SILVER SCREEN

GOODFELLAS, THIRTY-FIVE YEARS ON: THE DANGER OF BEING PERFECT

KAREN BATTS

November 18, 2025

Thirty-five years after its release, “Goodfellas” (1990) is less a movie than a monument. It has entered that untouchable tier of films one is no longer allowed to question—too celebrated, too studied, too firmly entrenched in the canon. The verdict has been unanimous for decades: It is one of the best films ever made, the defining statement on modern American crime. But what if its brilliance is its flaw? Are its perfection, its composure, its unerring fluency symptoms not of vitality, but of control gone cold?

---

There is a new Apple TV+ documentary, Mr. Scorsese (2025), for anyone who wants the director’s own retrospective gloss. He speaks with the calm assurance of a man who knows exactly what he built. That’s part of the problem. Goodfellas is the film of a director who knows too much, who has conquered chaos so completely that he no longer remembers what it felt like to be lost inside it.

Every myth begins with someone young enough to believe it.

Scorsese’s earlier work was infected by uncertainty. Taxi Driver (1976) is psychosis shot from the inside, Raging Bull (1980), a wound with a camera attached. Those films throb with tension between vision and material, order and collapse. The camera is alive, unpredictable, erratic, a nervous system rather than an instrument. In Goodfellas, that pulse is gone. What remains is the sheen of mastery, the high polish of a director who has disciplined his own madness.

Before Goodfellas, he learned how to take a punch. Afterward, he never needed to.

The first thing one notices upon watching it now is the smoothness. The camera glides where it once stumbled. Every cut is exact, every gesture rehearsed, every act of violence balanced in the frame. The editing, by Thelma Schoonmaker, is immaculate, the rhythm narcotic. The film moves as perfectly as a luxury car—impressive, quiet, sterile. The chaos of gang life is filtered through a style that never loses its equilibrium. Scorsese has said he wanted the film to move like a tracking shot through Henry Hill’s mind, a continuous rush of sensation. But he succeeded so well that he anesthetized it. Goodfellas is a film without friction. The camera never struggles, never hesitates, never doubts. The Steadicam passes through kitchens, corridors, bars, bodies, and bullets without ever touching resistance. The effect is exhilarating for a few minutes and numbing thereafter. It’s not immersion—it’s suspension.

Every Scorsese man hits a point where the haircut becomes a warning.

What distinguishes Taxi Driver is its gritty realism: the visible tension between control and breakdown. That tension produces meaning. Goodfellas has no grid. It is all flow. Its momentum is self-sufficient, a pure mechanism of pleasure. The audience is swept along in a perfectly maintained delirium that feels designed to prevent thought. Scorsese once filmed the world as if it might explode at any moment. Here, the explosion has been simulated, organized, rehearsed, and safely contained. Even the blood is aestheticized. When Joe Pesci’s Tommy stabs a man in the trunk, the violence has the precision of choreography. When he beats Billy Batts, the editing makes the brutality elegant. This is not realism or moral terror, but performance.

Nothing personal—just the cost of doing friendship.

That performance extends to the film’s structure. The voice-over that made Taxi Driver an act of self-exposure is here reduced to commentary. Henry Hill narrates his own corruption with the breezy cadence of a sports recap. His crimes are anecdotes, his betrayals punch lines. The narration doesn’t draw us closer to him, but insulates us. It transforms confession into narration, guilt into rhythm.

Everything in Goodfellas is subordinated to rhythm. The cuts, the camera movements, the music cues—each is calibrated for maximum fluency. The film’s moral argument, if it has one, is buried beneath its pulse. There are no pauses, no ruptures, no stillnesses in which reflection might occur. The audience doesn’t experience corruption; it experiences velocity. The moral consequence of action disappears into movement itself.

The spiritual grandchildren—still arguing about respect, still eating better than everyone else.

That’s why Goodfellas feels contemporary even now. It anticipated the logic of the algorithm: a world without pauses, governed by flow. It is cinema’s first great work of hyperattention—addictive, continuous, exhausting. Its descendants are not only The Sopranos (1999–2007) and Breaking Bad (2008–13), but every online montage that turns excess into a rhythm you can’t stop consuming. Goodfellas taught us how to aestheticize speed, to mistake movement for life. The result is that Scorsese’s subject—moral collapse—is neutralized by his style. The film is too elegant to be corrupt. Its beauty cancels its own diagnosis. The Copacabana shot, celebrated endlessly for its technical perfection, epitomizes this confusion. It should reveal Henry Hill’s seduction by power; instead, it seduces us with the same grace. The tracking shot is not critique, it’s complicity. Scorsese’s camera moves like the dream Henry is having about himself.

The American Dream, now serving dinner through the back entrance.

The difference between Taxi Driver and Goodfellas is the difference between paranoia and choreography. Travis Bickle’s descent is incoherent, suffocating, unpredictable; Henry Hill’s is exhilarating, timed to the beat of a rock song. One film trembles, the other glides. One contains madness; the other aestheticizes it. Rewatching Goodfellas today, the brilliance is undeniable but the thrill is absent. It has the smooth, flawless quality of a museum piece. Every gesture has been canonized, every sound cue decoded. The experience no longer feels cinematic; it feels liturgical. You know what’s coming, and it arrives right on time. The pleasure is in recognition, not discovery. The legendary cocaine sequence, the late-night paranoia, the frenetic montage of Henry’s last day as a free man—it’s all pure style, without tension or unpredictability. It is not hysteria, but the representation of hysteria, designed to look like frenzy while remaining perfectly in control.

Some days you’re the gangster. Some days you’re the guy checking the sky for helicopters.

That control is what makes Goodfellas dead at its core. Scorsese had mastered his own neurosis, and the film pays the price. It is a triumph of editing, not of emotion. Its moral energy has been replaced by technical fluency. The camera is no longer searching for truth; it’s demonstrating skill.

Even the film’s supposed transgressions feel rehearsed. The language, the violence, the misogyny are all integrated into the design. Nothing leaks out, nothing escapes the frame. The film contains its own dirt so elegantly that it ceases to be dirt. When Henry beats Karen, when Tommy shoots Spider, when the bodies pile up, there’s not a moment of genuine disgust because everything looks right.

That’s why audiences misread Goodfellas as celebratory. It doesn’t moralize, because it can’t. Its form is too self-satisfied to permit guilt. Scorsese shows depravity with the calm of a professional demonstrating a well-honed craft. The film’s confidence becomes indistinguishable from its subject’s arrogance.

Scorsese’s light parody of Goodfellas: the corporate edition—same sins, better dental plan.

For all its influence, Goodfellas was the turning point at which Scorsese ceased to be dangerous. Casino (1995) repeats its structure with greater opulence; The Departed (2006) replays it as genre parody; The Irishman (2019) embalms it as memory. None of these films reclaim the volatility that once defined the director. After Goodfellas, Scorsese’s chaos was systematized. There is no risk of collapse, no sense that a scene could break free from its director. Everything unfolds with the inevitability of a luxury watch. And perfection, in art, is not excellence; it’s paralysis.

Humor as a loaded gun—smile carefully.

What is striking, watching Goodfellas now, is how little air there is in it. Every second is filled—with music, dialogue, motion, noise. There are no silences, no hesitations, no moments of human confusion. Even its comedy is mechanical: the rhythm of the dialogue, the punch line timing, the ritualized aggression of the banter. Everything is entertainment calibrated to keep you from thinking. The irony is that Goodfellas is ostensibly about loss of control. Henry Hill’s life disintegrates under the pressures of greed, paranoia, and addiction. But the film observes his collapse from a safe aesthetic distance, as if chaos were an experiment conducted behind glass.

Compare it to the final minutes of Taxi Driver. Travis Bickle’s rampage is incoherent, disturbing, and grotesque. You don’t know whether it’s redemption or psychosis. The camera shakes; the editing breaks; the meaning dissolves. That’s art discovering itself. Goodfellas offers none of that uncertainty. Its ending, Henry in suburbia, is a gesture already calculated for irony. The film knows what it means. It explains itself as it goes.

In Mr. Scorsese, the director looks back on his own life and career with the detachment of a historian. He describes Goodfellas with reverence, as though discussing a restoration rather than a memory. One feels the distance between the man who once made films out of obsession and the man who now tends to his own legend. The documentary confirms what Goodfellas already suggested: that Scorsese’s greatest subject has become himself.

The man who made America look in the mirror—and didn’t blink.

What remains, after all these years, is admiration without affection. You respect the film, but you cannot enter it. It leaves you cold, not because it’s immoral, but because it’s too moral in its construction, too neat, too flawless, too self-aware. Goodfellas represents the moment Scorsese ceased to be possessed by his material and began to master it. The fever broke. The delirium subsided. What replaced them was precision: beautiful, exact, bloodless. Goodfellas is not a dangerous film. It is a film about danger safely aestheticized. It shows what happens when a great artist finally gains full control of his craft: he loses the possibility of transcendence.

Scorsese’s genius has always been moral rather than technical; his greatest images come from a sense of sin, not skill. In Goodfellas, sin became an aesthetic category. Every crime looks right, every fall feels choreographed. The camera no longer trembles. It approves. The result is a masterpiece without pulse. You leave impressed, not moved. It is the cleanest film ever made about dirt, the most organized depiction of disintegration. Its greatness is uncontested, but it is the greatness of a corpse perfectly preserved.

Witness protection: the quiet death of a man who only knew how to live loudly.

For those who still crave danger, the answer is not to watch Goodfellas again. Instead, return to the films that bleed—to the uneven, unstable, human ones, where mastery is still a question and not a fact. Scorsese knew this once. He may know it again. But in Goodfellas, he built the most beautiful cage of his career and then stepped inside.

Karen Batts (born 1959 in Hoboken, New Jersey) is a former FBI intelligence analyst specializing in organized crime networks. She now writes about film, culture, and the stories America tells itself when no one is under oath.

Cover image: A family portrait, if your family reunions required bail money.