It's a deeply felt movie. After years and years of kind of circling around these singular, bizarre, almost inscrutable characters -- Bickle and LaMotta and, well, Jesus -- Scorsese rooted this film in "one of the guys" and, even though these men are pretty much on the verge of madness in cultural terms... I think it's Karen who says "these were blue collar guys" in the movie. Somehow, it seemed like a life, as hellish as it was, that a person could (and did) live for awhile. And it's not really about the boss. I think that's the key. It's about a guy who's not made. He'd just as soon no one died. It's the movie, really, about Scorsese himself; the watching the gangsters from afar as a boy, the charm of being the man, that want to belong, the eventual drug problem, fooling around with scandalous women. The "Copa" scene. Is there is a more defining scene about middle class American manhood in the last half of the 20th Century? Walking in the back entrance to the best table in the house all while impressing a beautiful, classy girl on your arm? All of Henry's rotten life, could it be worth that moment alone?
And it really uses pop music as a character. That's overdone now, especially since MTV does it with everything. Scorsese himself overdoes it. But it was fresh in that movie.
I've rarely seen a movie so alive as that one. The first two Godfather films are "better," I know they are, they're better art, filmmaking of such beauty and elegance that it's canonical to the industry, like Citizen Kane or The Third Man or 2001. But neither are alive like Goodfellas.
I know a guy whose two favorite movies - ever - are Goodfellas and The Sandlot. Odd couple, right? But the way he put to me years ago, why those two, I'll never forget: "One's about having a bunch of money in your pocket, the other's about baseball, and if I'm honest, just about everything I've ever liked in life involved those two things."
