I have distinct sensory memories of the altered state I entered the first time I saw GoodFellas, just about 25 years ago.
After the movie, my body was buzzing on the sidewalk outside the theater. I was jittery. I felt a little drunk. Something about the movie's rhythms, the interaction among the push-pull of the camera, the voice-over narration, the montage of pop music and the cackling violence had shaken me up and flipped me upside down. I couldn't wait to write about it.
That would have been late September 1990. In the quarter-century since, the movie has become a reliable fount of off-color quotes shared between friends and a rallying cry for those of us naive enough to expect sound judgment or taste from the Oscars. (Note to Dances With Wolves: You committed a robbery on par with the Lufthansa heist.)
GoodFellas is a compulsively rewatchable movie, perhaps because we're still trying to chase the buzz of that first time.
Anniversaries like this provide yet another excuse for chasing. A new 25th-anniversary Blu-ray set came out this week. There's only one new documentary feature, plus one of those fancy hardcover booklets. But that's OK. It's a reason to think about GoodFellas again.
Last month the cast and crew, including director Martin Scorsese, reunited for a screening to close out the Tribeca Film Festival at the Beacon Theatre. I didn't get a ticket, but I considered sneaking in through the kitchen and tipping the staff in twenties.
Actually, the best feature of the new Blu-ray is a brief essay by Scorsese (or, in the parlance of such knickknacks, "A Letter From Director Martin Scorsese"). "It had to feel like it was going to spin out of control at any moment, just like the lives led by Henry Hill and his friends," Scorsese writes. "They broke all the rules, so the movie needed to attempt to do the same - multiple narrators, freeze-frames, nonstop popular music on the soundtrack powering and pushing the action forward in synch with the drugs, the sex, the adrenaline and euphoria of so much money, so much 'plunder' as the ancients called it, so much unchecked power."
Powering. Pushing. Adrenaline. Euphoria. In a word: energy. GoodFellas is a prime example of why the question "What's it about?" says absolutely nothing about the magic of film. It's not a what medium; it's a how medium. How did they do that? How could what I'm seeing on that screen sweep me off my feet like that? The plot of GoodFellas concerns midlevel gangsters high on the life, but the movie is all about how that high is conveyed.
There's no better example than the frenzied 20-plus-minute helicopter sequence near the end of the film. Ray Liotta's strung-out Henry Hill makes his way through an arduous day of gun running, coke snorting, pasta-sauce making and other various errands, all the while looking over his shoulder at a helicopter that seems to be following him. As the action grows more frantic, and Henry's paranoia mounts, the snippets of songs on the soundtrack surge and recede and Thelma Schoonmaker's editing chops away at our nerves. It may be the finest examples of form matching content I've ever seen.
I thought of GoodFellas early last year, during the tepid moral furor surrounding Scorsese's The Wolf of Wall Street. It, too, is a bravura piece of filmmaking about thoroughly amoral people. At times it even matches GoodFellas' intoxicating power. Scorsese knows bad behavior can feel like an overdose of fun, and the movies provide the safe distance to experience the rush vicariously. He captures this push-pull better than anyone ever has, and he never captured it better than in GoodFellas.
