Film Review - Goodfellas & Casino

1.
Audiences adore their gangster cinema. They are exciting exercises in role projection, the legitimation of capital gain and our resulting excesses, carving new tragic or romantic idols in the oppressed and fallen protagonists -- an expression of our dominant ideology and the ethics of the audience. Also its inverse: power strivings the inherent weakness or strength of all repressive structures, the dialectic of wealth and poverty fractured as power-relations, and the individual undone in creation/destruction both. We will always return to nothing.

2.
Goodfellas is Henry Hill's verbal memoir -- half-fantasy, all nostalgia. His character as a child sits windowside idealizing the gangsters standing across the street enough to join them. Parttime employment gains him respect, cash and a family more intimate than his first, less alienated, less abusive. They create, then provide for his needs. They alter and ruin his character at the climax. The film finishes in frustration, taking the same view of 'the life' as his younger self. His betrayal sends him back to the conditions in which he sought the care of the syndicate.

3.
Jimmy Conway acts as an artificial father for Henry, before his paranoia about betrayal assists Henry's decision to turncoat. He is intelligent and rifted between caution and risk, settling with age but violent and anxious (see: Lufthansa Massacre). Tommy DeVito, Henry's counterpart, seeks strength, charisma, emotional security, joy in chaos and gain, and all while loving his mother with total devotion. Tommy is both friend and enemy to Henry, a brother whose death is the last attack before his total alienation from the family beside Jimmy's disconnect from stability.

4.
Henry's betrayal is forced upon him by both sides -- threats from the state, threats from friends -- an act of survival, but also the erasure of his identity and his connection to everything. His narration is one of total dissatisfaction and resentment of the contraits in his witness-protected status. Its masturbatory -- his fantasy is a return to the freedom, the elitism and his past sense of community.

5.
Both films are a matter of nostalgia for historical glories. The present castrates. They project past happiness onto an embodying era (murders and other unpleasant issues exist as sidelined incidentals). The films portray a peculiar conservative memory.

6.
Casino is about controlling chaos. The protagonist, Ace Rothstein, obssesses over stripping the independence from anything he can hold. He controls the casinos and all parts of the gambling while being broken against the excesses of his pal Nicky Santoro or his wife Ginger. This hidden affinity for the anarchic ends his stance in Vegas and those relationships.

7.
Both films, likewise, in their documentary-construct, create an image of capitalism, marred in the perspective, of its style and intent. Goodfellas shows low-rank folks engaging in destruction as a superficial response to their needs. Casino seems more about class relations -- the greater expense, greater yield, greater loss, an oblique image.

8.
Their successes are reliant on their imaginary social structures and corresponding perspectives -- Henry relies on the charity of the family for his low-rank living, whereas Ace depends upon public relations and flirtations with the legitimate to stay his stature. Likewise, the inequalities they revel in: crime vs legitimacy, bosses vs associates, casinos vs clientele. These enclosed networks are ruined in individual action -- Henry's ratting, Ace's ego, Nicky's excess.

9.
Scorsese's reborn style is free-associative, similar to the structure of Once Upon a Time in America without the intersecting time. Henry, Karen and Ace narrate from the present to the past, Nicky narrates from the past as present prior to his deletion. The stylistic sense of emotional freedom seems a harsh contrast to the casual brutality of their lifestyles.

10.
Back to the audience: they love these gangster films since they are so focused on an image, the idea of status or whatever else they may represent. The gangster image idealizes social repression in its dialectic of brutality and glamor. It's cyclical. One needs and balances the other.

11.
Gangster movies are as good as horrors for psychic insight and social criticism.

12.
Conclusion: 4/5. The only negative is in their excesses. And their excess is everything.