Goodfellas at 25: outsized fun

By Tom Shone

Up on stage at the Beacon Theatre in Tribeca last weekend, Ray Liotta basked in the love for Martin Scorsese’s “Goodfellas”, which had just screened as part of the film’s 25th-anniversary celebration. Afterwards, the author Nicholas Pileggi (on whose book the movie was based), Liotta, Robert De Niro and other cast members took to the stage to swap anecdotes, some well known, others not – such as the time Liotta got a call to meet Henry Hill, the mobster he was playing, at a bowling alley in Los Angeles. A somewhat scared Liotta came to the appointed place, only to have Hill walk up to him and say, “Thanks for not making me look like a scumbag.” Liotta couldn’t believe his ears. The film had shown Hill bludgeoning a neighbour with the butt of his gun, sinking into cocaine addiction and ratting on his friends. “Did you see the movie?” he asked incredulously.

“Goodfellas” has always bulged with extremes. As hedonistic a picture about a life of crime as has ever been committed to film, it is not about guilt or male angst or Catholicism – or any of the themes that cross-hatched Scorsese’s work in the Seventies. It doesn’t tell us that crime doesn’t pay, or that it is morally wrong. Instead, it tells us what gangster pictures had been trying to tell us since the days of James Cagney but didn’t quite have the guts to spell out. “Goodfellas” tells us that crime is fun – enormous, outsized, XXL-fur-coat, spending-spree-with-a-cherry-on-top-style fun. The fun doesn’t last forever – as addicts like to say, first it’s fun, then it’s fun with problems, then it’s just problems – but who said it would? That’s precisely what makes it fun.