GOODFELLAS (Martin Scorsese, 1990)

“As far back as I can remember,” Brooklyner Henry Hill’s voiceover confides, “I’ve always wanted to be a gangster.” In 1955, at age 11, Hill quit school and began his partial ascent up Mafia ranks, dutifully robbing and killing, keeping his mouth shut and ratting out nobody. Only half-Italian (the other half, Irish), he could not remain pristine forever; to protect himself from an imminent hit, he sings in open court against higher-ups before disappearing into a new identity, along with his Jewish wife, Karen, and their children, under the F.B.I.’s Witness Protection Program. “In a sense,” critic Robert Castle quips, “[Hill] has died and gone to suburbia.”
     GoodFellas compresses the “true story” that Hill told Nicholas Pileggi, which became Pileggi’s book Wise Guy, which Pileggi, along with the director, Martin Scorsese, adapted. Hill’s voiceover—Karen also contributes voiceover—underscores the viewpoint of an outsider looking in. Like The Great Gatsby, which F. Scott Fitzgerald gives a wider, more poignant reference, Scorsese’s film punctures the illusion of the American Dream. Unlike Gatsby, though, Hill dreamed small, and the irony of his suburban destiny—what countless other small dreamers might mistake for social acceptance and cosmic recognition—barely scratches the skin. Jay Gatsby’s fate in the novel that bears his name devastates.
     Detailed, earnest, exceptionally well crafted, Scorsese’s film is, finally, thin, hollow, almost insignificant; as it follows the course that actual events predetermined for it, it peters out and grows tedious. Many, though, have mistaken it for a work of art, naming it best film and Scorsese best director: the New York critics, National Society of Film Critics, BAFTA. In addition, Scorsese’s direction won at Venice.
     Ray Liotta is alert and pitch-perfect as Hill; Oscar-winner Joe Pesci, hilarious as unruly Tommy DeVito, who crosses the Gambinos.

THE COOK THE THIEF HIS WIFE & HER LOVER (Peter Greenaway, 1989)

Someone with a cold heart, and whose literary tastes run to Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus, its classical antecedents and Jacobean revenge tragedy, might savor the twisted flavor of writer-director Peter Greenaway’s The Cook the Thief his Wife & her Lover, which comes to us with a dash of neo-Augustan wit from the UK and France. It is a catalog of human horrors, especially a cuckolded criminal’s unspeakable acts targeting his wife (which predate her adultery), her lover, and also an innocent boy, all somewhat moderated by the employment of long-shots and stylized sets and cinematography; but those for whom torture and cannibalism do not constitute their favorite cinematic dishes need not apply. In all, I found the film nasty, grim and unappetizing.
     Almost all of it is set inside the restaurant that crime boss Albert Spica (Michael Gambon, pouncing exhaustively on a single note until the end) owns, manages and, along with wife Georgina (Helen Mirren, excellent—and, naturally, sometimes nude), frequents for elaborate French dinners, for which they are joined by Spica’s henchmen (including Tim Roth’s Mitchel), whose table habits Spica humorously lambasts, and other, more pretentious guests. “Georgie” and Michael, a Jewish bookseller, initiate their passionate adultery between courses in the woman’s loo.
     Aside from various forms of “eating,” including the forced eating of assorted things, I don’t know what the film’s about. Many think it’s a satirical assault on Thatcherism; but I don’t see how. Georgina’s despair over the inhuman things that her chow-down spouse does to others over her affair generates her sense of moral responsibility, which nudges the film into philosophical and, perhaps, theological territory. I like the shots of Spica’s ravenous dogs; but, mostly, Greenaway’s clever, self-congratulatory film is a pile of offal.