How Seeing Goodfellas in the Theater Changed the Way I Think About Film

A darkened theater can reveal more emotional perspective than a comfortable seat at home.

By ARGUN ULGUN

When the Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM) released a Martin Scorsese retrospective in 2013, I caught my first theatrical showing of Goodfellas (1990). Over several televised viewings, I had already memorized the iconic mafia film’s dialogue and scrutinized its technical merits.

Amid a full house, that night at the theater felt like an anonymous reunion. The audience and I knew the story, the lines, the beats. As such, I anticipated an evening of familiar laughs and snickers during the film’s mordantly humorous first act, to be followed by a shared silence as Jimmy Conway’s (Robert DeNiro) paranoia and Tommy Vito’s (Joe Pesci) psychopathy butchered Paulie Cicero’s (Paul Sorvino) crew from within.

But in the darkness of a theater, amongst a faceless crowd, Goodfellas’ first hour of comedy came across differently. The violence and exploitation amid the characters’ belly laughs and idle talk left an uncomfortable impression on the audience. Our self-aware response in public constituted mild chuckles, if that.

As Goodfellas continued, the audience’s controlled laughter and silence became a film itself to me, with our climactic moment occurring well before the film ended.

In Scorsese’s film, Tommy Vito’s murder of Spider (Michael Imperioli) at a friendly card game is based on little more than a routine verbal insult. The scene is a textbook example of multiple point-of-view mastery.

Henry Hill (Ray Liotta) rushes over to Spider’s corpse and exclaims, “He’s dead.” But he does this with an insufferably cloying stupor that perpetuates his self-delusion about his crew’s general “Goodfella” nature. Also there, DeNiro’s Jimmy is livid, not because an innocent man was murdered, but because he doesn’t want to be involved. Tommy — a ragingly insecure psychopath to Jimmy’s more financially motivated version of the same — is slightly remorseful, but only because his buddies didn’t laughingly approve of his action.

In the theater, however, there was a fourth vocal response to the violent act: a lone audience member shrieked when Tommy pulled the trigger to kill Spider.

Her reaction was a part of the film I missed on virtually every prior viewing. Her genuine horror at the unjustified execution of an innocent governed the remainder of the scene for me, for us in the theatre. The responses of Goodfellas’ characters, as compelling as they were, felt small and acutely selfish in comparison to this audience member’s powerful emotional response amongst an otherwise silent crowd.