"Because there is actually something very interesting in Goodfellas, how the style of the film changes as time goes by and based on the mental state of the protagonist"
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The canniest compliment in Alex Cox's remark is that it treats style as plot. In Goodfellas, the camera isn't just recording Henry Hill's rise and fall; it's behaving like him. Early on, Scorsese's movement is seductively fluent: long takes, gliding tracking shots, pop-song propulsion. It feels like access. The viewer is given the same narcotic certainty Henry has - that the world will open if you know the right doors, tip the right guy, smile at the right moment.
Cox is pointing at the pivot most gangster movies dodge: the moment where the dream doesn't simply sour, it speeds up, frays, and turns paranoid. As time advances and Henry's mental state collapses, the film's formal language gets harsher and more breathless. Cutting accelerates; the soundtrack crowds the air; comedy turns into a stress response. The famous "cocaine day" sequence isn't just narrative chaos, it's editorial panic - a film grammar that mimics stimulant overload and surveillance anxiety. Style becomes an internal organ.
The subtext is a quiet rebuke to critics who separate "content" from "technique" as if craft were decoration. Cox, himself a director shaped by post-New Hollywood volatility, is admiring a movie that admits its own complicity: it lures you with swagger, then makes you feel the hangover in your nervous system. Goodfellas works because it doesn't moralize from a safe distance; it changes its skin when the protagonist does, forcing the audience to experience the cost of the fantasy, not just understand it.
Cox is pointing at the pivot most gangster movies dodge: the moment where the dream doesn't simply sour, it speeds up, frays, and turns paranoid. As time advances and Henry's mental state collapses, the film's formal language gets harsher and more breathless. Cutting accelerates; the soundtrack crowds the air; comedy turns into a stress response. The famous "cocaine day" sequence isn't just narrative chaos, it's editorial panic - a film grammar that mimics stimulant overload and surveillance anxiety. Style becomes an internal organ.
The subtext is a quiet rebuke to critics who separate "content" from "technique" as if craft were decoration. Cox, himself a director shaped by post-New Hollywood volatility, is admiring a movie that admits its own complicity: it lures you with swagger, then makes you feel the hangover in your nervous system. Goodfellas works because it doesn't moralize from a safe distance; it changes its skin when the protagonist does, forcing the audience to experience the cost of the fantasy, not just understand it.
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