#92 ‘Goodfellas’
Coke, Cadillacs, and the Cult of the Charismatic Sociopath
Goodfellas (1990) is Martin Scorsese’s coke-fueled mob opera: a dizzying, swaggering tour of organized crime so seductive in its style that you almost forget you’re watching a 145-minute meditation on greed, betrayal, and emotional stuntedness dressed in gold chains and marinara sauce. It’s masterful, yes. Iconic, absolutely. But let’s not pretend it isn’t also Exhibit A in the endless Hollywood fascination with men who are terrible, as long as they do it with a decent soundtrack and a well-cut suit.
Ray Liotta’s Henry Hill is our guide through this morally bankrupt wonderland—a wide-eyed, eager-to-please Irish-Italian hanger-on who starts out as a kid running errands for the local mob and ends up as a paranoid, coke-dusted shell of a man hiding in suburbia, whining about not being able to get a good tomato sauce in witness protection. Henry isn’t a genius or a bruiser or a leader. He’s just available. And somehow, that’s enough for the American Dream in a tracksuit.
Joe Pesci’s Tommy is pure id with a pistol: volatile, vicious, and funny until he’s not—then horrifying. The “funny how?” scene is a masterclass in male dominance games, a testosterone-soaked dance where laughter becomes a threat. Robert De Niro’s Jimmy, meanwhile, plays the long con: cool, calculating, and just moral enough to make you forget he’s a killer until he’s suddenly calling hits on everyone in his phonebook. These men are not deep. They are loud. And the film lets them drown out everything else—including, surprise surprise, the women.
Karen Hill (Lorraine Bracco) is the only woman with real screen time, and for a while, she’s thrilling. She’s sharp, skeptical, and totally seduced by the power. The scene where Henry gives her a gun to hide and she talks about how it turned her on? Incredible. It’s honest about how intoxicating proximity to power can be. But then she fades into the background—first a wife, then a liability, then a passenger. Her rage is real, but the narrative isn’t interested. She's another cautionary tale sacrificed to the altar of male spectacle.
Scorsese directs like a man mainlining film stock—tracking shots, freeze frames, needle drops, fourth-wall breaks. The editing is breathless, the narration relentless. The camera is always moving, because in this world, stillness is death. It’s exhilarating, exhausting, and executed with surgical precision.
And yet, for all its brilliance, Goodfellas is still part of the grand tradition of cinematic myth-making that romanticizes the rise while hand-waving the rot. It shows you the violence, yes. The paranoia. The eventual comeuppance. But it also makes being a gangster look like the most glamorous self-destruction imaginable—at least until the pasta gets bad.
4 out of 5 frozen bodies in meat trucks
(One for Scorsese’s relentless command. One for Pesci’s gleeful menace. One for Bracco’s early brilliance. One for turning moral decay into visual poetry. The missing star? Buried somewhere in the crawl space between admiration and indictment, alongside the women who were never offered a cut—only a cleanup.)
