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Goodfellas? Hardly, these blokes are some of the worst you’ll ever be fortunate enough to encounter. Nevertheless, that hasn’t stopped them from being etched in ink into chubby arms or their faces being enshrined as working heroes who escaped the clutches of ne’er-do-well existence through nothing but forthright determination, and they would’ve gotten away with it if it wasn’t for meddling critics.

The film is a masterpiece. It is an undeniable triumph that stands as a homage to the textured narrative of film itself. It contains an encapsulation of an America of sorts. Not the David Lynch variety, prying at the horror lingering beneath the picket fences, but an examination of the darkness that sits alongside the light on the very surface of the red, white and blue. It is a study of the organised crime that plagues old Uncle Sam and the everyday bastards who perpetrate it. 

These slick, suited clowns are often dubbed with the term antiheroes – or even heroes to the less scrupulous viewer – but they are absolutely, and unapologetically, villains. They beat their wives, shoot young kids for mildly bruising their egos, callously knock wigs off hardworking shopkeepers, dole out racism, torture and mistreat anyone who stands against them, and run a general unjust racket that reaps havoc and harm in the world of the masses. But boy do they make a mean pasta sauce.

Their lives are as disordered as the top shelf of a dwarf’s fridge, their anxiety is as unstable as a three-legged table in a china shop, and their fickle notion of family is an untold falsehood given that they can’t come close to sustaining their own. They are just about everything that is wrong with America—fast cash fuckups who crave nothing but coins and are on a one-way ticket to hell whether you believe in it – as Martin Scorsese does – or not. 

This is shown to the viewer in the very first scene: They open the trunk of a flashy automobile revealing a half-dead man whose face looks like a Picasso in turmoil. The scene is bathed in a deep red light. The car is stationary, so this isn’t the glowing crimson of brake lights. Nope, this is Scorsese dredging up the fiery depths of brimstone that they face. Thereafter, the seven deadly sins cited by Scorsese’s beloved Thomas Aquinas play out in a tale of bloody betrayal and ignorant folly.

Lust tears Henry Hill’s marriage apart, gluttony has him sniffing a mountain of coke, greed is the crux of their fur-coated downfall, sloth defines why they don’t want to engage in hard work, they are envious of those above them, exhibit nothing but pride for things they have barely worked for and regard these treasures as marks of their own triumphs, and when anyone goes against them they face wrath untold only to fall foul to it themselves. Scorsese proclaims that such a list leads to one place only.   

However, this biblical nod to hell is a subtle one. The religious side of the picture is oblique. In fact, there is a sense that the terrible men running amok have their own set of virtues—twisted notions of honour and truth that are ultimately torn apart and brought into the everyday when Henry Hill breaks the fourth wall and enters our lives in earnest. The only principle here is egotism. 

Scorsese makes that clear from the off. The young and impressionable Henry Hill always wanted to be a gangster; however, his opening gambit mentions nothing of collectivism, old values or socialistically supporting thy neighbour—his motives are all about parking fancy cars where others can’t, making noise, making money and making fun of everyone beneath him. These are not upstanding men of ambition.

Why then, do so many people think of them that way? Well, Scorsese himself presents them without judgement. Our entry point to the story is via a young and impressionable boy. That’s the crux of it, that is how it begins. A kid looks out from his humble family home and sees the lewd example of faux success laid out before him. From then on his journey into bastardom unspools quite naturalistically, twisted by the sense that we see our lives as a movie and his is a very cinematic one. 

Along the way he has little pause for repentance, things are far too relentless and unforgiving for that. In fact, from the very moment he steps into Paulie’s pizzeria, a life of violence, disregard and mutiny is preordained and inescapable. The notion here is that crime perpetuates more crime and that plays out all the way. Scorsese displays this, as he does with every movie he’s ever made: uncompromisingly but without ever being cynical. It’s not so much a case of ‘look at these villains’, it’s a more-so ‘look at these American lives’. 

Thus, without judgement, you are welcome to fall victim to the same romanticised and juvenile lure that the young Henry Hill was ensnared by. These villains break the humdrum of drab existence and that is idealistic enough for some to crown them heroes without much scrutiny of their actual exploits. In short, this is typical Scorsese, and this is why Goodfellas is his defining film. 

The maestro has recently waged a war against Marvel and perhaps part of the reason he loathes their movies so much is because the villainy and heroism is marked in Lycra from the outset. Scorsese prefers to muddy the two. The hero of the piece in Goodfellas from a virtuous point of view is probably Karen Hill when all actions are weighed up on the scales of judgement. And yet, (thanks to a wonderful performance by Lorraine Bracco) she is probably many people’s least favourite character. She is irritable because she imposes the nag of morality that all the men face but refuse to grapple with. 

This takes us back to the very first scene we see. As Henry Hill witnesses his two friends unthinkingly butchering a man in the trunk of a car, there is a lost boy look in his eyes that Scorsese closely pans towards. He is entrapped in a life beyond his control—and all he ever wanted to be was a gangster. His eyes are glazed over, a far cry from the vibrance we see as the shot transitions to him staring out agog at a pizzeria of opportunity in days of youth. His eyes are now gazed to offer a façade of distant duty. If he looked at this brutal slaying with clarity then he would be forced to address the morality of it.

His choices in that moment are two-fold, watch the moment with clarity and come to the only conclusion possible that what he is doing is wrong and that if he wants to be noble he has to change forever, or ignorantly try to escape the incident as something that has to be done. That he is merely privy to a duty carried out beyond his control sent down by the hierarchy to sustain the right way of doing things.

In this regard, duty becomes an unthinking virtue in Goodfellas, something that perpetuates order—a virtue that is opposed to self-judgement. It is simply something being done by someone because it belongs to something bigger. This allows Henry Hill and his cronies to dually be men of integrity while committing horrendous acts. He isn’t a cold-blooded killer like these psychos on the news, he is a gangster—even though the act itself is exactly the same he has the cushion of not having to face it.

Thus, he watches on and only addresses the heart of it in a trial when he can’t escape the self-interrogation and suddenly, he must change so he leaves the movie behind and severs himself from the lifestyle that unspooled around him like fiction. And yet still, very importantly, he can’t quite escape the lure of romantically going against the grain of the everyday world of beige civility. This is the same reason that even though we know they’re bastards at heart, there is still that frisson of fondness for these fuckups in search of a thrill. 

This same concept crops up in many Scorsese movies. Many people had problems with The Wolf of Wall Street because of the way it seemed to glamourise tax-evading cash grabs and sexist bullshittery. One shot, in particular, showed a beleaguered FBI agent trundling to his crumby office on a stinking train while Belford reels of spiel about how he’s rich so jail will be a cakewalk.

Steve Coogan was outraged by this, calling for Scorsese to offer up some condemnation at this moment. But isn’t that how it is? The unjust rich continue to get away with murder while the virtuous go unrewarded and the grind continues forevermore. Only one top banker went to jail for their part in the financial crisis (Kareem Serageldin), but countless agents, journalists, and other investigators pulled their hair out for what? Scorsese’s scene subtly illuminates that with more veracity than any pointless condemnation would. After all, we should know Belfort is a bastard without Scorsese having to say it directly.

This is how Scorsese tells his tales of American life. They are endemic tales that highlight how things come to pass from the inside: How a taxi driver in a crumbling city ends up a mohawked martyr, how a champion boxer ends up bruised and beaten in old age angst, how fame mad comedians lose touch with reality. It is up to you to register these fellows on your moral compass. They’re just films, after all, bloody gorgeous and utterly engaging films, if you fall into the trap of their fiction then maybe that is just how it goes. 

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