GoodFellas

Someone recommended GoodFellas to me with the fatal phrase “one of those films you have to see,” which usually transforms pleasure into homework.

I postponed it for weeks.

Then one Friday night I watched the DVD and understood, within minutes, why the recommendation had carried such confidence. The film moves as if it already knows you will follow. Music enters before you ask for it. Doors open. People talk over one another. Money changes hands. A young man discovers that the world has a side entrance.

That entrance is the important thing.

Henry Hill does not become involved in organized crime because he has misunderstood its nature. He likes what he sees. People know his name. Rules that govern ordinary people appear flexible around him. Restaurants find tables. Problems can be solved with a telephone call. Respect becomes something physically visible in the way a room reacts when he enters.

The famous Copacabana tracking shot captures this perfectly. Henry and Karen do not wait in line. They descend through the back, pass kitchens and corridors, greet people, and eventually arrive at a table that seems to materialize for them.

That is power in its most seductive form: not possessing something, but living in an environment that reorganizes itself around your presence.

We recognize smaller versions everywhere. A title, a connection, the right surname, knowing which person to call. Procedures are often strictest for people without access.

The film is intelligent enough to let us enjoy this before it shows the bill.

Eventually the same network that offers belonging becomes a system of suspicion. Loyalty is praised constantly, which is usually a sign that loyalty cannot be assumed. Friends disappear. Trust becomes calculation. The group calling itself a family proves very willing to remove relatives when incentives change.

I have become suspicious of organizations that describe themselves as families.

Real families generally do not need the slogan.

The film’s rhythm changes with Henry’s life. Early speed feels glamorous: cars, clubs, cash, conversations. Later the speed becomes panic. Phones ring. Drugs have to be moved. Food is being cooked. A helicopter may or may not be following him. Every task collides with another.

The lifestyle has not changed its basic tempo.

His relationship to the tempo has.

That is the cleverest moral argument the film makes. It does not stop the story to explain that crime has consequences. The same energy we enjoyed becomes exhausting.

Years after seeing the film, I walked past a restaurant where a local politician was being greeted. The owner appeared at the door, hands were shaken, a table was found although other people were waiting. It was entirely ordinary and probably innocent. Still, for a second I thought of Henry entering the Copacabana.

Cinema had given me a vocabulary for a small social gesture.

That is why GoodFellas survives beyond its violence.

The most dangerous systems rarely look terrible at the entrance.

They look like someone opening a door for you.