Awake in the Dark: The Best of Roger Ebert (34 page)

Sal is a tough, no-nonsense guy who basically wants to get along and tend to business. One of his sons is a vocal racist-in private, of course. The other is more open toward blacks. Sal's ambassador to the community is a likeable local youth named Mookie (Spike Lee), who delivers pizzas and also acts as a messenger of news and gossip. Mookie is good at his job, but his heart isn't in it; he knows there's no future in delivering pizzas.

We meet other people in the neighborhood. There's Da Mayor (Ossie Davis), a kind of everyman who knows everybody. Buggin' Out (Giancarlo Esposito), a vocal militant. Radio Raheem (Bill Nunn), whose boom box defines his life and provides a musical cocoon to insulate him from the world. Mother Sister (Ruby Dee), who is sort of the neighborhood witch. And there's the local disk jockey, whose program provides a running commentary, and a retarded street person who wanders around selling photos of Martin Luther King and Malcolm X, and then there are three old guys on the corner who comment on developments, slowly and at length.

This looks like a good enough neighborhood-like the kind of urban stage the proletarian dramas of the 1930s liked to start with. And for a long time during Do the Right Thing, Spike Lee treats it like a backdrop for a Saroyanesque slice of life. But things are happening under the surface. Tensions are building. Old hurts are being remembered. And finally the movie explodes in racial violence.

The exact nature of that violence has been described in many of the articles about the film-including two I wrote after the movie's tumultuous premiere at the Cannes Film Festival-but in this review I think I will not outline the actual events. At Cannes, I walked into the movie cold, and its ending had a shattering effect precisely because I was not expecting it. There will be time, in the extended discussions this movie will inspire, to discuss in detail who does what, and why. But for now I would like you to have the experience for yourself, and think about it for yourself. Since Spike Lee does not tell you what to think about it, and deliberately provides surprising twists for some of the characters, this movie is more openended than most. It requires you to decide what you think about it.

Do the Right Thing is not filled with brotherly love, but it is not filled with hate, either. It comes out of a weary urban cynicism that has settled down around us in recent years. The good feelings and many of the hopes of the 196os have evaporated, and today it would no longer be accurate to make a movie about how the races in America are all going to love one another. I wish we could see such love, but instead we have deepening class divisions in which the middle classes of all races flee from what's happening in the inner city, while a series of national administrations provides no hope for the poor. Do the Right Thing tells an honest, unsentimental story about those who are left behind.

It is a very well made film, beautifully photographed by Ernest Dickerson, and well acted by an ensemble cast. Danny Aiello has the pivotal role, as Sal, and he suggests all of the difficult nuances of his situation. In the movie's final scene, Sal's conversation with Mookie holds out little hope, but it holds out at least the possibility that something has been learned from the tragedy, and the way Aiello plays this scene is quietly brilliant. Lee's writing and direction are masterful throughout the movie; he knows exactly where he is taking us, and how to get there, but he holds his cards close to his heart, and so the movie is hard to predict, hard to anticipate. After we get to the end, however, we understand how, and why, everything has happened.

Some of the advance articles about this movie have suggested that it is an incitement to racial violence. Those articles say more about their authors than about the movie. I believe that any good-hearted person, white or black, will come out of this movie with sympathy for all of the characters. Lee does not ask us to forgive them, or even to understand everything they do, but he wants us to identify with their fears and frustrations. Do the Right Thing doesn't ask its audiences to choose sides; it is scrupulously fair to both sides, in a story where it is our society itself which is not fair.

SEPTEMBER 21, 1990

There really are guys like this. I've seen them across restaurants and I've met them on movie sets, where they carefully explain that they are retired and are acting as technical consultants. They make their living as criminals, and often the service they provide is that they will not hurt you if you pay them. These days there is a certain guarded nostalgia for their brand of organized crime, because at least the mob would make a deal with you for your life, and not just kill you casually, out of impatience or a need for drugs.

Martin Scorsese's GoodFellas is a movie based on the true story of a mid-level professional criminal named Henry Hill, whose only ambition, from childhood on, was to be a member of the outfit. We see him with his face at the window, looking across the street at the neighborhood mafioso, who drove the big cars and got the good-looking women and never had to worry about the cops when they decided to hold a party late at night. One day the kid goes across the street and volunteers to help out, and before long he's selling stolen cigarettes at a factory gate and not long after that the doorman at the Copacabana knows his name.

For many years, it was not a bad life. The rewards were great. The only thing you could complain about was the work. There is a strange, confused evening in Hill's life when some kidding around in a bar leads to a murder, and the guy who gets killed is a "made man"-a man you do not touch lightly, because he has the mob behind him-and the body needs to be hidden quickly, and then later it needs to be moved, messily. This kind of work is bothersome. It fills the soul with guilt and the heart with dread, and before long Henry Hill is walking around as if there's a lead weight in his stomach.

But the movie takes its time to get to that point, and I have never seen a crime movie that seems so sure of its subject matter. There must have been a lot of retired technical consultants hanging around. Henry Hill, who is now an anonymous refugee within the federal government's witness protection program, told this life story to the journalist Nicholas Pileggi, who put it into the best seller Wiseguy, and now Pileggi and Scorsese have written the screenplay, which also benefits from Scorsese's first-hand observations of the Mafia while he was a kid in Little Italy with his face in the window, watching the guys across the street.

Scorsese is in love with the details of his story, including the Mafia don who never, ever talked on the telephone, and held all of his business meetings in the open air. Or the way some guys with a body in the car trunk stop by to borrow a carving knife from one of their mothers, who feeds them pasta and believes them when they explain that they got blood on their suits when their car hit a deer. Everything in this movie reverberates with familiarity; the actors even inhabit the scenes as if nobody had to explain anything to them.

GoodFellas is an epic on the scale of The Godfather, and it uses its expansive running time to develop a real feeling for the way a lifetime develops almost by chance at first, and then sets its fateful course. Because we see mostly through the eyes of Henry Hill (Ray Liotta), characters swim in and out of focus; the character of Jimmy Conway (Robert De Niro), for example, is shadowy in the earlier passages of the film, and then takes on a central importance. And then there's Tommy DeVito (Joe Pesci), always on the outside looking in, glorying in his fleeting moments of power, laughing too loudly, slapping backs with too much familiarity, pursued by the demon of a raging anger that can flash out of control in a second. His final scene in this movie is one of the greatest moments of sudden realization I have ever seen; the development, the buildup and the payoff are handled by Scorsese with the skill of a great tragedian.

GoodFellas isn't a mythmaking movie, like The Godfather. It's about ordinary people who get trapped inside the hermetic world of the mob, whose values get worn away because they never meet anyone to disagree with them. One of the most interesting characters in the movie is Henry Hills's wife, Karen (Lorraine Bracco), who is Jewish and comes from outside his world. He's an outsider himself-he's half Irish, half Italian, and so will never truly be allowed on the inside-but she's so far outside that at first she doesn't even realize what she's in for. She doesn't even seem to know what Henry does for a living, and when she finds out, she doesn't want to deal with it. She is the conarrator of the film, as if it were a documentary, and she talks about how she never goes anywhere or does anything except in the company of other mob wives. Finally she gets to the point where she's proud of her husband for being willing to go out and steal to support his family, instead of just sitting around like a lot of guys.

The parabola of GoodFellas is from the era of "good crimes" like stealing cigarettes and booze and running prostitution and making book, to bad crimes involving dope. The Godfather in the movie (Paul Sorvino) warns Henry Hill about getting involved with dope, but it's not because he disapproves of narcotics (like Brando's Don Corleone); it's because he seems to sense that dope will spell trouble for the mob, will unleash street anarchy and bring in an undisciplined element. What eventually happens is that Hill makes a lot of money with cocaine but gets hooked on it as well, and eventually spirals down into the exhausted paranoia that proves to be his undoing.

Throbbing beneath the surface of GoodFellas, providing the magnet that pulls the plot along, are the great emotions in Hill's makeup: a lust for recognition, and a fear of powerlessness and guilt. He loves it when the headwaiters know his name, but he doesn't really have the stuff to be a great villain-he isn't brave or heartless enough-and so when he does bad things, he feels bad afterward. He begins to hate himself. And yet he cannot hate the things he covets. He wants the prizes, but he doesn't want to pay for the tickets.

And it is there, on the crux of that paradox, that the movie becomes Scorsese's metaphor for so many modern lives. He doesn't parallel the mob with corporations, or turn it into some kind of grotesque underworld version of yuppie culture. Nothing is that simple. He simply uses organized crime as an arena for a story about a man who likes material things so much that he sells his own soul to buy them-compromises his principles, betrays his friends, abandons his family, and finally even loses contact with himself. And the horror of the film is that, at the end, the man's principal regret is that he doesn't have any more soul to sell.

DECEMBER 20, 1991

Oliver Stone'sJFK builds up an overwhelming head of urgency that all comes rushing out at the end of the film, in a tumbling, angry, almost piteous monologue-the whole obsessive weight of Jim Garrison's conviction that there was a conspiracy to assassi- nateJohn F. Kennedy. With the words come images, faces, names, snatches of dialogue, flashbacks to the evidence, all marshaled to support his conclusion that the murder of JFK was not the work of one man.