GoodFellas

If the Godfather films used organized crime as a personification of the corruption of the American society and dream, Martin Scorsese's GoodFellas never rises out of the surface level, not because it is shallow but because it gets itself in too deep. Who can stop to think of the poetry of illegality and how it represents the truth ethos of American law and organization when you're too busy looking over your shoulder for the guy who's gonna whack you? Michael Corleone would sympathize, but only in his twilight: "Just when I think I'm out, they pull me right back in," he once said. The gangsters of GoodFellas do not even have the luxury of dreaming of escape.

Of course, to call the crime that occurs in GoodFellas "organized" would be generous. It charts the street level thugs, not the consiglieres and dons who buy casinos and bribe senators; the few visible higher-ups who manage to stand out above the rest never involve themselves in anything more substantive than the local rackets. What's interesting of Scorsese's eye-level document of gangster life is how the lower-level soldiers and minor bosses, when separated from those no higher than a caporegime, think of themselves as kings, even when they report to practically everyone. Hell, most of them aren't even made men.

A young Henry Hill (Ray Liotta as an adult) only noticed the swagger, though. "All my life I wanted to be a gangster," he tells us over a scene of horrific brutality that precedes a flashback, and the irony of the placement of that declaration dissipates in the face of Henry's childhood memories. A half-Irish, half-Sicilian brat with no future, Henry looks out across the street to members of the Lucchese Family and sees only idols. All they do is run stolen goods, but they have tons of cash and total respect, something that the kid values more than anything an education might get him. So, he starts to work for the wiseguys, which his parents enjoy until the father realizes what he really does.

Young Henry goes from an unremarkable, pre-gray-flannel-suit American teen to one of those low-ranking kings. He is made to park the wiseguys' Cadillacs and hock crates of beer and stolen cartons of cigarettes, yet the neighborhood kids carry his mother's groceries, and thugs intimidate the postman who delivers Henry's mail in order to stop him handing letters from school officials and truant officers to Henry's father. Of course, Henry's dad seems to react so angrily to his son skipping school not because he wants the boy to get a proper education but because he does not like the idea of his son gaining more clout than him.

GoodFellas opens with the old "Based on a true story" chestnut that usually announces a series of half-truths and whole lies. That's true of this film, too, but among the many delights of GoodFellas is the balance between some of Scorsese's most straight-faced and "realistic" direction and his usual fanciful interpretation. The script itself mainly served as a transcription of improvisations the actors performed in rehearsal, so much of the dialogue of this true story comes from the actors. That first scene, taken from the sequence that would bridge the first and second halves later in the film, casts the three main wiseguys -- Henry, Jimmy (Robert De Niro) and Tommy (Joe Pesci) -- in the Expressionistic red of the brake lights interspersed with blinding white bursts as Tommy shoots the half-dead man in Henry's trunk, reveals how Scorsese's aesthetic certainly doesn't stick to documentary-like verité either.

But the use of both subjective direction and improvised acting makes GoodFellas feel so real. The camera draws us into this world, while the increasingly panicked and paranoid mannerisms of the actors, even if they're speaking their own lines and not those of the real-life mafiosos and wives they play, give the audience a fly-on-the-wall perspective that more coldly scripted lines would have precluded. As a young adult, Henry walks through a night club, and the camera takes his POV as it glides through the place as wiseguys, these old and powerful men, turn and address Henry (and the camera, and therefore us) and greet him as an equal. The effect nearly drowns out Henry's narration, speaking volumes of the allure of what Scorsese always paints in a negative light even as he allows us to empathize. Violence permeates GoodFellas, even more so than Scorsese's preceding films, and the great triumph of the director's work here is the manner with which he can play it so broadly that it's often comedic even as the sadistic, lawless brutality constantly undercuts Henry's nostalgic view of his gangster life.

Occasionally, GoodFellas practically intoxicates the viewer with its hints of power. When Henry takes his future wife Karen (Lorraine Bracco, the film's sole weak link) on their first true date, Scorsese employs a tracking shot that manages even to shame the previous one. After all, the first tracking shot showed us why Henry loved Family life, but he'd also already become used to it; the second tacitly assumes Karen's perspective as she watches this punky, self-absorbed 21-year-old transform into a deity. He practically changes the properties of the microcosm of the club: he parts the entry line to get in through the side door, walks calmly and amicably through the kitchen where patrons cannot enter, a chair "materializes" in the packed restaurant for Henry and his date, and much older people buy Henry free wine out of respect. Scorsese has to end the shot with a pan to a shitty, hackneyed comic just to remind us that this isn't someone's wonderful dream.

Karen's embrace of Henry, aroused as she is by his violent reprisal for a groping neighbor and his flashy wealth and power, shows how even the routinely abused women in this underworld cannot consider another life once they've had a taste. Sure, you have to pay your respects and, most importantly, "keep your mouth shut," but a wiseguy only has to obey the wiseguys' rules, not society's. As such, the insanity of gangster life often plays as comedy so grandiose it might have fit in the silent age were it not so rooted in dialogue. Tommy, attempting to woo a Jewish woman, displays the typical solipsism of the gangsters when he unironically chuckles, "I can't believe this. A Jew broad prejudiced against Italians!" Scorsese then juxtaposes, despite their lengthy time apart, scenes of Karen's Jewish mother and Tommy's Sicilian mom to demonstrate how the two are practically carbon copies for all the ethnic hand-wringing of both the Jews and Italians who constantly insult each other. Tommy in general walks the line between lunacy and dark comedy, his emotional rollercoaster so wild it sweeps up all those in his company: in perhaps the film's most quoted scene, Tommy has a dinner party in stitches before suddenly turning into a cold and intimidating killer when Henry remarks how funny the hothead is. "Funny like I'm a clown? I amuse you?" he hisses, until he finally reveals that he's kidding and people laugh even harder. That's Tommy for you: he can cow everyone in fear or win their love, often with only the briefest separation between the two.

The most absurd comedy, though, reveals just how powerful even these low-level guys are. "Nobody goes to jail unless they want to," Henry tells Karen, and when he is later pinched, he has his driver take him to jail as if going for a meeting. He might as well be, as he and the other incarcerated gangsters live as though nothing changed; they even get access to a kitchen to cook hearty Italian meals. There's no place that the wiseguys cannot make more comfortable. As the film continues, however, the humor and irony of this infiltration reveals its double edge: it also means that there's no place to hide.

Henry is, after all, placed in the center of two men who will lead him to the same destruction, albeit in diametrically opposed paths. Tommy, the white-hot nova packed into Pesci's small frame, is the embodiment of the childish freedom allotted to these gangsters: free to berate, beat, even kill practically anyone who sparks his short temper, Tommy is the unglamorous portrait of what happens when a person is not held accountable (and, when he eventually is, of the stark horror of mob "justice"). Jimmy, on the other hand, is more measured and calculating. Along with caporegime Paulie (Paul Sorveno), Jimmy is one of the few truly organized members of the demonstrated organized crimes. Though violent and ruthless, he carries himself with a more professional and typically calm attitude. He orchestrates the Lufthansa heist, at the time the largest cash robbery ever committed on American soil. In the aftermath, however, Jimmy slowly devolves. As the other criminals immediately advertise their guilt by spending their cuts on expensive, noticeable purchases like cars and mink coats, Jimmy takes drastic measures to protect himself, gradually eliminating almost everyone connected to the heist. In the film's best sequence, perfectly set to the ending strains of Derek & the Dominoes' "Layla," Scorsese's camera glides over images of bodies stowed in cars, dumpsters and even a meat wagon to show where all roads lead in the goodfellas' world.

Jimmy's own descent into paranoia prefigures the intensified final act, in which Henry, made rich but also addicted by selling coke, falls apart in an amphetamine haze. Living in a house that makes Dirk Diggler's pad look tasteful by comparison, Henry practically gives himself to the cops, who track him by helicopter in a funny sequence where Henry constantly makes his companions look for the helicopter to prove he's not crazy. Both he and Karen lose their minds as police raid the house and arrest Henry, as he fears Paulie's wrath while Karen comes to dread Jimmy, who himself frets that Henry will rat on him. Their entire world is based on keeping quiet, but they all live such ostentatious lives that they don't need to speak to give themselves away.

At last, the house of cards finally comes tumbling down. "Being together all the time made everything seem so normal," Karen tells us much earlier in the film; the close-knit nature of family and Family life only further enhances their feelings of superiority and separation from the rest of society. But society eventually breaks up this loose community, and we see how shaky the ties that bind really are, jiggled loose as they are in the frenzy of cocaine-induced hysteria. By this point we're entirely inside Henry's mind, which is probably why Scorsese then chooses to harshly expel us from it. Perhaps because memory of Taxi Driver's controversy (or the more recent hullabaloo over The Last Temptation of Christ) hung over his head, the director does not finish the film in harmonic subjectivity. Instead, Henry stops in the middle of testifying before entering the Witness Relocation Program to rail directly at the audience, who largely complained about this ending. It's understandable, as it shows a man, even in defeat, so arrogant that he turns on the people he invited to listen to his tale. By breaking the engagement of his own story, Henry uses his last bit of screentime to impart one last reminder that he, and those like him, is nothing more than a cocky jerk, and no amount of short-lived power can disguise what a pathetic and aggravating man he is.

Raging Bull

Raging Bull is one of the great character studies of the cinema. I have seen it derided as an inaccurate depiction of boxing technique by those who emphatically miss the point, but otherwise Scorsese's biopic has been rightly accepted as a modern classic, and perhaps the last creative gasp of New Hollywood as Heaven's Gate et al. dragged it down into the abyss. Every choice, from the decision to shoot in black and white to Robert De Niro's refusal to fake the vast body changes middleweight boxer Jake LaMotta underwent during his life, is the right one, one that finds verisimilitude in pure cinematic construction as only Scorsese can manage.

Scorsese happened upon the idea to shoot in black and white when he reviewed some initial test footage of De Niro in the ring with his friend and mentor, the legendary Michael Powell, and found that it didn't look right. Powell noted that, not only were the bright red boxing gloves De Niro wore distracting, they were not period-accurate. So, Scorsese decided to shoot in monochrome, allowing him to not only bypass the issue of the gloves but to avoid the then-disastrous quality of color film stock. The director, who used the film to overcome his crippling drug addiction -- made worse after the reception of New York, New York -- believed this film would be his last, and he wanted to make sure it would last if he didn't pull himself out of his tailspin to keep an eye on it.

The color shift wasn't the only influence Powell had on the production, however. The scenes inside the ring openly reference Powell's masterpiece The Red Shoes. Rather than film the fights from the perspective of the audience, Scorsese stays almost exclusively in the ring. His idea of Madison Square Garden is a vast, roaring blackness surrounding the stage with only those audience members close enough to bask in the radiance of the ring visible. LaMotta, like Vicky, lives for the stage, and what we see on-screen is Jake's perception of his fights; for him, only the opponent matters.

It's remarkable how much Scorsese makes his warped version of Madison Square Garden like his demented view of '70s New York in Taxi Driver: its infinite blackness is disturbing, made further obscure by the rising smoke of cigarettes (which recalls the sewer mists swirling about Travis Bickle's cab) and the blinding pops of flashbulbs. Scorsese further paid homage to The Red Shoes by choreographing the fights as ballet movements, though it's hard to tell just by looking at it (the opening credits, featuring De Niro shadowboxing to loosen up, have a dance-like quality though). “The only logical fight I ever saw was a Buster Keaton film," Scorsese later said. "He’s in the ring with this big guy. The guy comes out swinging. Keaton goes to the corner and gets a chair and hits the guy with it." That's more or less the finesse he gives to LaMotta, who earned his reputation as a fighter who never let an opponent out of arm's reach. De Niro, who trained with the real-life LaMotta, is terrifying in the ring: he bursts out of his chair at the sound of the bell and pummels his opponents -- "victims" seems a more apt term -- until they collapse or somehow retain consciousness long enough to vacantly listen to the result announcements.

Outside the ring, LaMotta is scarcely better. He's vindictive and insecure about his weight, at first because he's too small to fight in the heavyweight division to prove that he's the best and later when he begins to put on flab. By the time we meet him in 1941, his first wife has cracked from the pressure of living with him, throwing tantrums by the minute because she refuses to be beaten or insulted one more time. Jake, of course, accepts no blame, and he quickly moves on to his next conquest, 15-year-old Vickie (Cathy Moriarty in a sadly overshadowed performance), a young but mature lady who catches Jake's eye -- along with everyone else's -- at the local pool. We then see the cycle repeat, despite having only seen the final moments of the last one, as his mixture of boxer swagger and shy dope charms Vickie into marrying him, at which point their relationship turns cold as he saves all his energy for the fights, which in turn makes a repressed monster out of him.

He beats Vickie for even glancing at a man the wrong way. When she makes a passing comment on the attractiveness of a boxer Jake's set to fight, he can't stop thinking about it and pulverizes the kid when they eventually fight. "He ain't pretty no more," one of Jake's Mafia connections drawls at the end of the fight. He makes his brother, Joey (Joe Pesci, who's surprisingly heartbreaking here) punch him in the face earlier in the film to prove his toughness, but soon we see that it's his way of both addressing his own hangups and to accept punishment for what he knows is wrong but does anyway. Eventually, Jake's jealousy so overwhelms him that he believes Joey is sleeping with Vickie and viciously beats his own brother, shattering the only stable relationship in his life.

At some point it must become redundant to discuss the pristine excellence of Scorsese's direction, the way that every tracking shot is at once eminently noticeable but never distracting or a celebration of itself, yet if I accepted his direction as read I would also have to sweep aside the accomplishment of editor Thelma Schoonmaker. It's strange to think that Scorsese's vision and skill could find such a perfect foil, but Schoonmaker is every bit as integral to the power of this work -- and so many others -- as the director. She gives enough time to each shot in the ring to give us a sense of space, but her cutting is as quick and brutal as LaMotta's fighting style. She travels through LaMotta's life in a montage blending Super8 color "home movies" with black and white still frames of Jake's fights, those misleading images of the foggy warmth of polychromatic 8mm of LaMotta's growing family juxtaposed with clear, definitive looks of bruised and bloodied opponents falling to the unstoppable Bronx Bull.

The most shocking cut of all jumps from LaMotta's final fight with rival Sugar Ray Robinson, which ends in LaMotta's first unmistakable loss and a lingering final shot on his blood dripping from the ropes to a photo shoot and interview a few years later as Jake announces his retirement. Suddenly, Jake is revealed as a bloated whale, and the fact that the film opens with this iteration of Jake in no way lessens the shock of the sudden leap forward. Of the many remarkable aspects of De Niro's all-encompassing approach, his weight gain is perhaps the most overrated. His refusal to wear a fat suit and to gain the 60lbs himself is admirable -- and it probably guaranteed him the Oscar -- but it's the manner with which he captures the animal that is LaMotta, and how he somehow makes a man -- however awful -- out of him, that gives the performance lasting resonance. I do get a kick out of an assessment of LaMotta's ballooning, however, from British critic Peter Ackroyd: “The man without a soul has nowhere to go but outward.” Even as a tub of lard who runs a crap nightclub where he peddles the kind of stand-up we saw him chuckle at 15 years ago, Jake still thinks he's the champ, and there's something tragicomic about the way he discusses his retirement as if he's leaving the game on top.

Only twice in the film does Jake cry, and it's important to note the difference between the two. He does so the first time after he throws a fight for the Mafia, an almost humorous affair as LaMotta nearly knocks the guy out with one punch then has to dance around for four rounds as everyone in the stadium jeers. That comic moment disappears when Scorsese cuts to Jake in the locker room sobbing uncontrollably for what he's done, to the point that his trainer can barely fight back tears. The second comes years later, after he drove his brother away, lost his wife and kids and got busted for allowing underage girls into his club. As he sits in solitary confinement, he's given just enough time to mull over what he's done with his life and beats his hands and head against the wall, screaming in agony and regret. In the first instance he sobbed because he'd allowed someone to interfere with his boxing life for the first time; in the second, he realized how little it mattered.

I've heard Scorsese labeled as a "cold" director before by random forum users and even the odd critic, but if Scorsese is cold, who could possibly be "warm"? He does not hate LaMotta; indeed, he may be the only director who could have plausibly given the character redemption, as he does with that prison scene and the final moments of the film, set after an uneasy reunion between brothers. As he stands before a mirror, practicing the monologue he's about to foist onto a bored audience and psyching himself up -- I'd forgotten how much Paul Thomas Anderson took from this to end his own Boogie Nights -- we finally see a bit of humility in him, though LaMotta's still got some energy to him. The possibility for quiet redemption presents itself, underlined by a textual coda reading the Biblical quote, "Once I was blind, but now I see."

1989 Rewind: Lethal Weapon 2

I planned to start my 1989 retrospective with something perhaps a bit more artistic, but screw it, I was on a roll. Lethal Weapon was the kind of hit that would undoubtedly get a sequel, which must have sent chills running down the spines of geeks back in the late '80s. After all, those were the halcyon days of blowing crap up, but it all fell apart in the sequels. Rambo, Predator, Temple of Doom, they were all major letdowns (Aliens is exempt, as nearly a decade passed between sequels and the original was a horror film, not an action extravaganza).

It is therefore a total shock that Lethal Weapon 2, the follow-up to a film with some of least attention to the plot of any action film in the '80s -- and Lord is that saying something -- is every bit as good as the original. This is all the more impressive when you consider that this film actually has themes it wants to address, which easily could have spelled doom for a franchise built upon the line "I'm too old for this shit."

The first thing that caught my eye when I watched this film for the first time was its acknowledgment of past events. I would expect Murtaugh's house to be completely rebuilt following the events of the previous film, and indeed for any concrete details of that film to be forgotten period. But, sure enough, Murtaugh must cope with the arduous repair process as well as the loss of police car.

Initially, plot doesn't even enter in the frame. Donner and writer Jeffrey Boam, working from Shane Black's story, know that people tuned in to see Gibson and Glover do their thing, and the first 10-15 minutes involve them chasing low-ranking bad guys and trading barbs. There's a particularly funny bit involving Roger's daughter starring in a condom commercial, which the entire department watches thanks to Riggs' big mouth.

Eventually, though, we meet our baddies. As with the last batch, they're drug runners, but with a new twist: they're also South African diplomats and thus immune to any investigations. To be honest, the film's chief flaw is its loose grasp on diplomatic immunity, as these guys seem to think that they are immune no matter what they do. Their South African background opens up a racial subplot on account of the tension over apartheid, but thankfully it never gets in the way. Mainly, it serves to set up one-liners for Roger.

Aiding Martin and Roger's quest to break these villains is Leo Getz, an accountant and money launderer for the diplomats. Joe Pesci, normally the intimidating, thuggish wee-man, instead plays Leo as a total incompetent, a babbling fool with a gift for numbers but not human interaction. He so thoroughly annoys his protectors you think they might just turn him over to the South Africans to stop the noise. Pesci nearly steals the show as the manic Getz, with his shrill rants on minutiae and his constant use of the word "OK."

Having a plot could have dangerously distracted us from all the fun that made the original so great, but Donner makes good use of his bigger budget with some jaw-dropping stunts, including a brief but thrilling car chase and two all-out assaults on the South Africans. There are Bond-esque one-liners thrown in for good measure, but the characters know how ridiculous those things are.

Lethal Weapon 2 does not benefit from its extended cut as its predecessor does, but I can't find an area where it hurts it, either. Everything about it is bigger and badder, but it also has a narrative as compelling as its characters this time around. Some of the lines addressing apartheid and the juxtaposition between evil South Africans and tolerant American cops -- in the LAPD, no less -- are too simplistic, but it's all worth it for a line as deliriously cheesy as "They've been de-kaffirnated." It may not be high art, but Lethal Weapon 2 is one of the most worthy sequels ever made, and something you should always keep handy for a rainy day.