First off, I need to point you to my friend Glenn Kenny’s New York Times piece on Ray Liotta in his definitive role, playing gangster Henry Hill in Goodfellas. To quote another pal, Stephen Silver, Glenn literally “wrote the book” on Goodfellas (aka Made Men), and it’s great to read his granular observations on Liotta’s iconic – no exaggeration – performance. (I love the observation on a moment in the Voiceover: “Tuddy”. You almost never hear a voiceover narration that allows for moments like that. I always loved that moment but never put it into words, so I thank Glenn for providing me that moment of recognition and tribute. Yes! “Tuddy.”) But there are so many other great observations. Liotta “accosting” Irwin Winkler, and pitching himself for the role. It’s hard to picture anyone other than Ray Liotta in that role, but … everyone wanted that part. They cast a wide net. Liotta, who was already “out there” in the business, had to convince Winkler. And he did.
For a lot of people, our first encounter with Ray Liotta as the menacing ex-boyfriend in Jonathan Demme’s Something Wild, whose entrance, gliding into the frame on the dance floor, is unforgettable. In a flash, the entire movie changes. Something new … something wild … untameable … has entered the film. I know I thought, “WHO is THAT.”
He brought with him a legitimate sense of menace, a legitimate – not artificial – sense of cool, sociopathic cool, with all this STUFF churning underneath. He was like a wild animal. A wild animal you do not want to mess with. Liotta always had those two poles working within him – sweetness and wildness, unpredictability and vulnerability … Jennifer Lopez said he was the classic “tough guy who was mush on the insides”. That kind of thing can be a cliche. With him, it was organic. It arose naturally. He understood.
Even if Goodfellas hadn’t come along, he would still be remembered for Something Wild and Field of Dreams – more so for the latter, since it has entered the pantheon of American classic films (and it did so almost immediately). There are so many pitfalls in the material, pitfalls of schmaltzy sentimentality and self-righteous posturing (it falls into one of those pitfalls in the scene when Annie dresses down the book-banning PTA, and her exhilarated response … to herself … in the hallway after. My issues with her performance do not stop me from recognizing what is so radical about the conception of that character. I had no idea this was a controversial “take” until I wrote this piece. Supporting your husband’s dreams is so RETRO, apparently.) One of the ways Field of Dreams could have drowned would be if the golden glow of memory infiltrated every corner of the film. But it doesn’t go that route, and it starts with the casting of Ray Liotta as Shoeless Joe Jackson, and Liotta’s performance. (Along the way, choices were made to undercut the sentiment. James Earl Jones’ cranky recluse: he means business. There’s also the other ballplayers: trash-talking, harsh, hard-bitten guys – they don’t feel like idealized ghosts of the Ideal of Baseball. They’re real baseball players: some of them dumb, all of them cocky, razzing Ray for how his wife calls him to dinner, etc. Very smart choice.)
Ray Liotta is truly “Other” in Field of Dreams, embodying the disorientation of what it must be to be a ghost – echoing with regrets and unfinished business – suddenly sucked out of the ether and plopped into a perfect baseball field. He moves slowly at first, but he moves like a panther. A panther can stroll around and laze-about on a tree branch, but within all of that languid indolence is the potential for bursts of speed, for explosive power. The way Liotta runs to catch the ball, holding up his glove, and keeps running a little bit … almost like he himself is in slo-mo. He’s savoring it. He’s in awe of it. He feels the pleasure of it and he can’t quite believe it is happening. All of this takes an actor who can communicate not just with his face, but with his whole body, his every nerve ending. He doesn’t run or leap or slide: but the potential is within him at every moment.
Undercut, undercut, undercut. Liotta undercuts so powerfully that when the big moment comes – when there’s a big closeup and he says, “No. It was you, Ray” – with this simple tone of acknowledgement for all that Ray has done … the moment can handle it. Nothing is betrayed. Up until then, Liotta plays Shoeless Joe Jackson like a quietly ravenous animal, barely aware of Ray, at least not as anything other than the guy who owns the field. Shoeless Joe is into the grass, the glove, the sound of the bat, the dark expanse around him, the memories of playing, the sensory pleasures of it (boy does Liotta do justice to the little monologue he has: “I’d have played for nothing’.”) “No. It was you, Ray” … said like a kind father, making sure his son knows how special he is … can only exist because of all of the undercutting that came before. Shoeless Joe Jackson is tender. Liotta has space in him for both toughness and tenderness.
I feel like Glenn said what I needed to say about Goodfellas – and expressed stuff I couldn’t have put into words – “Tuddy…” – but I must mention two other things: Just two nights ago, on my De Niro kick – still – I watched Copland, or re-watched. I saw this one in the theatre. Liotta is so frazzled here, and he looks truly unwell – pasty and clammy and wild-eyed – as though the character lives his whole entire life like Henry Hill lived his May 11, 1980.
In Copland, Liotta’s “Figgis” does some horrendous and selfish things – one in particular – but, unlike Henry Hill, he is clearly tormented by it. It’s why he is such a wreck. The man has a conscience, which he has tried to bury underneath drugs. But the conscience finally cannot be ignored, and it all comes to a head in the great moment on the bridge, when Figgis, driving like a bat out of hell, to put as much distance between himself and Garrison, NJ as possible, suddenly starts screaming, as though someone else is in the car with him. “STOP IT. NO. STOP IT.” He slams on the brakes. There’s no one else in the car. It’s his conscience he’s hearing. Fabulous moment.
And finally, I must mention a film that hasn’t been getting much chatter ever since the news dropped that Liotta died. 2009’s Observe and Report was one of the best films of that year – but perhaps too dark and ambiguous for modern audiences who LOVE moralistic lessons, who yearn for films to telegraph who is Good and who is Bad, etc. Observe and Report harkens back to 1970s anti-hero ambivalence, with Seth Rogen’s dangerously gung-ho security guard taking “the law” of the shopping mall into his own hands. Ray Liotta plays a cop increasingly frustrated by this rent-a-cop getting in his way.
Liotta’s sense of exasperation increases by the second, until he finally is a raving MESS, trying to rein this douchebag in. Liotta is really the only person “outside” of Rogen’s deluded sense of self: everybody else in the film is roped into – or seduced into – believing Rogen’s bullshit. Liotta sees right through it. He’s a hot-head, but he’s a professional, and he is the only one who really perceives that this security guard is off the RAILS. (I wrote a long and, yes, rambling piece about Observe and Report, where I “went off” on a couple of things that bug me about current cultural discourse – which has gotten so much worse since I wrote the piece in 2009. So these comments MORE than stand. Long story short: see Observe and Report if you haven’t already.)
Liotta was rough around the edges but he could clean up nice-nice. Those rough edges were in the eyes: those icy eyes, which could be drained of humanity, or filled with humor, tenderness, passion. He was present, but he was present in the context of the character. There’s a difference. He gravitated towards reality. Watch again Field of Dreams, and his miraculous instincts … his instincts kept him away from sentimentalizing the character. The movie did all that work FOR him: on the ground, WITH him, it was all reality. (The mean loud cackle about not inviting Ty Cobb. All that.)
He could make you understand Henry Hill’s perspective, and – even more shocking – he forced you to wish Henry well. You’re on his side. And then you stop yourself short, shocked: “What the fuck am I supporting???”
Only a great actor can make you do that.
Two more pieces on Ray Liotta:
My friend Charlie wrote a gorgeous piece for Esquire.
Glenn Kenny wrote a scene piece, this time for The Decider, about Something Wild and Field of Dreams, two of the pre-Goodfellas performances.
If you haven’t seen it, I recommend Heartbreakers, a movie that doesn’t quite have the nerve to be as cynical as, say, Used Cars (not many movies do), but still has a lot of refreshingly unsentimental observations about humanity’s cupidity. Gene Hackman’s portrayal of a tobacco enthusiast is worth the price of admission and Liotta is convincing as perhaps the most decent of the grown-ups on display.
If I had a nickel for every different punk band called “Ray Liotta’s Brain” that I saw in the first decade of this century, I would have… well, 3 nickels, but it’s three more nickels than I would have guessed….
Ray Liotta was the star of my favorite movie, and coming off your De Niro piece and Scorcese triumph, this is as good a time as any for me to break down the brilliance of Goodfellas. I could go on all day, but will stick to what I think are the two biggest reasons the movie has endured, in that these are in my mind overlooked aspects of a film that has been analyzed to death.
1. Henry and Karen are giving court testimony, not “voice over”. This is very much in the text of the film, as Henry breaks the 4th wall at the end of the movie, and his “voiceover” becomes testimony, and he starts speaking directly to the audience. We can infer (perhaps) that ALL the voiceover has been the testimony at the trial we are watching. For some reason, this never really sunk in with me until many repeated viewings. (It’s by far my most watched movie. I bought a VCR tape in 1994 for $90 and wore it out.)
It’s important for many reasons. Scorsese is a genius with voice over, and Henry is the ultimate unreliable narrator. As we see, he never does anything TOO bad. He certainly didn’t kill anyone like Batz, (although he can maybe help you find the body), and he DEFINITELY didn’t know anything about Maury getting whacked. This squares the one part of the picture that felt weird to me for a while, the Maury murder. If Henry is telling the story, and as far as he knew Jimmy decided not to kill Maury, then how would he know Maury was talking about shaving points with Nunzio when he got an ice pick to the brain? I think we can infer Henry was in the car.
“But I told Jimmy not to do it. He said it was off, it was like a weight off my shoulders.” Yeah, sure Henry. The whole device allows us to soften to Henry. He is telling us a brutal, horrible story through rose colored glasses. He’s trying to sell it, not just to us, but to a jury. And he is VERY careful to not come across too badly. The unreliable narrator gets me to my second point.
2. Henry does NOT miss the action. I had to listen to Henry Hill himself on the commentary track to really get Goodfellas. What the late Mr. Hill said was this (and I am paraphrasing):
“I pretended to have a great time. We were always drinking and laughing and playing cards and cracking jokes. But the truth is I was terrified every second of every day. I was always afraid that today would be the day I would get murdered. I was happy to get out alive.”
This gets back to the movie telling us one thing but showing us another. It’s telling us, “Hey, you viewer, you’re a sucker. You have no balls. Jobs? Seriously? Just take what you want. You have no heart.” But what the movie is SHOWING us is “You are a freakin’ GENIUS for not joining this world. You want to wind up in a meat truck like Carbone? You’re not dumb, like everyone says, you’re SMAHT!”
So while the movie seems to be insulting us, it’s praising us. It’s a feel good story in the most unusual costume. (And the closing shots are a fascinating contrast with Wolf of Wall Street, which implicates the viewer in a way that Goodfellas does not).
And nobody gets that. Even today I am reading about how Henry is so, so, so SAD that he has to live the rest of his life as “an average nobody. I get to live the rest of my life as a schnook.”
But LOOK AT LIOTTA!!!!! Is he showing regret? Is he sad? Is he dejected? Hell no! HE IS RELIEVED! Liotta smiles and shows relief in that final shot. It’s a completely different expression than anything we have seen from Henry before, and in that one shot lies the entire subversive genius of the film. Did Liotta just GET that? Was he specifically directed to do that? How many takes did it take? Who gives a shit. It’s the best final shot in the history of film in my opinion, when followed with the Pesci gun blazing coda. It’s the reason the movie has a hold on people.
And I’ll make just one more of many possible points on the instinctual acting brilliance of Ray Liotta. The dinner scene with Joe Pesci’s Mom (played wonderfully by Martin Scorcese’s Mom. As an aside, the whole family can act, including Marty. Ever see Search and Destroy?), anyway the dinner scene was famously largely improvised. De Niro and Pesci are going on about the “the paw? The hoof” and the painting and this guys going this way and that way. And Liotta is firmly in character, worried, smoking, glancing at the car outside.
And then they notice Henry has been quiet. “Hey Henry, how come you don’t talk much. Why are you so quiet, what’s the matter with you?” The more I see it, it doesn’t feel like the characters busting Henry’s balls, it feels like the actors busting Liotta’s balls. And I think a lessor actor would have felt compelled to try to crack a joke, or say something about the cooking, or maybe we need to get going. But Liotta says “I’m just listening.” About as honest as could be. I don’t know for sure that was ad-libbed but it certainly feels like it, and it’s one of my favorite little moments in the movie.
You talk often about how hard it is to just listen as an actor. Not for Liotta.” I’m just listening.” Thank goodness.
Love this comment so much. I also had thought the movie (& Pileggi’s book) was awfully careful to not implicate Hill in anything too terrible, in particular keeping his hands clean of murder. The idea that all the voice-over should be thought of as testimony makes a lot of sense.
It also had struck me that Hill’s big downfall, his arrest for cocaine trafficking & subsequent ejection from the mob life, really came at the right time of life for him. The wiseguy lifestyle in Goodfellas is a young man’s fantasy of the good life: no regular job, take whatever you want, lots of booze & broads & trips to Vegas. But not a lot of people can or want to keep that up forever. Hill was, what, 38 or so when they got the goods on him? Just about the right time to move on to some kind of more adult life. Your comments here fill this idea out a lot more clearly though.
Since your catching up on older comments, I didn’t know if you missed my Goodfellas post, which I’m very proud of Lol.
I’ve been loving your De Niro analysis. Comparing Jackie Brown to Wag the Dog, how he ONLY gives the character EXACTLY what’s required and strips everything else away. I find him absolutely mesmerizing in so many films, Taxi Driver, Heat, Cape Fear, Goodfellas. He plays great psychos, but look at the 2 law enforcement guys in Midnight Run or Cop Land. Hard to believe it’s the same actor. It’s his willingness to take small, weird parts in stuff like Angel Heart or Brazil that makes him unique I think. He seems 100% committed to the art form with absolutely zero consideration to money or public persona. I doubt that is fully true, but it seems that way.
Todd, thanks for your insight. Personally, I agree with one part of your analysis and disagree with another part. I agree that by the end of Goodfellas, after everything the movie’s been telling us, if there’s still someone in the audience who says he/she wants to embrace the lifestyle: it’s just plain dumb, this person just hasn’t been listening nor paid attention at all (although we know, and Scorsese does too, that many will still say it!). This can’t be any clearer in my mind too. But, precisely, that it is Henry himself, after all the hell he’s been through, who still moans that he can’t get a proper dish of spaghetti, like he misses the life so much: it just shows how stupid he can be, and how little he has learnt. In my mind, it’s supposed to be ironic, and its supposed to be upsetting: how can anyone be THIS dumb? That’s my take on it, at least! Thanks again!
Hi Jose,
I am just giving my take obviously and understand your point. This movie is so rich that analyzing it seems like a never ending process. To me, Henry saying he misses the life is just one last taste of him trying to look and sound cool, trying to make the “life” seem wonderful, when it was anything but.
I see relief, not regret on his face, but that’s just me. One thing I think everyone agrees about is that Ray Liotta was nothing short of brilliant.
Thank you, Todd!
Thanks. And of course Hill did fall off the wagon repeatedly after entering Witness Protection, so the rush and addiction of that lifestyle is real. Otherwise it wouldn’t exist. But the idea that it’s FUN, that it’s something people should want to do, seems silly to me. Goodfellas gets accused of somehow endorsing this behavior while it’s not doing that at all. Which is why it’s so brilliant.
//And then they notice Henry has been quiet. “Hey Henry, how come you don’t talk much. Why are you so quiet, what’s the matter with you?” The more I see it, it doesn’t feel like the characters busting Henry’s balls, it feels like the actors busting Liotta’s balls. And I think a lessor actor would have felt compelled to try to crack a joke, or say something about the cooking, or maybe we need to get going. But Liotta says “I’m just listening.” About as honest as could be. I don’t know for sure that was ad-libbed but it certainly feels like it, and it’s one of my favorite little moments in the movie.//
I was rewatching this scene, and I can see what you mean. I think it’s real shyness that Liotta is projecting in that scene and that moment, it’s not about his character, but about himself and how he’s feeling at the moment, and it’s almost sweet to see. And the food, I love it when food is not just a prop in a scene, and it never is in a Scorsese film: the actors are really eating and really enjoying eating Cathy’s food and its just a joy to watch!