martin scorsese sopranos

“They use language – four-letter words – in front of their daughters, at the dinner table? And it’s deliriously enjoyable. I don’t get it. What seemed sizzly and transgressive in Goodfellas looks, in The Sopranos, exhausted and trashy. This is not a new tension in art—Don Giovanni was not exactly a Presbyterian—but in a genre obsessed with the codes and customs of people who reject the usual norms of society, it can be a powerful line of inquiry into the moral status of art itself. The world, as Fredo Corleone knew it, has never been an easy place for middle children. In part, this ambiguity is enabled by The Godfather’s semi-euphemistic relationship to violence. Discussing Al Pacino, he said he was in the running to direct the star in Serpico (1973), he said: “Thankfully, I didn’t get it: it’s a Sidney Lumet thing, and he handled it beautifully. One is as giddy an exploration of sin as has ever been put on film, and the other is a document of intense spiritual yearning. If the characters in Goodfellas are like little boys with guns, they have something of the innocence of little boys, even in their adult vices. Instead of Coppola’s quiet visual of a fish stuffed in a bulletproof vest, Scorsese gives us De Niro’s shoe crashing into Frank Vincent’s rib cage again and again and again. Christ gets crucified; Henry Hill gets another martini. “No, there were a lot of meetings that I was considered for but found that I couldn’t fit in. In a world defined by the silence of God, people’s inner suffering tends to fall in direct proportion to how thoughtful they are and how good they try to be. Scorsese is absolutely clear about this: Being a crook is fun. By lightening The Godfather’s atmosphere of moral somberness while ramping up its depiction of traumatic consequences, Goodfellas also ends up foreshadowing much of the most acclaimed TV of the past two decades. Plus: MSNBC’s Jacob Soboroff, Analyzing “Know Your Place” and Breaking Down One of Its Iconic Scenes. Wow! The thrill of watching the characters behave badly keeps swerving uneasily into recognition of the damage their bad behavior does to everyone they meet. Really, though, Scorsese’s moral universe, at least in his later work, is pretty consistent. All the annoying social conditioning the rest of us put up with on a daily basis—be polite, do what you’re told, save your money, pay your taxes—they throw out the window. In the Corleones’ universe, honor and family tradition are the gateway virtues that lead to a life of crime; power reinforces itself within a complex web of obligation and loyalty. David Chase has credited Goodfellas as a major inspiration for The Sopranos, though frankly the lineage would be hard to miss even if he hadn’t—27 actors from Scorsese’s film ended up working for Chase on the HBO series, including major Sopranos characters like Dr. Melfi (Lorraine Bracco) and Christopher “Chris-ta-phaaaa” Moltisanti (Michael Imperioli). In The Sopranos, the protagonists have lost this innocence. For Liotta, Robert De Niro, and Joe Pesci, the reason to get involved in the mafia is that it’s easy and fun. During the first film, he’s slowly brought inside, but the director, Francis Ford Coppola, works this through a particularly sneaky and brilliant trick. From a moral perspective, the heroes of Goodfellas are essentially toddlers: They take what they want, they hit you if they don’t like you, and they throw violent tantrums when they don’t get their way. October 02 2019 09:35 PM Martin Scorsese has said he only ever watched one episode of The Sopranos because he could not identify “with that generation of … The Godfather gives Michael a series of decisions in which the seemingly “good,” or at least brave and honorable, course prompts him to move deeper and deeper into mob life. Or it does until you see the psychological toll that this kind of fun has on the deeply (or rather, shallowly) non-introspective guys who enjoy it. “Then he started working with Brian De Palma a lot, but over the years he was always very good with me, respectful. Scorsese also told the magazine how he went through a period in his career where he “couldn’t get anything made”. In a way, by structuring itself around the arc of psychotherapy, The Sopranos arguably represents a partial return toward the old moral grandeur of The Godfather. You could add Deadwood, Better Call Saul, Killing Eve, Succession, and countless others, in one way or another, to the list of shows that adapt Goodfellas’ “It’s fun … we’re doomed” tension for television—though even the best of them seldom approach the offhand elegance of Scorsese’s masterpiece. Plus: The Jets are first in line in the Trevor Lawrence sweepstakes, and RedZone takes an L. 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Instead of clothing a violent story in respect for your dignity as a viewer, Goodfellas wants you to feel how exhilarating it is to misbehave. The mob pulls him in by exploiting his better qualities, and kills his soul by exploiting its very depth. Even now, people sometimes find it strange that Scorsese made Goodfellas so soon after The Last Temptation of Christ. Dak Prescott’s pursuit of the passing record at least made the Cowboys interesting. Goodfellas is far more than a transitional film, but it does link the past and the future in some important ways. He told Sight & Sound magazine: “I think I only saw one episode of The Sopranos, for example, because I can’t identify with that generation of the underworld. (The ending of Goodfellas, for instance, didn’t provoke a national nervous breakdown.) Coppola hides some (though not all) of the film’s most gruesome business behind iconic cyphers: Luca Brasi sleeps with the fishes. Who likes obeying the rules when they get in your way? In one sense, though, it’s understandable. Michael Corleone starts out as someone who, like the viewer, is looking in on the mob from the outside. But the point is that Scorsese doesn’t hide any of this. The stakes of humanism matter in The Sopranos, and Chase needs you to know it; Goodfellas, sticking closely to the perspectives of its protagonists, doesn’t bother with any of that fancy stuff, not when there are airports to rob and furs to swipe off trucks. © Aberdeen Journals Ltd 2020. Scorsese’s film, the sprawling story of Henry Hill, a mid-shelf, midcentury mobster played by Ray Liotta, and his cronies in the not-quite-big-time Brooklyn underworld, didn’t revolutionize anything. What did their showings teach us? Chase has specifically talked about the dense kinetic detail of the milieu—Goodfellas’ manic pasta dinners, and how they contrast with The Godfather’s restrained classicism. “I just didn’t grow up that way,” added the filmmaker. “They live in New Jersey with the big houses? There’s no romance to it, though; Scorsese may defer the final reckoning, but he never hides the costs. But the influence goes deeper. In Goodfellas, which takes place a generation later and several rungs down the power scale, it’s not clear that Henry and his gang have souls. The Godfather revolutionized the movies. Or at least it does right up until it crosses the invisible line that makes it feel queasy and disturbing. The tension it exploits, the push-pull between sympathy and judgment, is the major attribute of the whole slew of antihero shows of the first decade and a half of the 2000s. Goodfellas didn’t do any of that stuff. 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The world is not easy for middle children, but Goodfellas shows the truth of another axiom, too: Sometimes the bad guys have all the fun. The movie didn’t launch an array of imitators (at least, not imitators that weren’t already imitating The Godfather) or transform an industry. What Week 6’s Uninspired QB Performances Tell Us About Teams’ Playoff Hopes. No one. It contained its share of iconic moments—“Now go home and get your fuckin’ shinebox”; “You think I’m funny?”—but none on the “May the Force Be With You” god-tier rung of half a dozen moments from The Godfather, or on the slow-burn cultural-obsession level of the gradually unfolding plots of The Sopranos. He never asked for this. Why does a person become a gangster, and how do we, the audience, feel about the choice? “At that time I really couldn’t get anything made. If it’s true that every great work of art ends one genre and founds another, then Goodfellas could be seen as the culmination of the tradition represented by The Godfather and as the vital link between the New Hollywood cinema of the ’70s and what we now think of as the golden age of TV. It was only a perfect movie. Martin Scorsese’s Goodfellas opened 30 years ago this week, on September 19, 1990. If it’s true that every great work of art ends one genre and founds another, then Goodfellas could be seen as the culmination of the tradition represented by The Godfather and as the vital link between the New Hollywood cinema of the ’70s and what we now think of as the golden age of TV.

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