Goodfellas

Funny enough, tonight I filled in a bunch of reviews long-time favorites I'd never posted, and as soon as I was done, what does Tubi serve up, but the best gangster movie I've ever seen, "Goodfellas".

Honestly? I love this movie, but not like I love many of my other favorites. There is no denying it's one of the best films from one of our best directors, and contains an unimaginable heap of talent in its huge ensemble cast of dozens. It's a superb movie that deserves every bit of the wide praise it's received, and is the thrilling watch from beginning to end. I love this movie. But not like I love many of my other favorites.

But, it's ultimately just a story. It's not profound. It's about the rise and fall of a gangster. Even a crime film like "Dog Day Afternoon", another old favorite crime movie, somehow presented something very human that I could related to. I related somehow to Harry Beale in "Network", Alex in "Clockwork Orange", Travis Bickle in "Taxi Driver", even though they were all repugnant characters... because the movies were about what they wanted, what drove them (truth, a twisted notion of beauty, and to matter to somebody, respectively.) In "GoodFellas", Henry Hill wants... luxury, creature comforts. That's all there is. There's nothing transcendental about it. He doesn't have something driving him, he just wants cash. And the story of how he gets and uses it is still one of the best pieces of cinema we've got, but as a story, I don't relate. There's something mechanical about it. Maybe if we had some understanding of what drives his hunger for cash, how it changed him as a person—but we don't. He's the same person at the end of the movie, in 1980, as he was in the beginning, 25 years earlier, in 1955: he wants status and comfort. This movie is all about externalities: the escapism of getting to root for a bad guy as he pursues a career that leads up to the largest-ever robbery on US soil up to that point, and then the redemption, for us and our guilty pleasure in rooting for him, of seeing him lose it all due to the same hubris that brought him to that point.

I'm going to put it in the "Favorites" section because, honestly, compared to a landmark achievement like this movie, even "honorable mention" is an insult. It's better than that. But, just it's two and a half hours of terrific entertainment—at the end it leaves me, as a viewer, in the same place it found me at the beginning. There's no catharsis. So, while I absolutely love it, and have no real criticism of it at all, nonetheless, considering how much my favorite movies move me personally, it's probably my least favorite of all my favorite movies.