Summary
Henry drops his brother off at his house, and explains to us that he is in charge of the family dinner that night. At 11:30 AM, he begins prepping ingredients for a sauce, a cigarette hanging out of his mouth. “I was home for dinner early. My plan was to start early, so Karen and I could unload the guns that Jimmy didn’t want and then get the package for Lois to take to Atlanta,” he narrates, as we see him walking over to the front door to check for the helicopter. Henry instructs his brother, Michael, to watch the sauce in his absence, and rushes out the door with Karen. In the car, Karen spots the helicopter, which rattles Henry once again. They drive to Karen’s mother’s house, where Henry puts the bag of guns in a trash can in the garage. He then instructs Karen to tell her mother not to touch anything outside the house, which frustrates Karen. Karen and Henry look out for the helicopter from the garage before rushing to the car. “Let’s go shopping,” says Henry, and they speed off to the store. After hanging out at the store for awhile, Henry and Karen emerge and note that the helicopter is gone. They go back to Karen’s mother’s to pick up the guns again, then to the room of the gun and cocaine dealer from Pittsburgh. Karen takes a hit of cocaine, while Henry packs a bag filled with cocaine for Lois to deliver to Atlanta. In voiceover, Henry tells us that he had to go to his mistress Sandy’s apartment to pick up some more drugs before dinner, and that he was worried Sandy would be mad at him for not being more attentive to her.
Henry calls Lois the babysitter and asks her if she’s ready. She tells him she is, but gives him some attitude. He yells at her to call him from a payphone when she calls him, to which she halfheartedly agrees. Immediately after agreeing to call from a payphone, Lois calls him from his house phone, and Henry narrates in voiceover that if anyone was listening they would know that there was a package going out from his house that day. At 6:30 PM Henry arrives home and begins to cook, with only a few hours until Lois’s flight. Leaving the sauce once again in the care of Michael, Henry rushes off to Sandy’s where he does a lot of cocaine and she nags him about neglecting her. Henry reassures her and leaves with the drugs. At 10:45, Henry’s family is sitting around a big dinner. When he goes into the kitchen to start preparing the delivery, Lois comes in and informs him she has to go home to get her hat. He is furious, because they have to start taping the delivery to her body as soon as possible, but she insists that it’s her “lucky hat” and she never flies without it. He finally agrees and hastily drives her home to retrieve her hat. As he pulls out of the driveway, Henry notices a bunch of cop cars in the road and an undercover policeman suddenly pulls a gun on him, yelling orders to shut off the car. The scene cuts instantly to Karen, running to flush the drugs down the toilet as the cops bang on the door. She then puts a gun in her underwear as she prepares to answer the door.
A supertitle appears: “The Aftermath.” We see Henry in an office being questioned by a man, who threatens him with 25 years if he doesn’t give up any information. Lois enters the office and makes a face at Henry as she passes. In voiceover, Henry says, “All this time, I thought the guys in the helicopter were just local cops busting my balls over Lufthansa. They turned out to be narcs. They’d been on me for months. Phone taps, surveillance, everything.” A man comes in with a box of the instruments Henry used to cook cocaine. As they realize how much cocaine Henry was sitting on, the officer laughs and says, “Bye-bye dickhead!” The scene shifts to Henry in jail being visited by Karen. She tells him that Jimmy wants to talk with him, but Henry tells her that unless he straightens things out with Paulie, he’ll get whacked, so he’s less concerned with Jimmy. He begs Karen to help him get out of jail, and she eventually gets her mother to sell her house for his bail. We see Henry coming out of the jail and getting in a car with Karen and her mother. Worried that both Paulie and Jimmy have reason to kill him—Paulie for dealing drugs, Jimmy for ratting him out to Paulie—Henry has a plan to sell off the remaining drugs in their house and leave town for awhile. When he can’t find the drugs, Karen tells him that she flushed them down the toilet to evade the cops.
Henry is mortified and begins banging on the walls in desperation; those drugs were the only thing he had left to make money. Karen goes to him and they hold each other, sobbing. We see them sleeping in each other’s arms, a gun in Henry’s hand. The next day, Henry goes to Paulie to beg for forgiveness, insisting that he’s clean now and can be trusted. This does little to comfort Paulie, who tells Henry that he cannot forgive him for lying to him. When Henry is contrite and begs Paulie for help, Paulie hands him a wad of cash, $3200, saying, “Now I gotta turn my back on you.” Crying, Henry leaves the bar. Back at his house Henry tries to convince Karen to go on the run with him, but she refuses, calling him paranoid. The scene shifts and we see Karen talking to Jimmy, who asks after Henry, asks what the authorities have been asking him, and tells Karen to get Henry to call him. As she leaves, Jimmy tells Karen to go look down the street at some dresses he got. They say their goodbyes and she goes to investigate, but when Jimmy becomes insistent that she go look, and she sees the storefront he’s pointing at—an abandoned looking building with two intimidating looking guys inside—Karen grows suspicious and runs for the car, excusing herself to go find her kids and speeding away.
At home, Karen pulls into the driveway sobbing. Henry runs out of the house and asks her what happened. “I just got scared,” she tells him, and they go into the house. In voiceover, Henry discusses how easily the people in the mob, people that you've known your entire life, can turn on you. We see the diner, where Henry is meeting Jimmy. He tells us he wanted to meet somewhere crowded where they knew a lot of people, and that when he arrived 15 minutes early, Jimmy was already there. Jimmy is there to surmise whether Henry plans to rat him out, and he tells Henry about a young man who ratted everyone out not long ago. When Jimmy asks if Henry would be willing to go on “vacation” with Anthony to whack off the young informant, Henry agrees, anxiously smoking a cigarette. “Jimmy had never asked me to whack somebody before, but now he’s asking me to go down to Florida and do a hit with Anthony. That’s when I knew I would never have come back from Florida alive,” Henry narrates in voiceover.
The scene shifts and we see Henry and Karen sitting in an office speaking to a representative from the Witness Protection Program. He tells the officer that they don’t want to go anywhere cold, while Karen worries about being taken out of contact with her parents. The officer tells her that maybe something can be worked out if her parents get sick, but otherwise not. Karen gets upset at the thought of being torn away from her life, and Henry tells her that he can’t do it unless she and the kids come with him. She protests, but the officer tells her that if Henry goes without her, her life will be in a great deal of danger. We see Jimmy and Paulie being arrested, as the officer tells Henry in character that the Witness Protection Program is their “only salvation.” We see Henry testifying in court, as he narrates that it was easy for him to disappear, because none of his official documents were real, and he had never paid taxes. In court, Henry identifies Jimmy, who glares at him, and then Paulie. In voiceover, he explains that the only thing he was sad to give up was “the life,” explaining, “We were treated like movie stars with muscle. We had it all just for the asking.”
We see Henry in a bathrobe in his suburban home in the Witness Protection Program. He is dissatisfied with his boring life, and misses the thrill of membership in the mob, complaining that he can’t even find decent food. As we see Henry staring directly into the camera, he narrates, “I get to live the rest of my life like a schnook.” We see a flash of Tommy shooting a gun towards the camera as Sid Vicious’s cover of “My Way” plays. An epilogue is projected, stating that the real Henry Hill lived out the rest of his life in the Witness Protection Program, receiving 5 years probation at one point for narcotics conspiracy. In 1989, he and Karen separated after 25 years of marriage. Paulie died in prison, and at the time of the release of Goodfellas, Jimmy was still in prison, ineligible for parole until 2004.
Analysis
Food and its preparation is a recurring gag in the film, a motif meant to contrast with the brutal, stressful, and crime-addled lives of the main mugs. Often, when tensions are running high, the subject of food comes up. This comic contradiction between the thuggish lives of the characters and their gentler, feminized preoccupation with food preparation and quality, occurs first when Tommy, Jimmy, Henry are looking for a shovel at Tommy’s mother’s house. Covered in Billy’s blood, Tommy tries to deflect his mother’s insistence that they sit down and have a meal. Even in the wake of such gruesome atrocities, however, Tommy is a good Italian boy and cannot say no to his mother’s cooking. They sit down to eat. Italian tradition is inextricably interlaced with the mob tradition and the prevalence of violence. Food is also a comic device in jail, where Paulie, Henry, and the other mafia members enjoy feasts that do not match the typical associations with incarceration.
Food continues to be an important motif at the end of the film. As Henry is running around delivering drugs and weapons, visiting his mistress, and avoiding the watchful eye of a helicopter overhead, he becomes pedantically fussy about the preparation of the family dinner. In the midst of all that tension, he needs to cook a perfect meal, and he frets about the sauce at the least opportune times. Finally, when he is sent to live in a suburban house under the Witness Protection Program, “like a schnook,” as he says, his number one complaint is that he can’t find any decent food. When he ordered spaghetti with marinara, he tells us, he got egg noodles and ketchup. Not only is the life of a suburban nobody not for him, but the food isn’t any good. This lighthearted comedic device shows both the unexpected and uncanny sensitivity of the macho characters in the film, as well as their interest in having nice things. Indeed, as Henry explains, the interest in nice things is one of the defining characteristics of being a member of the mob. As a mob member, Henry was able to take anything he wanted; in the real world, he has to settle for middling, for egg noodles and ketchup.
In the final chapter of the film, we see Henry pushed to the limit and his bonds with the mafia dissolve. The men who helped raise him are now bent on killing him, and he feels pushed into a corner. This is perhaps the first time in the film that we see Henry as genuinely vulnerable. While he was able to wriggle out of most other situations throughout the film, shaking off the things that disturbed him and determined to live out the mobster life, by the end he is pushed into despondency and desperation, crying in the arms of his wife on their bedroom floor, begging Paulie for money, and suspiciously eyeing Jimmy over lunch at the diner. The familiarity of the “crew” and of his membership in the group is dissolved when he gets caught. He becomes too much of a liability to be welcome any longer in the group, and his life becomes much more dangerous.
After Jimmy almost has Karen killed, Henry begins to see just how twisted the affiliation he is in truly is, and begins to redefine what membership means. He explains that “If you’re part of a crew, nobody ever tells you that they’re going to kill you. It doesn’t happen that way. There weren’t any arguments or curses like in the movies. See, your murderers come with smiles. They come as your friends, the people who have cared for you all of your life.” This monologue serves as a kind of reversal of his definition of the “goodfella.” While Henry previously romanticized the notion of the “goodfella” or the “wise guy” before, and the goodfella’s membership in a family/crew, he now sees the deception of such a system, now that it is targeting him and threatening his life. In this monologue, he reveals that membership in the “crew,” rather than protecting the member, in fact makes him or her more vulnerable to violence. Furthermore, this violence is two-faced, arriving with a smile, from an old friend. The perversity of such a system finally makes an impression on Henry and Karen. While they were protected by the inner circle, they didn't mind the skewed ethics of the group. When their membership is taken away, the contradictions of the mobster lifestyle become glaring.
The Witness Protection Program forces Henry to break the most important code of mob fraternity. As he learned when he was first arrested as a kid, the worst thing a gangster can do is squeal on the crew to the police. A mobster is rewarded for keeping his mouth shut with more secure membership in the group. Thus, when Henry decides to squeal on Paulie and Jimmy to save his own life, he is sacrificing his life as a gangster to become a stool pigeon. While his decision keeps him alive, it removes him from the life he’s always known, a life—he reveals—that it is hard for him to leave behind. In the film’s only break from realism, Henry steps down from the witness stand in the courtroom to explain directly to the camera why he will miss being a gangster. In the Witness Protection Program, he will never be able to feel the rush of power, celebrity, and muscle, that the mafia afforded him. Instead, he has to join the ranks of suburban Joe Schmos, living in a cookie cutter house, wearing a bathrobe; even the pasta’s bad. The film ends on an ethically ambiguous note: Henry left the mafia to save his own life, but he still feels loyal to its codes. The final image of the film is its most brutal villain, Tommy, pointing a gun at the camera and firing.
