“I was living in a fantasy,” narrates Henry Hill just before we see him get a taste of his father’s belt. The opening minutes of “Goodfellas,” Martin Scorsese’s 1990 crime saga, depict the teenager’s giddy induction into a neighbourhood mob racket, serenaded by the voice of his adult self. This boyhood power trip is lent a nostalgic sheen, and Henry’s deluded, adolescent sense of purpose and belonging is so extreme that the cruel punishment is reduced to a mere blip.
“The way I saw it, everybody takes a beating sometime,” intones Henry, played by Ray Liotta, who guides the viewer through this mid-level gangster’s decades-spanning true story with a reptilian charisma that rightly earned the performance a place in the dirtbag pantheon (if not an Oscar nomination).
Alexander Mooney is a critic and programmer based in Toronto.