Look, Goodfellas is a phenomenal film, what The Godfather: Part III (The Death of Michael Corleone) should've been. Martin Scorsese not winning the Academy Award for Best Picture that year — one of the many greatest films unfairly snubbed by the Academy — was a gross injustice. However, there exists another film that I always feel deserves to be equally worthy, and, 30 years later, feel far superior: Casino. I revisit both every year, but the 1995 film has a stronger gravitational pull, which the former lacks.
Based on true events surrounding the mob chronicled in two books written by author Nicholas Pileggi — Goodfellas, from "Wiseguy: Life in a Mafia Family", and Casino, from "Casino: Love and Honor in Las Vegas" — they feature several similar characters and a similar account of the mob's operations, leading everyone to label it "Goodfellas-2". The former was told from the perspective of its protagonist, Henry Hill, played by Liotta. Casino, however, benefits from a more intriguing structure: Scorsese decided it best to narrate the events from the perspectives of two characters, Sam "Ace" Rothstein (Robert De Niro) and Nicky Santoro (Joe Pesci). Rothstein’s voiceover opens the film: as he gets into his car, it explodes. We assume he is dead.
This clever narrative device is not Scorsese’s invention. Billy Wilder did it 45 years ago in Sunset Boulevard, the reinvention of which Scorsese pulls off beautifully. We then follow the brutally honest narration of Rothestein and Santoro; nothing is held back. Just because you hear them narrating their past, it’s not necessarily a guarantee that either of them is alive. This is one of the areas where Casino has a slightly superior edge over Goodfellas — the behaviour of a mystery. Who makes it out in one piece? Who doesn't? Each man gives his own take on how he sees the world and offers unapologetic justification for every past (mis)deed. Santoro has no qualms about admitting that he is a scumbag. The motivations of these two characters are clear as day. Interestingly, we don’t hear the voiceover of Sharon Stone’s Ginger, the third member of the lead trio. We don't see what drives her or, as Rothestein himself tells us in one scene, what moves her. She is the most unpredictable of the three.
In Goodfellas, Pesci's voice-over is absent; there, he is the most unpredictable character. Henry Hill's wife (Lorraine Bracco) gets one, though. She honestly recounts her reasons for opting to spend the rest of her life with Hill and deal with all his mess. Perhaps Scorsese chose to have Santoro do the narration because he is no longer an unpredictable character: We have already seen a version of Santoro in Tommy DeVito from Goodfellas. Though Santoro feels like an extension of the same character, there’s nothing to complain about. Who doesn’t like seeing Pesci f**k things up? Ginger's true nature is gradually revealed, and in the end, her actions "f**ked it all up" — in the words of Santoro, who also played a major part in the "f**king up." And last, but not least, we get a palpable sense of the history of the mob's operations in Vegas before it was taken over by corporations, through the extremely engrossing Discovery Channel-style narration, accessible to even the layman.
Goodfellas' Henry Hill was a compelling character, sure, but I found Rothstein to be even more so. Hill was just a young boy who hero-worshipped the gangsters in his neighborhood. Being a gangster, he thought, would make him “invincible” and, maybe, equal to the “President of the United States.” (Well, now that you think about it...) He despised those who “made a living by regular means” and called them “losers.” Rothstein, on the other hand, is already living like the “President of the United States” and hanging out with “guys who play Golf with the POTUS.” He is an incredibly smart man who is likened to a “brain surgeon" by Santoro. He is astute, very particular about how the day-to-day operations in a Casino are carried out, dresses sharply, and probably has OCD?
So, naturally, we wonder how a man like that couldn’t apply his brains when it came to one thing: love and women. Acknowledging his failure, Rothestein tells us: "I decided to complicate my life." It’s the kind of narration that has noir written all over it. Ginger is, after all, the epitome of a femme fatale. Careful observation will reveal that it was Rothstein’s decision that led to all the dominoes (no pun intended) crashing down, along with many towering hotels and casinos; yet, the mob didn't see it fit to give him a harsh — if not harsher — punishment just as they would for Santoro, later. (We get the answer, of course, but it makes you wonder, doesn’t it?) It’s one of the reasons why Rothstein is a more emotionally involving and relatable character as opposed to Hill.
While “repeating” what Pesci did in Goodfellas may have been a gutsy filmmaking choice, let’s look at it this way: Casino is simply offering more delights for Pesci fans who couldn’t get enough of his shenanigans in the former. Whether indulging in new forms of depravity, repeatedly stabbing a guy in the neck with relish, or putting another guy's head in a vice and trying to gouge out his eyeballs, there is something oddly cathartic about Pesci's mesmerising performance. Thankfully, Scorsese was wise enough to not make Pesci repeat the same in The Irishman, 24 years later. Twice was enough, no?
Ginger is a character I couldn’t get on board with in the first viewing. At the time, I was 15, with less exposure to world cinema. This character, along with the ridiculously huge number of expletives used in the film (422 uses of the f-word), was admittedly off-putting. And since I saw Goodfellas first, I found it to be the superior one at the time. Up until that point, I don't think any other movie character had managed to disgust me as much as she did. I felt pity for Rothstein, and the whole time I was asking myself: "Why the f**k did you have to marry her? You are supposed to be super smart. Why, man? Why?" But years later, I found myself going back to this film, again and again, and finally reached the conclusion: "You are supposed to be disgusted by Ginger!" I now regard it as Stone's best performance. (Some people might disagree with me and remind me of that little Paul Verhoeven film where she did that little leg-crossing trick.) I wish she got to do more roles like this one. I found Ginger to be more fleshed out than Lorraine Bracco's Karen in Goodfellas. Her relationship with her pimp (James Woods at his creepiest best) is reminiscent of Jodie Foster and Harvey Keitel's in Taxi Driver.
In Casino, Scorsese takes some of the new filmmaking techniques he introduced in Goodfellas and cranks them up to ten. The entire film feels like it’s on acid. The camera movement is fluid, occasionally swooping down on characters and gliding in and out of casinos, approaching the characters swiftly, moving away from them, and, of course, the disorienting (in a good way) swish pans. (Robert Richardson also shot Scorsese’s The Aviator, Hugo, Shutter Island, and Bringing Out the Dead). And Thelma Schoonmaker’s delightfully bravura editing, a standout characteristic of every Scorsese film, is on full display here, too, but slightly more unhinged. Sometimes portions of the frame are darkened with only a few characters highlighted. The sets are lit in a way that makes the characters seem like they are under multiple spotlights, creating the sensation that they’re being “examined” under a microscope — or being “judged” (an oft-recurring theme in Scorsese’s work).
Much has been said about the Steadicam-filmed Copacabana sequence in Goodfellas, but it pales in comparison to what Scorsese demonstrates at the beginning of Casino, allowing us a sort of voyeuristic peek into the shady operations going on behind the scenes inside these gambling dens. And there is no rest for Scorsese's "jukebox" here, as rock and soul classics from the 1950s to '70s accompany every scene without missing a beat. Every moment is directed with a delirious energy that is not seen in any of his previous films. (Of course, some of these techniques would show up in his later films, such as Gangs of New York, The Aviator, The Departed, and The Wolf of Wall Street.) Boasting a scale and scope larger than those of Goodfellas, the film plays out like a Greek tragedy and is one of Scorsese's most magnificent epics.
