Author: Pauline Kael (The New Yorker)
Translator: csh
The translation was first published in "Iris"
In "The Good Guy", Scorsese has made some progress. It is similar to "Angry Bull", the difference is that it is not so domineering. Like "Angry Bull", it was produced in a joyful and pleasant thought. In the film’s original novel "Big Brother" (by Nicholas Pelegui), the Mafia members are moral dwarves. But Scorsese is a rap artist who always maintains energy. He will not adopt that ironic, alienated narrative. He loves the gangster environment in Brooklyn because it creates a state of distortion, exaggeration, and prosperity. The gang members in his movie like the feeling of having a stack of cash in their pockets. This film tells the story of Feihuang Tengda, and this process is accompanied by flying flags and the cheers of the crowd.
Is this a great movie? I do not think so. But this is indeed a successful product of the film industry-news reports presented in a vivid and dramatic form. Every frame is so lively and vivid, you can feel the passion and joy that the director has in his heart when he makes these images move. When Henry Hill (Ray Liotta), the core character of the film, walks through a street on Long Island to beat the man who is trying to flirt with his girl, we see dogwoods in bloom. Throughout the film, the suburban, lush environment where these gang members are located is in a very conspicuous position. These villains always negotiate in the bushes or by the hedges. They also prepare food in a ritual and social way—mixing the seasonings in the vat and cutting the garlic into razor-like slices. We see them haunting bars and restaurants, and they enjoy preferential treatment here. They will also appear in their noisy homes, and we will see the gaudy interior space. They also gather stolen items, blackmail restaurant owners, hijack, set fires, prepare to steal goods at airports, and bury murdered victims. All aspects of their lives are like the theme of opera.
So, what is missing? Well, we didn't see a great story. This script, which was completed by Peleji and Scorsese, is not really dramatic. On the contrary, Scorsese only raised his own voice, and those guys only gradually developed their careers, worked hard, and finally broke out. However, this is not the kind of brainless movie that treats barbarism as entertainment, not the kind of movie where good guys fight bad guys. Scorsese just presented the barbaric blackmail crime and told us that this is all those men are. Jack LaMotta of Scorsese can only do one thing: fight. And these guys in this movie can only do one thing: robbery.
The original novel of this film is based on the real Henry Hill story. After joining the Federal Witness Protection Program, he told Pelej his story. In this story, the time of this film is 1955. An 11-year-old, helpful, half-Irish, half-Sicilian boy of descent worked as a runner in the taxi parking lot of a Brooklyn block gang. , The leader of this team is named Poly (Paul Sorvino). As the darling of the gang, Henry got the approval he wanted and a lot of pocket money. When he was fourteen years old, his name had already appeared on the salary list of a construction company, and he had already experienced that kind of lavish life. In the years that followed, crime became a game for him. He fought side by side with old friends Jimmy (Robert De Niro) and Tommy (Joe Persie), and he really made a lot of money through fraudulent blackmail. And when he brought his Jewish girlfriend Karen (Lonan Breco) to those flashy and expensive places, he would give a big tip, and people would treat him as a celebrity. (And he is only 21 years old.) Karen is not the kind of woman who behaves badly (she has her own set of values), but she likes the dangerous feeling that emanates from him. His life looks like a Puerto Rico Day parade mixed with rock concerts. When she saw his gun, she felt very excited (he used that gun to slam his enemy). In "Angry Bull", the young man tried to smash a way on that brick wall; and in "Good Guy", the young man found a enthusiastic and warm group, whose members first included Poly and His gang, then Jimmy and Tommy, and finally his wife-Karen-and many children, as well as a mistress who was placed in an apartment.
When Henry showed a puzzling dislike for Tommy and Jimmy's violent behavior, we felt that the film seemed a bit off track. In a card game, Tommy, played by Joe Pesci, gags and shoots a teenager because he pours alcohol too slowly. Events like this — they are designed to be extremely sophisticated — seem to be tapping the already awakened sensibility in Henry's heart. But these opportunities did not result in any results in the end, so they seem to be a little perfunctory, with a sense of falling into the cliché. (De Niro also had a scene that made Henry lose control, but it didn't get further development in the end.)
Some basic elements of this film could have been linked together: they show that the primitive male criminal behavior is gradually destroying the Mafia and other organized criminal groups from within. Jimmy, played by De Niro, has been planning a robbery all his life—the six million dollar Lufthansa robbery, which was the highest-value robbery in American history at the time—but he could not control his team. They are so undisciplined, so lacking in the overall situation, they start to spend extravagantly, and the paranoid Jimmy wants to keep all the money anyway. He feels sorry, but he feels that he must hit them hard—that is, They kill. (After the successful robbery, at least ten murders occurred.) Poly has strict rules on drugs, because drugs can turn men into the kind of informants who destroy the "family". However, when the issue involves the wives and children of prisoners, the family has no etiquette (or foresight). So, when Henry went to jail, Karen became his partner, helping him smuggle drugs, allowing him to sell them internally—just like a regular franchise. Then he started smoking cocaine. When Henry was released from prison, he started to run his own business in his home on Long Island. At this time, he had become a manic patient, and he was going to betray his mentor Pauli and all the brothers he knew. Moreover, he felt that his behavior was justified, because his closest friend Jimmy was also preparing to kill him and his wife.
However, Scorsese did not dramatize these events, he simply presented the themes-even the story-in a rigid manner. In a hurried, still unfinished closing paragraph, he connects some context together, and then tells us some character information in the final subtitles-but omits some extremely interesting parts of this information. Hill was so determined to take the path of evil that when he was given a new life by the witness protection plan, he still used this opportunity to continue committing crimes, and he was eventually expelled from the plan. But beyond that, we know very little about him. When we read the subtitles and discover that Henry and Karen are separated after twenty-five years, we will be very shocked because we find that we don't know what made them last so long in a relationship. This is a film with breadth but no depth. We only watch Henry Hill's life from the outside, and he seems to be keeping a certain distance from the life of that kind of thug. "Goodfella" is like a "Scarface" (Directed by Howard Hawkes) without a Scarface.
Scorsese had achieved great success with "Angry Bull", which was voted by international critics as the best film of the 1980s-in that film, he presented his protagonist as a " Savage Totem". In "The Good Guy", he seems to want to make his role very shallow. However, what makes this film seem monotonous is not their shallow anti-social identity. The monotony of this work is that when he presents this kind of anti-sociality, he uses a very superficial concept, and we can often see this phenomenon in B-level films. When Henry Hill was a child, he lived opposite the taxi parking lot in the Mafia, observing the flashy life of these criminals in and out of limousines. He wants to do something big like them. The kind of life he watched is the same as what we audiences see on the Scorsese movie screen, but this film does not invite us to identify with his desire.
Of course, even if an actor plays a shallow guy, he can impress the audience, but the premise is that we must understand the guy’s motives and emotions. However, compared with their roles, these actors seem to be a bit too old, and they have left us with a stable impression. In this film, they just show us some isolated and terrifying scenes-Tommy played by Pessi asks: "What do you mean, I am funny?"; and Jimmy played by De Niro When Karen was led into the potential death trap, he had an unnatural smile on his face.
However, the technique of this film is so superb, it makes you feel like you are in a live performance. This is Scorsese's show. He became known as a mature director in the early 1970s. At that time, many film lovers still adhered to the idea of the 1960s: a good movie should be attributed to its director. There may be a certain truth hidden in this view, and Scorsese presents this truth to us.
The production process of the film became the theme of the film. You just want to talk about the wonderfully working camera, as well as those freeze frames and jump cuts. This may be the reason why those young fans like Scorsese so much: they want more than just respond to his films, they want to be him. When Orson Wells was making "Gone with the Journey", the filmmaking process took over almost everything-the entire content of that film was a gorgeous technique one after another. But it was a 1958 movie. At that time, it was an exciting feat to make a thriller and express your own enthusiasm for the film medium. Moreover, Wells did not spare his role, on the contrary, he made them appear more complicated to fit his gorgeous style. He presented us with brilliant images. And in 1990, when a film dealt with a thirty-year time span and adopted an epic-level length, we might start to miss those characters that really penetrated the hearts of the people-in Scorsese's "Life Lesson" ( Originated from the highlight movie "Metropolis Legend"), the cunning Lionel Dobby played by Nick Knott integrates all the elements together.
Scorsese is like the kind of excited addict. He will arouse your desires and make you want to hang out with him and listen to him about the way all elements work. In this respect, he can be regarded as a master. However, in the main elements of this film, we do not see that fullness and richness. There is no structural change, and no climax. It just ends at the end. This approach may sometimes take effect, but I don’t think this video does it. Does the kind of self-entertainment in the film production process still satisfy some audiences today? Perhaps, after all, the process of watching a movie may be the same as taking drugs, pursuing pure sensory pleasure. This is Scorsese's view of underground life. This movie is like a young movie fan, dreaming of a certain director’s life, and in Scorsese’s view, the distance between this dream and reality is not very far away.
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