Which is the best of the two?
On the scale of Robert Deniro playing a serious, calculating man who has to deal with Joe Pesci as a reckless mobsters who’s eventually killed by the bosses, both movies have a perfect score.
On the scale of having voiceovers from several characters that explain their thoughts and gives backgrounders on the story and environment, both movies also have a perfect score.
But they do differ in some ways.
In what ways do they differ the most? If we don’t take into account that Goodfellas came out before Casino, which one is the better movie?
I honestly think Casino was Sharon Stone’s finest performance. Maybe her only good one, really. But I was amazed at how well she did and I thought her Best Actress nomination was not out of line. Casino really grew on me as a film and I appreciate it a lot more than when it first came out. It’s miles better than The Departed if you ask me.
That said IMHO Goodfellas is still a better movie.
It is the high point of Casino. IMO it is her best performance and a truly frightening depiction of self-destruction. Stone’ performance (no relation, but watch me sit!) is the only reason to even consider Casino. In every other respect Goodfellas is much better.
Though I do think De Niro had much more to get his teeth into in Casino, it lacked somewhat in comparison. No matter, it was still quality entertainment.
Incidentally, as much as I liked Ray Liotta as Henry Hill (his menacing stride across the road to pistol-whip Karen’s groper is a brilliant little vignette) I can’t help but think Scorcese’s current muse, Leonardo DiCaprio would have been even better.
Goodfellas by a mile. The entire sequence from when Henry notices the helicopters until he gets arrested in his driveway are as good a 20 minutes as you’ll find in a movie.
As much as I like both, Goodfellas was just a tighter story; Casino seemed to “sprawl” a bit all over the place. That’s about the best way I can describe it.
Casino is a good film. Goodfellas is a great film.
One point which Goodfellas clearly wins out on and is one of the things that puts it over the top is conciseness. It may be over 2 hours long, but it feels much shorter because each scene flows into the next and every single one of them is deals with the same main characters. You know what it’s about. You know who these people are and what they’re up to. And most of all you know who the main protagonist is.
Casino OTOH, while only 30 minutes longer than Goodfellas, feels like it goes on for an eternity and is all over the place. Is it about Jimmy, is it about Nicky, is it about the bosses back East, is it about Ginger and Lester, I don’t know because it keeps jumping around from one character to the next. It’s a much more ambitious story, but because of this it becomes very unfocused as more and more characters are added. While there are many interesting and entertaining scenes, I find myself skipping ahead or changing the channel for a while and coming back because the movie is filled with long boring stretches where I just don’t care what’s happening with these people.
Goodfellas was more careful to draw distinctions between those in the mob life and not in the mob life and additionally, distinctions within the mob life.
There was little humor in Casino and there was little to like about Rothstein. Pesci and Liotta were great together. I guess Deniro had similar roles as the humorless outsider big earner worry-wart and it was a bigger role in Casino (to it’s detriment). In short, Goodfellas was more fun.
I’ll go with Goodfellas as the better movie overall.
But Casino has the one of the most disturbing scenes I’ve ever seen in a movie - you know the kind of scene where you forget that it’s special effects because it’s that freakin’ disturbing - when Joe Pesci’s character and his brother & buddies are beaten with baseball bats and thrown in the hole. When Pesci’s character is begging the killer to stop his brother’s suffering. One of the few scenes in a movie that even thinking about it makes my heart race and my skin crawl. THAT’S some excellent filmmaking there.
Casino feels like it’s trying to recapture many of the brilliances of Goodfellas. It’s an attempt to recapture the same magic… and that never really quite works, does it?
On its own it’s a fine movie, but it’s still just an attempt to do it again.
I agree, too, that the movie suffers from the lack of a protagonist we can empathize with. You can put yourself in Henry Hill’s shoes; Henry Hill may be a gangster, but he’s not an evil person, and he’s appealing. Lorraine Bracco puts it best, really; she knew he was a gangster, but it turned her on. He’s a bad guy but in an exciting, sexy way. He’s charming and handsome, and in the end he doesn’t try to murder his friends.
But in Casino, who do you empathize with? Rothstein is wholly unsympathetic; he seems to love his daughter but we barely notice that. He’s an asshole, a tyrant, he buys a wife, and there’s nothing appealing about him at all. He’s competent, but wholly unlikable. And there’s nobody else to like either; Joe Pesci’s character is a monster, and Sharon Stone’s character (and I think she was great) is an awful human being in every way.