Hi everybody, and welcome to Mark Overanalyses Film! Today I will be overanalysing 1990’s Goodfellas. 

Goodfellas was based on the book Wise Guy by Nicolas Pileggi, and the screenplay was co-written by Pileggi and Martin Scorsese, who also directed. 

I’ve had Goodfellas pencilled in for overanalysis for a long time, but I needed some time to go at it, because frankly, Goodfellas is a pain to analyse. In an interview with the American Film Institute, Scorsese said “the star of the movie is a way of life, not a character.” And that presents issues for Mark and his analysis. The foundation of story is dramatic tension, and the foundation of dramatic tension is that “someone wants something badly and is having difficulty getting it”. And, well, it’s not initially obvious that Henry has much of that. For large tracts of the film, it feels episodic and Henry’s mostly doing what he wants, which is kinda the point. So, what gives Goodfellas its unity and dramatic tension throughout then? One more thing, here’s a question to think about as I go through the details: Story is normally about change, or the threat or possibility of change. So, does Henry change? I’ll come back to that later.

But for now, with all that in mind, first, I’ll look at the fundamental features of the protagonist, and then I’ll go through the main story beats by looking at the sequences of the film. Then, I’ll talk about the main things I learned along the way.

So, let’s begin with the 5 Questions about the protagonist. 

Q1: Whose story is it? 

Or, who is the protagonist? Ok, so this question I can handle: this is the story of Henry Hill. Of course, even this gets a little complicated as we also have Karen Hill’s narration and point of view often throughout. But I think it’s safe to say this is the Henry Hill story: a guy who grew up idolising gangsters only to end up becoming one the most famous FBI informants in American history.

Q2: What is his life dream?
Life dream here refers to what it is that the protagonist wants or is aiming to do when the film begins and the story has yet to properly start. Well, Henry’s life dream is one of the most famously stated life dreams in cinema history. Henry, for as long as he can remember, has wanted to be a gangster.

Q3: What is his want?

Want here is what the character is trying to achieve in “the middle” of the film, or Act II in a three act structure, from the moment they really begin their journey until the moment they are at their most defeated. It’s normally a SMART goal, in that it is Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time bound, so that it gives our story a clear shape. But here is where things start to get really tricky. Does Henry have a SMART goal? When does he begin a particular journey and when does this goal get a definitive answer? Well, I’m reminded of Scorsese’s comment: this is about a way of life. As far as I’m concerned, the tension of Goodfellas is really something like “Will Henry become a real, traditional mafioso or not?” In practical terms, I think Goodfellas is a question of Paulie vs Jimmy and Tommy for which side Henry will end up on. Now, you could talk me into this objective of being a real mafioso beginning at minute 15, when we cut to adult Henry. Or, that it really ends with him getting arrested at minute 123. But as I’ll get into, I have different start and end points.

Q4: What is his need?

Need is the human quality or piece of wisdom that the character lacks at the beginning of the story. Ok. So, first of all, as a downfall story, there would be a negative need here. So, for the sake of clarity, I’ll use the term Flaw. Second of all, just what is Henry’s central, fundamental Flaw? I think, put simply, he’s too selfish, or too selfishly individualistic. The whole point of the Mafia is that it’s at least meant to be Cosa Nostra, or “Our thing”. There’s meant to be a community element to it. Now, whether or not there is, or ever really has been, is another question, but that’s what it’s meant to be. And on those grounds, Henry’s problem is that he’s too selfishly individualistic to even be a gangster. 

Q5: Does she get what he wants and/or what he needs?

So, Henry does not get what he wants, to truly be a gangster, and I’d say he is eventually fully subsumed or defined by his flaw.

Ok, now that I’ve attempted to answer the 5 key questions, let’s have a look at the sequences, and the acts, of Goodfellas. 

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The Sequences

There is traditionally 8 sequences, or stages, in a film. A sequence is a combination of scenes that are tied together by having a single overriding dramatic question or tension, and they tend to be between 10 and 15 minutes in length. A good way to think about it is that every 10-15 minutes, the audience should be on some level asking themselves a different dramatic question. 

Now, apologies but I just want to do one more quick piece of set up before I start in earnest. As slippery as Goodfellas can be, it does fit really neatly into a classic 5 Act structure. Now, Acts I and III in a 5 act structure are the same as in a more familiar 3 act structure, and they would both have 2 sequences. The difference between a 3 act structure and a 5 act structure then is in that middle part. In a 3 act structure, we have a long second act with, traditionally, 4 sequences. In a 5 act structure, that long 2nd act is split into 3. In a more traditional, shorter film, the first sequence here, the refusal of the call, is act II. Then act III is the middle 2 sequences, where the protagonist approaches their flaw, acquires it at the midpoint, and then experiments with it for a bit. Then, Act IV is the last sequence, where there’s doubt in the Flaw and we move towards a low point. So here in Goodfellas, we have acts, and they are actually 28, 24, 36, 25, and 27 minutes in length. Pretty neat and symmetrical, isn’t it?! So, I will be speaking in 5 act structure terms for Goodfellas rather than the more typical 3 act structure. 

So, finally, let’s get stuck in. We begin with Act I, which contains our first 2 sequences, the first of which is basically “life as it is”. But first, there’s a brief flash forward, and we begin in the middle of the film. Now, I think this will serve a purpose later, but for now it serves as an engaging ironic opening. On a late night car ride, Henry discovers that a body in the trunk is still alive and they have to kill the guy all over again. It’s pretty unappealing, and so Henry tells us that as long as he can remember, he’s always wanted to be a gangster. And the brass horns come in. 

And so now we really start our story. We see how Henry grew up opposite a gangster’s hangout. And it's really worth noting here that the thing that Henry's looking up to is Paulie. We see how the Mob became Henry's family, as his own family, or his father at least, was pretty terrible. The mob then were not just somebody’s, they were somebody's that would look after him. They take care of the postman for him and we see Henry do bigger and bigger jobs for them. He goes from parking cars to blowing them up. Then, 11 minutes in, we have what is, to my mind, Goodfellas’ inciting incident: the event without which our story as it is would not happen. And that is: Henry meets Jimmy, the man who would not only define Henry’s journey, but also introduce him to another terrible influence: Tommy. It’s not long before Jimmy has them both working for him, and Henry soon gets arrested selling cigarettes. This, you might notice, is the first of his 3 arrests: one at the beginning, one in the middle, and one at the end. But, it’s all relatively low stakes at this stage. He does what he’s meant to, and he gets off. Jimmy pulls him aside immediately and commends him for learning the two greatest things in life, which he will apparently forget in about 2 hours time. Those things are: never rat on your friends, and always keep your mouth shut. Which feel like they overlap to me, but I guess if you’re in organised crime, it’s worth repeating. I also notice there’s nothing in there about not murdering your friends. Anyways, they step outside, and Paulie and all the crew are awaiting him. It feels like a big party. By the time of his 3rd arrest, things sure will have changed. 

But at that, we’ve told Henry’s origin story, so we skip forward to our 2nd sequence, set in 1963. Now, I have to admit, I struggle to pin down a particular tension here for this sequence, or when it kicks in. I’d say really what we have is some set up to show how entwined Henry has become with the mafia before a main tension arises around Sonny and the Bamboo Lounge, but you could probably convince me otherwise. All I’ll say is, by contrast to a lot of analysis out there, I just don’t think it’s the airport heist really, cos by the time that pays off, I reckon we’re already into a different sequence with a different tension. And it’s just not that big a tension. But I will admit, it’s a weird overlap, and it might be a difference of approach between Scorsese and his famously influential editor Thelma Schoonmaker.

Anyways, there are clearly two stories being told. One: we are introduced to Idlewild Airport and the score that will make Henry. Two: more importantly for now, we’re told the story of The Bamboo Lounge. This is a place the mob hang out, and notice we see them all together here, sitting, eating dinner, and relaxing. Henry talks about how many of them there were. Notably different to later, when they’ve all isolated or turned on each other. But for now, we see that Henry is getting closer to Jimmy and Tommy. He’s plotting a robbery with Jimmy, and goofing around / getting threatened by Tommy. And to be fair, Tommy might be a sociopath, but he is a funny guy… The Bamboo Lounge soon falls under the sway of Paulie, and they cash the whole place in before torching it to the ground. But: importantly, as Henry and Tommy wait for the place to catch fire, Henry makes his first big decision. He very reluctantly agrees to go on a double date. This date is going to be significant, and Henry is about to embark on his journey of being an adult mobster, and so we end Act I and we enter Act II.

Now, again, when I say Act II here, I mean it in the Shakespearean kinda 5 act sense. And, somewhat unusually, this first of our ‘middle’ acts almost completely belongs to Karen. This is where the vast majority of Karen’s narration takes place. But also, it’s interesting to note that Henry doesn’t need any introduction to this world or convincing of its merits, like a traditional protagonist might, but Karen does. In this way, shifting the perspective allows the story to achieve this effect, which is commonly done at the start of Act II. Also, this is really where Henry’s story doesn’t really have loads of dramatic tension, but Karen’s does. Now, there is some really important Henry stuff going on here, but I’ll come back to that in a bit. Right now, we see Karen slowly get sucked right in. First, we have sequence III, the first attempts to solve the problem, wherein we see their terrible first date, and Henry’s standing her up on the 2nd date. Then, when she comes looking for him full of anger, Henry gets interested. And so, they go for a 3rd date, and he — and Goodfellas — puts on a show, with one of the most famous and intoxicating tracking shots in film history. I’ll never be able to hear the song “Then He Kissed Me” without hearing “Every time you two! Don’t you work?!”. Soon though, Karen is attacked by her neighbour, and Henry beats the living crap out of him with a gun in front of her… and it turns her on. Act II begins at minute 28 and ends at minute 52. She witnesses this smack bang in the middle, at minute 40. The moment she’s turned on by that gun is Karen’s act’s midpoint. And so, if we’ve been wondering something like “Will Karen marry this guy?”, we now have an answer, and so we enter a 4th sequence, as we wonder “Will Karen get used to being a mobsters wife?”. But I just want to quickly point something else out here in our transition. Henry beats this guy with a gun. Cut: he hands it to Karen. Cut: Karen puts it in a canister with a glass. Cut: another glass being wrapped, and stepped on, to symbolise their marriage. Through a series of sharp cuts, their marriage is directly connected to the gun. That is Scorsese and Schoonmaker. That is filmmaking! 

Anyways, we have Karen and Henry’s wedding, her being left at home while he’s off galavanting, and her meeting the other wives. When she comes back from meeting the other wives, she says she doesn’t know if she could live like that. But by 4 minutes time, we’ll see her explain how everything came to feel normal. We see her holiday photos with all of these women and their husbands. We see her watch TV while cops search her home. And we see her ask her husband for a wedge of money and then give him a blowjob in return. And, well, it sure seems like she has gotten used to being a mobsters wife. 

Now, in a 5 act story structure, Act II ends with what we term “acceptance of the call”, or the protagonist’s “first unconscious move towards their need”. But of course, this implies that up until this point in Act II, there has been some kind of “refusal of the call”. And I think this is really goddamn clever by Goodfellas. Because while it’s been telling us Karen’s story, it’s also been showing us Henry’s refusal of the call. Because, what has Henry been doing all this time? Exactly what a traditional mafioso is meant to be doing. He met a girl and got married. And it isn’t Jimmy or Tommy that brings Karen around at the wedding, it’s Paulie. Most importantly though, Henry robbed the airport, and as he says himself: “We did the right thing. We gave Paulie his tribute.” Note how different that is going to be to Act IV when he won’t even tell Paulie about his dealing. But, Henry is about to begin experimenting with his flaw, and so we now enter Goodfellas’ third Act.

Now, our first sequence of Act III is our 5th sequence overall. I should point out that I regard Henry’s first unconscious move towards his flaw as being the moment he’s drinking in this bar with Billy Batts, Jimmy, and Tommy. It’s an unconscious move because Henry’s not really driving any of this, but because of our opening scene, we know what’s coming. So, the guys are drinking — y’know, for a change — and Billy is at the end of the bar being a jerk, so we have the tension “Will these guys kill Billy Batts?”. Tommy promptly takes offence to a gentle invitation to kindly return home and procure his fucking shinebox, and then we have the incident that all of Goodfellas leads up to and comes out of: Tommy’s murder of Billy Batts. Everything up to this has been evil gravy; everything after this is, well, what happens to evil gravy when it grows too rich, spoils, and turns on itself in cocaine-fuelled paranoia. That’s some bad gravy. Tommy and Jimmy jump Billy, who is a made man, and murder him. And they are basically rejecting tradition and norms here. This is not what’s done in the mob. Then, they have to swing by Tommy’s mom’s place for a shovel, and I would pay good money to watch an hour of Tommy describing famous paintings. Anyways, at that, we’ve caught up to our introduction.

We very quickly introduce the fact that Henry now has a girlfriend on the side, and we move now to the all important midpoint, or, the protagonist’s first conscious move towards their need or flaw. Now, again, this is all my own theory, so you may disagree. But personally, I regard the tension in Goodfellas to be between whether or not Henry Hill is going to be a traditional mafioso like Paulie, or if he’s too selfishly individualistic to even be that, like Jimmy and Tommy. And so, 64 minutes into a 140 minute film, Paulie asks Henry if he’s heard anything about Billy Batts’s disappearance, and Henry lies. Henry has chosen not to do the traditional mafioso thing. And so we enter sequence VI now, Goodfellas’ ‘kind of’ Honeymoon sequence.

In a typical happy ending, the honeymoon sequence is where things would start to go well for the protagonist after having first embraced their need. But here, in Goodfellas, a film with a down ending, things really start to spiral, specifically because of Henry’s flaw. The first thing that happens is that they have to dig up Billy Batts’ body after it’s been decomposing for 6 months. And look at the lighting now: the deep red hue surrounding them as they do so. These characters could be in hell. Then, Henry gets his girlfriend her own place and starts staying over a few nights a week. It’s fine for a gangster to have a girlfriend, but they’re also supposed to be a family man. And then, of course, there’s the tale of Spider. Now, Spider is important here for a couple of reasons. 1) Tommy killed Billy Batts, but at least Billy was really giving him shit. That’s not the case with Spider. And 2) Spider is the next generation. Tommy and Henry were Spider and they were brought through the ranks. These guys are so evil and narcissistic though that they kill Spider just for giving a little sass back to a torrent of verbal and physical abuse. They are completely off the reins now and, really importantly for the overall theme I think, they’re not passing this thing on to another generation. There’s no community here. But the worst is still to come here, because Karen is losing it. She begins harassing Henry’s girlfriend, and then holds a gun to Henry’s head as he wakes. He talks her down, then grabs her, and holds the gun to her head. So, y’know, things aren’t ‘great’ right now, and it’s about time we end this awful sequence. And notice again the story shape: the personified push and pull. Here, Paulie comes back in to present the counter argument again to the wilder guys. He’s going to talk to Karen, smooth everything over, and Henry’s going to go back and start living like a more traditional mafioso again. After all, we’re not animali!? There’s a couple of smaller points of interest here too. First, Paulie suggests he go on a trip here to take care of somebody, which is a foreshadowing of Henry’s final conversation with Jimmy. This kind of foreshadowing happens a lot around the midpoint you might notice. Second, right as we end this anti-honeymoon sequence, 78 minutes in, Henry once again gets arrested, for the 2nd of 3 times. This time he still keeps in with the mob, because this is still traditional mafioso business, but he does go to jail this time. Things are escalating. And so, Henry is now in jail, and we enter sequence 7.

While going to jail might not seem like an obvious boon, there’s actually an immediate upswing in mood. Cos Henry is back in with the traditional, older guys now. The first thing we see is Paulie slicing garlic with a razor blade to Bobby Darin’s “Beyond The Sea”, and living with the guys kinda looks like some fun. But, in classic good news / bad news, Henry starts selling drugs in prison, but then fights with Karen and ends up re-committing to her. Surely out of necessity, but still. Four years later, he’s out, and he’s not long in heading back to the family: both his kids, and to Paulie’s. And once again, we have a vital moment for Henry. At minute 87, Paulie explicitly warns Henry: don’t sell drugs, and don’t get too involved with Jimmy and Tommy. And Henry, once again, lies to Paulie. And the moment he does, we cut to him cutting a mound of cocaine and hanging out with new girlfriend, Sandy and we know that Henry’s on the fast track to his impending doom. And so, we enter Act IV now: the bridge to the low point. 

Act IV, just like Act II, once again has two sequences, with a perfect midpoint. And, like all the acts really, it also looks totally different from all the others. As we begin sequence 8 here, there’s now cocaine and mirrors and black and dark hues all over the place. Henry immediately moves into a new, gaudy apartment. At the same time, despite having just told Paulie that he would steer clear of drugs and watch out for Jimmy and Tommy, he starts dealing cocaine and involves Jimmy and Tommy. That’s the side of the argument he’s now on. But anyways, this is the Lufthansa heist sequence. As soon as we’ve set up the cocaine stuff, Morrie starts hassling Henry about setting up the heist with Jimmy. Now, this is another sequence I find a little hard to pin down with an active tension, but I am wondering some version of “Will Henry benefit from the Lufthansa heist?” It’s made clear quickly that Henry is not in on the Lufthansa heist directly, so that makes sense to me. And things are kind of going well, though you can see how they’re really teetering again. Like in the anti-honeymoon sequence, only worse. We’re introduced to Henry’s cocaine system, including both his coke-addicted girlfriend, Sandy, and Lois the obnoxious babysitter — so what could go wrong there — and Jimmy puts together a crew who look, well, not “elite”. And yet, they do really pull off the biggest heist in American history at the time. But things sour immediately as this non-elite crew spend the money showily, and Jimmy begins to get “agitated”. And, unfortunately, it turns out Jimmy gets a very murder-y kind of agitated. But for now, Henry is still in his good books, and receives a fat wad of cash for his part. He goes home, and immediately starts lavishing it on Karen and the kids. It would appear that Henry has indeed benefitted from this heist, and everything is looking good right now for him, so we enter a new sequence. Because, we sense, this is not to last.

Again, as we enter sequence 9 now, we have this act’s midpoint or midpoints, as two things happen side-by-side. Firstly, Jimmy starts having people associated with the robbery killed. It starts with Stacks, who did screw up, but that just seems to whet Jimmy’s appetite. Secondly though, it’s revealed that Tommy is going to get made. Now, the main tension here, as far as I’m concerned, is “Will Henry stop Jimmy from killing everybody?”, but this other underlying tension is really important. Henry and Jimmy cannot be made, and so can never really be full on mafioso, but the film goes out of its way to tell us that Tommy getting made is akin to Henry and Jimmy getting made. So, if Tommy does get made, it will be as close as Henry will ever get to being a full fledged traditional mafioso, of achieving his Want. And you might notice here that Henry is once again switching tack a little. Here, he’s not the one pushing the envelope and breaking rules. It’s Henry who says there was more than enough money to go around. It’s Henry who is worried about the Feds. It’s Henry who tries to talk Jimmy out of killing Morrie. He’s behaving more like a Paulie type. But Jimmy is undeterred, and he starts whacking everybody, despite Henry trying to at least stall him. Once Morrie is murdered, the bodies start piling up. And, really, why? Only one reason: selfish individualistic greed, and maybe a healthy dash of paranoia. Despite Henry’s retrenchment, he is steeped in his flaw, as it is enacted by those around him. BUT, then we finally and suddenly see that these guys can’t keep getting away with this. We discover that Tommy is not actually getting made, he’s getting whacked. And, it’s blink and you’ll miss it: but it’s Paulie’s brother Tuddy who does the deed. Upon finding out, Jimmy breaks down, and Henry is for once given real pause. His best chance at being a “real” mafioso is now gone, but so is one of his best friends, his closest peer, and someone who presented the wildest extremes of his own behaviour. To paraphrase Craig Mazin, at the low point, the protagonist no longer believes the counterargument, but the argument seems impossible. With the Mafia whacking his best friend, Henry is isolated. And, well, we soon see arguably the result of his isolation. With 27 minutes left, we cut to May 11th, 1980, and we begin our final act, Act V.

Act V contains a false resolution and a true resolution. Now, when we last saw Henry, he was isolated from the mob and from just about everyone except Jimmy, who was increasingly becoming even more of a murder-happy paranoid maniac than usual. But, in the false resolution, it appears that Henry’s still able to do his thing. And that’s despite the fact that he’s already getting his day going at 6:55 in the morning with an eye opening snifter of cocaine. And this sequence is all about being on cocaine. The speed, intensity, and paranoia is incessant here, and it seems like Henry can’t really keep any one thought in his head for more than a moment. But then, he’s got a lot on his mind, not least the helicopter that keeps appearing overhead. This is what gives this sequence its tension, as we wonder “Will Henry get arrested?” So, while this helicopter lurks in the background, Henry’s trying to get rid of some guns that he bought for Jimmy, and it’s worth noting that he is clearly screwing up now but doesn’t admit it. Then he has to pick up his brother and cook him a meal while also preparing a shipment of cocaine. It’s a busy day, and everyone looks wiped out and/or pissed off. So, after dealing with Jimmy, his brother, Karen, his girlfriend Sandy, and Lois the babysitter, he finally pulls out of the driveway… only to be stopped by cops. Importantly: Henry himself points out that he assumed they were local cops looking into the Lufthansa stuff. In other words: traditional mafioso stuff. But no, they are federal agents, after him for his drug dealing. If it was typical mafioso stuff, he might still be fine. Just like he was the first 2 times he was arrested. And so, it is this turning away from the traditional stuff that really brings Henry down. He’s been stopped in his tracks, arrested, and is now in very serious danger, and so we enter our 11th and final sequence of Goodfellas: the true resolution.

Now, in the true resolution, the idea is that the protagonist fully embraces their need, or, in this case, flaw. And here, that means Henry is going to fully embrace his selfish individualism. So, for starters he gets Karen to convince her mother to put her own house up for his bail. Classy start. And as he walks to the car, he feels like he’s going to get killed right then and there. Paulie or Jimmy might kill him. This unfortunate mix of his Want and his Flaw would seem to have come to ruin him at this stage. He gets home and realises that Karen has flushed the last of the cocaine down the toilet. And for some bizarre reason, Henry is convinced that the cops would have never found it. I’m starting to think this guy might not be so smart. But man, this scene is worth mentioning. It is a real lowest of the low moment, and he and Karen end up wailing in the corner of a room. Every time I watch it, it still really hits me. It’s an amazing scene and the actors feel so raw in it. The following morning, Henry speaks to Paulie. And I also love this scene, even though it’s a short one. It’s a bit longer in the script, and they make clear that Paulie knew everything all along and tried to warn Henry. But Henry was too selfishly individualistic to take heed. And note, Paulie directly refers to Henry lying to him, which Henry did at our midpoint and our end of Act III. In the script, there’s tears in Paulie’s eyes when he tells Henry he has to turn his back on him. And what does Henry do? In the voice over, he bemoans that Paulie only gave me 3200 bucks “for a lifetime”. This. Fucking. Guy. How entitled can you be?! Anyways, Karen sneaks off to see Jimmy and get some money, and there’s a question mark over whether Jimmy tries to have her murdered. There’s no way to know for sure, but considering Jimmy’s penchant for whacking associates and his close watching of her as she walks down the street, I think it’s definitely a murder waiting to happen. Henry soon meets Jimmy, and it becomes clear to him that Jimmy is planning on having him murdered. Henry’s flaw is going to get him whacked, unless he finds a new way to use it. And so, we have the climactic action of Goodfellas. Henry, with nowhere else left to go, turns to his only salvation: the cops. He rats on everyone. As he does so in court, he laments not one thing he’s done, only the fact that his gangster way of life is now in the past. And I’ll take this idea up again in a few moments. But for now, we see that Henry ends up just a regular schnook, looking very pissed off to the sound of the incredibly apt Sid Vicious version of My Way.

Epilogue

So, first I’d like to talk about the structure of Goodfellas, and then touch on that ending and its meaning. 

I think it’s fair to say that Goodfellas is the hardest film to analyse that I’ve done so far, and I’d like to talk about why that is. As I said at the outset, Scorsese regarded the main character as really being the way of life, rather than Henry. And that follows in the sequences and their tensions. Normally, sequences have a clear overriding dramatic question or tension that generally relates directly to the protagonist. So, you can ask “Will Henry get the money?” or “Will Henry save the day?” or whatever. But I really found that hard to do a few times with Goodfellas. For instance, as I mentioned earlier, the second sequence with the Bamboo Lounge feels hard to pin down, but I’m somehow never bored or confused. It really moves, and I’m engaged the entire time. Similarly, it’s odd that Karen would get to be the protagonist, with her own narration, for a whole act, but it does make some sense, cos it serves the story shape and there just wouldn’t be much tension with a Henry who is living the easy life.

But what really screwed with my over-analysing, story-structure-obsessed brain is the relationship between the midpoint and the low point, and the series of sequences between them. In his book Save The Cat!, Blake Snyder refers to the midpoint and the low point as a “set”. If one is a good moment, the other should be a bad moment, or vice versa. Now, it doesn’t have to be “good” and “bad”, but that’s the simplest way to put it. Now, as I’ve said, I reckon Henry’s midpoint here is lying to Paulie. It’s the moment where he really starts isolating himself from the traditional gangsters of his youth, and it closely mirrors his climactic action of informing on him at the end. It works really well as a midpoint. But at first, I couldn’t figure how this is a kind of opposite of the low point. Both are a movement away from the mafia, as personified by Paulie, to my mind. But then, eventually, it struck me that when Henry first lies to Paulie, it seems to work. He feels free to engage in all of his excesses without consequence. Until he ends up in prison. At the end of Act IV, he learns that “Oh yes, there really are consequences.” And that will inform his actions in the true resolution. 

Furthermore, what you’d normally expect after a midpoint in a typical film is that things would largely go well for a while until we move into Act IV, and then they’d largely go badly until we hit the low point. Now, normally a film only has 2 sequences here, so one is good, then the next one is bad. A longer film though will often have things getting bad in one sequence, then getting worse again leading to the lowpoint. Seven has this for example.

But, Goodfellas actually keeps switching at sequence level. After the midpoint, Henry pushes the boat out on his excesses… until he goes to jail and gets back in with the mob. You could argue that that’s when he starts dealing drugs of course, but Paulie is kinda happy ‘enough’ with that. Then he gets out, starts dealing, and his friends commit a huge heist… until the boss starts killing everybody. Good, bad, good, bad. Or: freedom, curtailment, freedom, curtailment. And, you might notice, it keeps momentum by upping the ante in each sequence. Henry is living a wild life with his mates, but then he goes to prison for it. Then he lives an even wilder life, selling cocaine while the crew commit a huge heist, but then they’re all in mortal danger. And I have to say that it took me a while to realise that in that final sequence, Henry really does retrench into a much more traditional mafioso type than he has been in a while. While in the previous sequence, we see him setting up his drug business and flashing the cash, once Stacks is killed, he’s the one trying to subtly manage Jimmy the way Paulie’s tried with him. He is reverting to a more traditional, cautious role. He even tries not to have a drink at one stage! But then, of course, the traditionalists murder his closest peer and Jimmy murders everyone else anyways, and there’s nothing left for him to do other than give into his cocaine fuelled individualistic excesses.

And that brings me to Henry, that ending, and what all of this means. I have to admit, when I first saw Goodfellas, I didn’t love it the way everyone else seemed to. I preferred Casino, because, I see with hindsight, I “got” the protagonist in that film. I could see his struggle and his ups and downs. Here, it’s a bit harder to see that with Henry, or at least, to see it consistently throughout. He seems kind of flat for a protagonist. He starts a self-interested asshole, and he ends a self-interested asshole, and he never seriously considers being anything else than what he is. He’s really our window into the life more than anything. But, it is worth pointing out that he does actually present dramatic tension. Things are pretty easy in acts one and two, but from Act III, he’s really struggling to juggle his flaw with his want, and it causes him a bunch of headaches. He struggles with the shackles of Paulie, but equally struggles with the wildness of Jimmy and Tommy. And that’s before his wife learns about his girlfriend, he gets hooked on cocaine, and helicopters start tailing him. It’s safe to say the man has problems. Furthermore, all the major character beats for his arc are there, even if they are a little ‘one way’ for my money to really make him a fully compelling protagonist in his own right. But I could be wrong about that. Roger Ebert says this is a film all about guilt, but I must confess I don’t really see it. Is Henry really repentant about anything? Maybe it’s all subtext. He’s the narrator and so he’s clearly leaving that stuff out and it’s just off screen, and I’ve just missed that element? 

Anyways, what interests me in particular here is the ending. Many say that the speech Henry gives at the end to camera is a condemnation of American life: that you could cheat and steal and pay people off, cos as Henry says, “Everyone had their hand out”. But I do think there’s real importance in that past tense he uses. All the big mob stories of note from the last 50 years — The Godfather, Goodfellas, The Sopranos — are steeped in this idea that the past was better. When the story starts, Henry tells us about the “glorious time” when he “met the world”, and wiseguys were everywhere. Now, all of these stories also imply a kind of inherent vice built into the mafia, or: ‘a natural characteristic of something that will cause its own spoilage or decay’. The Godfather Pt II for instance ends with young Michael with his Dad on a train, which always represents destiny in films, moving from right to left, which is generally a bad omen in film language, away from his ancestral Italian home. Then it cuts to him alone, staring into the distance. The implication is that his father and his way of l ife set him on this course. And we can see in all of these stories a movement from a sense of community, of “Our Thing”, to a degradation and decay of that, and it’s almost always catalysed by the introduction of drugs. So, to my mind, Henry’s journey is the journey of the mob writ large, which also explains why it’s a little one way in its direction. Henry couldn’t become a traditional mafioso because he was too selfishly individualistic. But then, as we’ve been told in multiple stories, there was clearly a generational loss of values in this way of life, whether or not those values were exaggerated, imagined, or wrongly valorised in the first place. This coincided with and/or resulted in the dwindling and decay of the mafia in American life. When Henry says “Everyone had their hands out. Everything was for the taking. And now it’s all over,” it feels like Henry is describing not just his fate, but the fate of the mafia in America. And that, I think, is what Martin Scorsese was really interested in, and what he so amazingly presented in the masterpiece that is Goodfellas. 

This has been Mark Overanalyses Film on Goodfellas. Next time: it really is the season for me to overanalyse the question of the best Christmas film of all time by looking at It’s A Wonderful Life! If you enjoyed this episode, please like, rate, follow, recommend, and whatever else it is that’s good for this kind of thing! A special thanks to Mary Kate O’Flanagan who taught me everything I know about film, including these methods. Thanks for listening. Take care of yourselves, and see you soon.