I first noticed Ray Liotta in Something Wild, the 80s “yuppie nightmare” movie with Wall Street wimp Jeff Daniels getting way out of his depth with the seductively impulsive Audrey played by Melanie Griffith. He has a very uneasy moment with her violent-criminal ex-husband, played by Liotta who – without revealing his own history with Audrey — insidiously asks him how she is in bed and boorishly remarks: “She looks like she could fuck you right in half.” That line reveals how close he is to violence. And he did the scary Liotta laugh, eyes crinkling and the jaw opening up about eleven inches like some new breed of raptor.
But it was only four years later that Liotta became a legend – though somehow without ever quite becoming an A-list star – with his staggering performance as wiseguy and future stoolie Henry Hill in Martin Scorsese’s Goodfellas, and like everyone else I thrilled first to his incredible voice with its resonant syrup-gravel: “As far back as I can remember, I always wanted to be a gangster …” Liotta’s line there was the voiceover equivalent of Mario Lanza, and actually all of his voiceovers were rich, glorious arias of longing for the great days when a gangster really was special.
The adult Henry, as played by Liotta, was so different from the innocent beardless youth shown in the opening scenes. This Henry has short hair which is maybe slightly gelled giving it the consistency of wire and his face seems to have survived a sprinkling of acne. His great wide eyes are those of a romantic poet, still those of someone who is permanently awestruck by the criminal legends who had taken him to their hearts. His skin, so often somehow covered by a sheen of sweat, seemed to be of a piece with his sleek shiny blue suits. And he did the scary laugh again, thrilled like everyone else by a hilarious anecdote from Joe Pesci’s Tommy DeVito; Henry rashly tells him he’s funny – and it is fascinating to see how Liotta showed the laugh being replaced by unease and fear as Tommy turns on a dime to annoyance (“Funny how?”) and then back to the wide-mouth triumphalist alpha-mob laugh as he realises Tommy’s only kidding.
Liotta gives an exquisitely self-admiring performance in the famous “single take” Copacabana scene in Goodfellas with his date and future wife Karen (Lorraine Bracco) – with the Crystals’ Then He Kissed Me on the soundtrack – taking her to the club and guiding her past the losers who have to wait on line outside to get in, down the side entrance, through the kitchen and out into the showroom. There is something almost Gene Kelly-ish in Liotta’s assurance as he glides through the scuzzy corridors and impresses Karen by handing out money and exchanging badinage with the staff: I always love it when he teases a smooching couple: “Every time I come here! Every time you two!” Liotta’s Henry is in love: in love with Karen, in love with himself, in love with his princeling mob status, in love with a world in which he gets special treatment at this wonderful place, in love with life itself.
The reason why that scene is so great isn’t simply the technical bravura, amazing though that is — it is the innocence and compromised love that Liotta radiates. For all that he is a cynical violent man who is shifty and evasive when Karen asks what on earth he can be doing for a living that pays for all this (“I’m a union delegate”) he has an almost boyish joy in the paradise that he has stumbled into. And it is his fall from grace that is so shocking: he seems to be ruined and despoiled in a way that Robert De Niro’s Jimmy “The Gent” Conway never is. That other famous sequence, when a coke-addled Henry has to run banal errands while paranoically checking out the helicopter overhead, is gloomy because of the decline which Liotta shows us — that surface of sweat now glistening unhealthily.
Liotta did other excellent roles after this, often (perhaps ironically) playing corrupt cops or law enforcement officers. He has a thoroughly macabre role in the 2001 Hannibal sequel, playing a crooked Justice Department staffer, who winds up staying conscious while Dr Lecter pokes around in his exposed brain.
There were tough and plausible roles in Blow (2001), Narc (2002) and The Place Beyond the Pines (2012). And of course before the era of his hardboiled greatness, Liotta played the ghost of legendary baseball star “Shoeless” Joe Jackson in Field of Dreams (1989) who appears in Kevin Costner’s backyard baseball diamond, although maybe this character’s association with corruption was part of what made Liotta right for the part.
Ray Liotta had a final surge of greatness in Marriage Story (2019), in which Adam Driver’s about-to-be-divorced Charlie has to lawyer up like a criminal, and must choose between the sweet-natured Alan Alda and brutal attack dog Ray Liotta – and Alda and Liotta couldn’t be more appropriate as the Jekyll and Hyde of the legal profession. It was wonderful to see Liotta getting a juicy part that he deserved.
Liotta never became a brand-name above-the-title star; perhaps he was born into an era when gangster pictures were not quite the industry they were when the not-especially-handsome Bogart or Cagney or Robinson could be carried to greatness on them. But he’s a Hall of Famer for Henry Hill: the gangster who sold out his comrades and whose punishment was the Witness Protection Programme, having to live like a boring civilian, like the dopes who line up outside the Copacabana, like all the rest of us in the cinema audience.
