GOODFELLAS AND BAD GUYS: SCORSESE AND THE MOB

Across nearly 60 years of filmmaking, Martin Scorsese consistently, but not exclusively, has made exciting and enthralling films about very complicated and sometimes downright evil characters. Because of his unparalleled ability to create a sense of empathy between the audience and that evil, he’s long been considered a controversial filmmaker. However, ascribing the value systems of the characters in his movies to him as a filmmaker demonstrates a lack of critical thinking, as the foul deeds his characters commit rarely go unpunished. When they do, as in The Wolf of Wall Street, his message is also crystal clear. Most of his films have a “rise and fall” arc to them, so they play as modern biblical parables. Through these movies, he makes sweeping indictments of American society and its enablement of harmful pursuits as well as insecure masculinity and the damage it wreaks.

For the purposes of this article, I’ll only be focusing on his four movies about the Mafia, but to suggest that these are the only films that his heart and messaging are in is both reductive and false. There is as much meaning to wring from the bad guys of Taxi Driver, Raging Bull, The King of Comedy, The Aviator, The Departed, and The Wolf of Wall Street as anything below. There’s also as much craft, elegance, and power in something like Silence as anything else that he’s ever made. However, these four films span the 5 decades in which he’s made major films and function as landmarks of his evolving style as well as windows into his evolving self. They’re each full of his recurring themes and motifs, but they’re also full of him. Despite his characters being “the bad guys”, he relates to them. And, because he’s among the very best to ever do it, he gets us to do the same.

I view his four Mafia films (Mean Streets, GoodFellas, Casino, and The Irishman) as speaking to each other, as well as spiritual sequels to each other; he seems to use each film to respond to any ideas presented in the previous movie, as well as any criticisms that may have been leveled at them. What is fascinating about this quadrilogy is that despite all four of its main characters being deeply involved with the mafia, none of them can ever be fully “made”, whether because of their choices or ethnicities. In handing over their lives to a system that can never fully accept them, and often destroys them, Scorsese is laying bare his soul about his own profession and asking us to do the same. He asks us all to consider what our pursuits give us in the short term, as well as what the ultimate costs of those pursuits really are. If we look closely at these four films, we can see how he does this as well as reflect himself through his film’s characters, plot, and his directorial choices.

The Sinner (Mean Streets, 1973). After two other features, Mean Streets was Scorsese’s first film whose story he was able to help shape, and he wanted to make something reflective of his own experiences. Martin Scorsese grew up in Little Italy in the 1940’s and 1950’s in a devout Catholic family, observing the gangsters in his neighborhood while never becoming fully involved. In 1972, Francis Ford Coppola and The Godfather opened the door to finally portraying Italian American life in a mafia movie. The following year, Scorsese released Mean Streets with a similar goal as Coppola in terms of representation, but the final product could not have been more different. The main characters here are at the very bottom of the crime family food chain – in fact, none of them are members – and the action is limited to the locations of their grimy apartments, streets, and bars.

Harvey Keitel’s Charlie is favored by his uncle to potentially join his uncle’s Family, but his friendship with the rogue Johnny (played by Robert De Niro) and his romance with Johnny’s cousin threatens that status. In Charlie’s voiceover, he’s constantly reminding us of his Catholic faith, but that he can’t find true penance in the church; he needs to find it in the streets and believes that protecting Johnny will grant it to him. The film isn’t just representative of how Scorsese grew up, but of where he was in his career when he made it; he was 30, but his characters were in their young 20’s, and just at the outset of their criminal careers the same way he was at the outset of his. I’m sure he had older filmmakers and studio executives who, much like Charlie’s uncle, wanted to shepherd his career and keep him out of trouble, but at what point does he disagree like Charlie does? Similarly, Johnny may represent not some of Scorsese’s friends that could potentially derail his burgeoning career, but a darker and wilder side of Scorsese himself. Charlie’s conflicts with Johnny might be an externalization of what was happening within Scorsese as he felt he was on a path to fame.

Mean Streets is a perfect entry point into his career because Scorsese is not only showing us the story elements he frequently returns to, but the filming technique with which he brings them to life. He bathes the bar in which Charlie dances with strippers, drinks too much, and schemes with his pals in expressionistic red light to highlight its status as a place of sin. Men are ready to fight each other over slights because of their fragility, the main character has a hothead friend constantly getting them into trouble, and our “hero” is brought down by the lifestyle that they have chosen.

The Wise Guy (GoodFellas, 1990). After not returning to gangster films for 17 years, Scorsese made one of the best of all time with GoodFellas in 1990. There are many similarities between how he tells the true story of Henry Hill and the fictional story of Charlie in Mean Streets. Scorsese was at a similar age to Henry at the conclusion of the film and related deeply to Henry’s experience growing up and watching the local gangsters. He doubles down on the anthropology of Mean Streets here; every house, suit, car, bar, interaction, meal, and decoration feel deeply authentic. He also doubles down on the stylistic flourishes that he introduced in Mean Streets: expressionistic red lighting, freeze frames, speeding up/slowing down the film, whip-pans, rapid editing, long takes, sourced soundtrack, and the list keeps going. In just shy of 2.5 hours, he communicates nearly 30 years of the life of a mafia associate, filled with dizzying highs and nearly bottomless lows. The film is as fast paced as any that you’ll see, and yet each scene is jam-packed with style, memorable moments, and perfectly realized tone, which is just a miracle to behold; there’s enough movie in here for a four-hour epic. Every actor also breathes fantastic life into their characters, and when combined with the authenticity of the rest of the production, effectively convinces the audience that they are watching real people, not just characters.

Henry’s story is almost an “alternate history” of Scorsese’s own life, had he worked like Henry to ingratiate himself into the mob from an early age. Between the release of Mean Streets and GoodFellas, Scorsese also had well-documented struggles with drug addiction that nearly killed his career, much the same way that drugs brought Henry Hill down. Using its voiceover, GoodFellas has a reflection that Mean Streets lacks; Henry Hill, after having been arrested and forced to rat out all his friends, reflects on the good times and the bad at about the same age as Scorsese was when he made the movie, which isn’t coincidence. Mean Streets is about looking forward to a potential life in the underworld, and GoodFellas is about looking back and reliving its highs and lows after that lifestyle has been cut short.

Similar also to Mean Streets is the protagonist’s hot-headed friend always getting them into trouble. In this case, it’s Joe Pesci’s near-psychopathic Tommy who functions not just as a wildly insecure evocation of machismo gone awry. Henry’s happy life begins to take turns for the worse as Tommy grows increasingly rogue, and as his other friend Jimmy (Robert DeNiro) grows increasingly willing to kill anyone in his orbit who poses him threat or inconvenience. Once Henry’s own vices get the better of him and he winds up facing a hefty drug trafficking charge, Jimmy grows to represent the ghostly specter of a mafia that could come to kill Henry. I think that Scorsese relates to Henry’s predicament. The movie he made before GoodFellas, The Last Temptation of Christ, created such an extraordinary controversy that it could have ended his career. Jimmy’s presence in GoodFellas’ final act may represent a studio system that, though friendly in the past, will not hesitate to terminate your career if you’re not willing to play ball. Just as he is saying “careful what you wish for” in relation to the mafia lifestyle, he is saying it about Hollywood.

The Businessman (Casino, 1995). I think Casino is the weakest of these four films, but it is damn strong entertainment and to suggest that it’s void of ideas or just a reiteration of GoodFellas is incorrect. It’s also a stylistic change for Scorsese – the rapid-fire editing, courtesy of Thelma Schoonmaker, remains but it is used to cover a greater scope than GoodFellas. Working with a new cinematographer, Robert Richardson, gave Scorsese the chance to create a different style as well. Casino is full of blown-out overhead lighting that combines with an excess of beautiful things to create an air of immateriality while also heightening the intensity of the film’s violence. Though the scenes between De Niro’s Ace Rothstein and Pesci’s Nicky Santoro occasionally share a similar dynamic as their characters in GoodFellas, there are a few key differences between their characters in each film. Whereas Jimmy Conway wanted to steal everything he possibly could in the world and killed anyone who hindered that vision, Ace Rothstein hopes to cultivate a perfect personal and professional life and dreams of being a legitimate businessman. While Nicky and Tommy were both likely to violently fly off the handle, Nicky lacks Tommy’s insecurity, and has the same goal as Jimmy Conway.

The biggest departures that Casino takes from its two predecessors on this list aren’t in its style or anything related to De Niro or Pesci, but in the way it uses its female lead and its treatment of the mafia. Sharon Stone’s performance in this film isn’t just among the best for a woman in a Scorsese movie, but among the best in any Scorsese movie. She represents the allure, the inherent danger, and disastrous consequences of pursuing this kind of life. Though De Niro ends up losing his beloved casino and narrowly escapes death once everything breaks bad, it’s her arc that feels the most representative of Scorsese’s evergreen idea. She enjoys the highest of highs and suffers the lowest of lows in more extreme measures than Ace, but this as much collateral damage of Ace’s pursuits as anything of her own making. The mafia also doesn’t have much arc to it, and hardly any screentime. By virtue of being based in Chicago with the film’s action in Vegas, we rarely gain any insight to the personalities of the old men pulling all the strings. They never understood or appreciated Ace’s dedication to the perfection of his craft beyond what financial benefit they could reap from people gambling at his casino. Scorsese didn’t have to look too deeply into this dynamic to relate to it, where he and other artists are like Ace, and the movie studios are like the mob bosses. Film critic Adam Nayman sees a similar metaphor being drawn during the film’s epilogue between a changing Vegas and a changing Hollywood, and I believe both to be true. The mob thought they had it made by hiring an “artist” they could protect, but even they couldn’t see how the entire world of gambling was about to be completely overhauled by soulless corporations, as film studios can rarely see the same thing in their industry.

The House Painter (The Irishman, 2019). As soon as it debuted, The Irishman was hailed as one of Scorsese’s great masterworks, with the metatext of the film deemed as crucial as anything in the film itself. In the first layer, the film’s structure, length, and tone give Scorsese the chance to reflect on his own career and mortality. In the second layer, the men who play the film’s three principal characters (Robert De Niro, Al Pacino, and Joe Pesci) get to do the same. A layer deeper, all four men are using this grace note to look back on their involvement with crime films specifically, aware that may be what their careers are most associated with. A layer deeper, they ponder if that’s a good thing or a bad thing. A layer deeper, this movie seeks to close the book on mafia films entirely.

If, since The Godfather, making a crime film was the way to craft the “great American novel” by using stories about the mafia to evoke ideas about American decline, The Irishman is among the very best to do this, and one of the most pointed. One of the film’s sections recounts the mob’s involvement in the election and clandestine activities of JFK’s administration, explicitly interweaving American history with that of organized crime. Scorsese also paints the world of the mafia as one of dark beauty, but cold. Frank’s resigned and unquestioning nature throughout the film’s runtime evokes that of a “true patriot” who commits murder for his master, no matter how empty the promise of his master’s lifestyle ends up being. Not only could this emptiness reflect that of the “American Dream”, but it was a new place for Scorsese to go after the homegrown charm of the mafia in Mean Streets, the cheap yet undeniable allure that accompanies GoodFellas, or the wild excesses of the life in Casino. Frank’s personal life, even long into his time involved with the Bufalino family, remains so humble as to nearly become minute. He’s not in it for the flashy clothes or bands of cash, he simply craves a structure and to follow orders from people he can relate to – something he was unable to find as “one of a thousand working stiffs”.

I believe that Scorsese was more attracted to the story of a man willing to submit himself to a murderous system than the story of a debatably regretful old man waiting to die alone. The key moment in the film comes when Joe Pesci’s Russell Bufalino quietly and obliquely orders Frank to kill Jimmy Hoffa. In other words, when his best friend (and master) tells him to kill not only his other best friend, but one of the only other men in his life he was able to have any meaningful relationship with. This moment speaks to any number of compromises that he was forced to make along the way that he’ll never forget nor forgive himself for. He also seems to be wrestling with the long history of gangster movies and his own part in it, just as Frank is caught quietly influencing significant moments in history.

That we can never fully predict the long-term ramifications of our actions is one of the film’s key messages, and the story is structured generates that reflection by working non-linearly. The participation of the legendary trio of Robert De Niro, Al Pacino, and Joe Pesci – icons of the crime genre for 50 years – in this project is no accident; not only are they reuniting for “one last ride” in their old genre, but they get to tap into this film’s interrogation of that genre’s meaning. Scorsese imprints himself onto this concept by flexing nearly 50 years of acquired directorial skills all over this film, whether it be through virtuosic long takes, meticulously composed shots, clever camera tricks, or newly incorporated digital technology. He brings out every trick in the bag to claim Frank’s story as his own, looking back far more broadly and deeply than he did in GoodFellas at the history that he helped create. Whether or not he’s proud of all his choices are as irrelevant to him as they are to Frank at the movie’s conclusion. Just as Frank’s telling of the story is his confession, possibly because he’s seeking the same penance that Charlie was, Scorsese treats this film as his own confession, and it’s a capper to a quadrilogy of greatness, and one of the key highlights in a career vital to film history.