Martin Scorsese's film GoodFellas (1990)

Martin Scorsese's film GoodFellas (1990) is an examination of the criminal lifestyle in America. Director Scorsese uses the techniques of film to good advantage in shaping the story to keep every element fresh. He builds an overall impression of the activities of organized crime, and shapes a different film experience in a genre that has been addressed many times with varying results by other filmmakers in the past. Drugs are part of the criminal lifestyle presented in the film both as a commodity to be distributed and sold and as a substance used by the criminals themselves. They may use drugs in order to flout convention, make themselves feel good, or deaden their fears about the world they have created. The film uses the story of 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, including the spread of drug use and the networks that supply the product.

The film is based on the book by Nicholas Pileggi, Wiseguy, and that book is told in the first person by the man who lived the actual events recounted. The man is Henry Hill, who for forty years was 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 eventually joined the ranks. Yet he defected to protect himself from prosecution and testified against his friends in the mob i

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ame underlying technique. The film has been structured with a pseudo-documentary element that carries the narrative, helps make sense of the mass of detail that is included, and allows the viewer to be in close touch with Henry Hill, the man who lived it and who now narrates it. This narrative voice accomplishes a number of different things at the same time, one of which is to show the scope of the problem of drug abuse and drug trafficking as Hill goes against the prevailing view of the mob because drug trafficking is relatively easy and highly lucrative. The narration is not intrusive and does not compete with the visual element in the film. Instead, the two elements comment on one another and complement one another as Scorsese shows how adept he can be with the camera and with editing. Hill comments on action sometimes directly and sometimes indirectly. His growing dependence on drugs is something he does not recognize as a reality in the time frame of the film, but he does recognize it as the older Hill looking back and recalling his life. One thing that may put off some reviewers of the film is its wry tone, a certain humor that comes through in the narration and that may seem at odds with the action on the screen, a

Category: Film - M