrees: “No.”

  “What happens to Henry Hill is not tragic; he’s just not having fun anymore,” Schickel says. Scorsese, clearly amused, responds, “Right. Too bad for him!”

  In each of Scorsese’s examinations of money and power in America—Goodfellas, Casino, The Wolf of Wall Street, and The Irishman—the protagonists, each an antihero to at least some degree, make it out of their predicaments alive, albeit worse for the wear. Henry loses his identity, and also, like Vinnie in My Blue Heaven and Dominic (at least in his worst imaginings) in Cookie, his ability to eat well. “Ace” Rothstein in Casino survives a car bombing and loses most of his friends, not to mention the wife who was probably not a great match to begin with. Jordan Belfort in The Wolf of Wall Street takes a slide in his infinite–con man variant of Chutes and Ladders, and goes back into sales (and in real life wrangles a cameo in a Martin Scorsese movie, something the director himself seemed displeased with when Belfort’s appearance in Wolf came up in a press conference I moderated). Frank Sheeran in The Irishman ages into some vague realization that his career in murder has been for naught, but can’t find real remorse, which the movie does consider tragic.

  * * *

  Henry Hill is, after Mean Streets’ Charlie, the first male character in a Scorsese film meant as an audience surrogate all the way through. In most of his films Scorsese dispenses, and most of the time radically, with that kind of mediation. Charlie is the docent of his movie’s world, and it’s arguably true that the more he screws up the more alienated the viewer becomes. Griffin Dunne’s horndog everyman in After Hours is a guy you’re supposed to have an affinity with, but again, he grows more selfish and conniving even as he plays the flummoxed victim. When he cries, “All I wanted was to meet a nice girl and now I have to die for it,” the answer is, well, yes. Michael Powell told Scorsese that After Hours was a New York Kafka story, and one is reminded of Welles’ The Trial and Welles’ ruminations on Josef K.’s guilt: “The point isn’t whether or not he’s guilty or innocent. It’s an attitude toward guilt and innocence.” With Taxi Driver, Raging Bull, and The King of Comedy, you’re tossed in the maelstrom with these characters, the only life raft of sanity or any such thing to be the viewer’s psychological relief or control group is the viewer’s own processing of the material. It’s only in Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore that you have, in this case, a heroine who’s a genuine rooting interest and through whose eyes you can see the world coherently.

  With Henry Hill it’s not quite so comfortable, nor is it meant to be. But he’s the closest thing to an ingratiating protagonist as has come up in the Scorsese body of work up until this time. Yes, Willem Dafoe’s Christ in Last Temptation is spectacularly appealing, but he’s Christ. As much as that movie makes you feel the character’s pain, you’re still at a divine remove, so to speak. But with Henry, he’s your guy, for better or worse, the whole ride.

  And as such, he can’t be portra
yed entirely accurately and still serve that function. Henry Hill was an alcoholic for a good portion of his life. He was a cokehead. He physically abused his wife. In the book On the Run: Escaping a Mafia Childhood, Gregg Hill, Henry’s son, recalls a horrific night during the period Henry was first looking out of his witness protection hole: “Experience told me what was happening, what was going to happen next. How many times had he come home hammered and screamed at my mother, slapped her, taken a swing at her? I couldn’t count that high. Was it getting worse, happening more often? Or was I just getting bigger, older, sick of it all?”

  * * *

  “Henry was a schmuck,” former prosecutor Ed McDonald says—with not inconsiderable affection, mind you.

  After he stopped working for the government, McDonald went into private practice, and he now has an office at a corporate law firm—one of those places touting offers of “global solutions” and such—with an impressive view of one of Manhattan’s landmark parks. Sitting in his office listening to him spin his tales felt ever so slightly like being Thompson listening to Bernstein in Citizen Kane.

  “I always called him the Beetle Bailey of mobsters,” McDonald continued. “You know, he just couldn’t get anything right. But Paul Vario loved him. Jimmy Burke, all these wiseguys in New York, loved him. Henry was inept, he couldn’t do anything right. But they wanted him around, because he was funny, he was cracking jokes, he was doing silly things, and when he’d do something stupid he’d make fun of himself, and he was a really charming, self-deprecating guy...and he could be relied upon. For some things. And he was the same way with the guys in the witness protection program, the marshals, you know, they’d go, ‘C’mon, baaaad Henry, baaad Henry,’ they’d call him that. And he’d be, ‘Fuck you, fuck you.’ And they loved him, they’d get such a kick out of him. And the FBI agents who worked with him liked him. And he would still be inept. He’d be inept when he was supposed to be doing witness prep, but you know, the next day he’d be, ‘I’m so sorry, I’m a schmuck, I’m a schmuck.’ So, it was easy to have a good rapport with him.