Martin Scorsese's film GoodFellas is an examination of the criminal lifestyle in America, and director Scorsese uses the techniques of film to good advantage in shaping the story to keep every element fresh, to build an overall impression of the activities of organized crime, and to shape a different film experience in a genre that has been addressed many times with varying results by other filmmakers in the past. Critic John Simon states of the film,
GoodFellas, with a script by [Nicholas] Pileggi and Scorsese, is a testimonial to the banality of evil as compelling as Eichmann's story and far closer to home (Simon 63).
The film uses the story of this one particular criminal to comment on the whole criminal enterprise and in a larger sense to comment on aspects of American society over the past three or four decades.
The film is based on the book by Pileggi, Wiseguy, and that book is told in the first person by the man who lived the actual events recounted, Henry Hill, for forty years a gangster associated with a New York crime family. Hill started as a young boy who admired the gangsters in his neighborhood in New York in the 1950s and aspired to be one, and in the end he defected to protect himself from prosecution and testified against his friends in the mob in the 1980s. He now lives under the witness protection program with an assumed identity, and he told his story to Pileggi, who wrote a detailed account of Hill's years with organized crime, an account that also revealed much about the workings of organized crime, the members of the gangs, the people who tolerate and even assist them, and both the perceived advantages and limitations of being a member of organized crime. In the end, what unraveled Hill's life in the organization was drugs, in terms both of his own drug use and his involvement in drug trafficking outside the normal channels of the crime family. Always, Hill emphasizes that even in crime, there ...