From the moment Ray Liotta’s Henry Hill breaks the fourth wall and delivers the iconic line, “As far back as I can remember, I always wanted to be a gangster,” Scorsese lets us know we’re in for a ride with a character as magnetic as he is morally bankrupt. Whether he’s taking his future wife Karen (Lorraine Bracco) on an effortless, one-shot stroll through the Copacabana kitchen entrance or flashing that manic, cocaine-fueled grin while juggling side hustles, Henry radiates the kind of effortless cool that makes his lifestyle look intoxicatingly irresistible. Even his darkest acts—like laughing off a man getting shot in a bar by Tommy DeVito (Joe Pesci) or using his charm to deflect Karen’s growing suspicions—are laced with an undeniable charisma. Liotta brings a kinetic, boyish energy to Henry, making him both an aspirational and tragic figure, a guy who seems too slick to fail until, inevitably, he does.
And like all Scorsese antiheroes, the very qualities that made Henry larger than life are what send him crashing down. That confidence curdles into paranoia as he spirals into drug addiction, sweating through a single day of frantic coke deals while dodging the FBI helicopter that stalks him from above. His casual betrayal of his closest friends to save himself in the courtroom is less a grand Shakespearean downfall and more a pathetic whimper—Henry, once the smooth-talking wiseguy with the world at his fingertips, reduced to a schlubby suburban nobody forced to live like a “schnook.” Unlike Jordan Belfort, who lands on his feet with a new scam to run, Henry’s fate is less poetic and more tragic: a man who had it all, lost it all, and can never get it back. Scorsese doesn’t just tell us how alluring crime can be—he shows us, and then he shows us why it never lasts.
