Crimefellas -- Scorsese's `Goodfellas' Is A Troubling, Brilliant Inside Look At The Mob

XXXX ``GoodFellas,'' with Ray Liotta, Robert De Niro, Joe Pesci, Lorraine Bracco, Paul Sorvino. Directed by Martin Scorsese, from a script by Scorsese and Nicholas Pileggi. City Centre, Crossroads, Factoria, Gateway, Grand Cinemas Alderwood, Oak Tree, Renton Village. ``R'' - Restricted, due to language, extreme violence.

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Martin Scorsese's ``GoodFellas'' is based on the true story of a Brooklyn mobster's quarter-century with the Mafia.

Yet this extraordinarily personal adaptation of Nicholas Pileggi's 1985 best-seller, ``Wiseguy,'' never reminds you of a documentary or a studiously objective nonfiction report. It's an inside account, something like a Hitler youth's memoirs of his good and bad times with the Third Reich, and how he finally abandoned his cohorts not out of a sense of justice but in order to ensure his own survival.

It's a troubling film, perhaps more horrifying in its depiction of casual, merciless urban violence than anything Scorsese or any other filmmaker has done to date. What's most disturbing about it is that the killers are treated with such humor and affection that the audience is implicated in their emotions, becoming vicarious accessories to their crimes.

This goes well beyond the screwball black farce of a movie like Jonathan Demme's ``Married to the Mob,'' which deliberately distances us from its cartoonish killers and says we're not like them. Scorsese insists that a part of us is like them, that given the right (or wrong) circumstances, everyone is vulnerable to peer pressure and capable of savagery.

At the outset, the central character is an outsider, a half-Irish, half-Sicilian boy named Henry Hill (Ray Liotta), who abandons school to be a Mafia mascot. He likes the perks (money, respect, emotional support from his newfound peers) and grows up to become an integral part of the mob, palling around with such kingpins as Jimmy Conway (Robert De Niro) and the near-psychotic Tommy DeVito (Joe Pesci).

Time and again, Scorsese hammers home the idea that crime is exciting, that murderers can be ingratiating, that a gang of thieves is an extremely seductive family. It's a given that power, even if gained through extortion and thievery, is an aphrodisiac. Like Gus Van Sant's ``Drugstore Cowboy,'' which has been unfairly accused of glamorizing drugs, ``GoodFellas'' never denies the attraction of crime, and it may draw even more criticism than Van Sant did on this count.

It also doesn't soft-pedal the ugliness of its characters' endeavors or the consequences of an amoral life. Right from the pre-credits opening, the murders in this film are hideous; there is nothing abstract or statistical or distanced about them. Perhaps because Scorsese himself grew up in Little Italy and understands the territory so well, ``GoodFellas'' goes even deeper than ``The Godfather'' in suggesting the corrupting nature of family feeling - and the way it leads almost inevitably to disloyalty, betrayal and smiling fratricide.

Although the movie reunites Scorsese with De Niro, who gave his most explosive performances under Scorsese's direction (``Mean Streets,'' ``Taxi Driver,'' ``Raging Bull''), it's more of an ensemble piece than their other pictures. De Niro is splendid as the unpredictable Conway, but so are Pesci, Liotta (Christopher Serrone plays him as a boy), Lorraine Bracco as Hill's excitable wife and Paul Sorvino as the group's would-be Don Corleone, who gives equal weight to family ``business'' and the preparation of sausages and pasta sauces.

Many of the comic high points revolve around food, restaurants and prison cells that are redesigned as mini-restaurants for this elite crew of criminals, and some of the best jokes come directly from the soundtrack, which makes ironic use of everything from Donovan's ``Atlantis'' to Jack Jones' ``Wives and Lovers'' to Sid Vicious' version of ``My Way.''

Scorsese doesn't seem to have forgotten a single tacky Top 40 hit from the 1960s-1970s (the movie begins in 1955 and ends in 1980). He takes an almost sadistic pleasure in showing how they were once part of our lives, whether we wanted them there or not.

``GoodFellas'' is an appalling masterpiece of the kind that, along with New York's current well-publicized troubles, is likely to give pause to anyone planning to make a trip to the city. But a postscript includes a local kicker - tying Henry Hill's career to Seattle in 1987 - that makes the hellish world it re-creates seem suddenly, spookily smaller.