Ray Liotta made dangerous men disturbingly easy company. We rate him most highly when a film lets him draw us close, as GoodFellas does, rather than simply waiting for him to look threatening.
Fi1m perspective
In GoodFellas (1990), Ray Liotta’s Henry Hill explains criminal life with the ease of someone passing on a useful recommendation. His voice-over sounds conversational, and he rarely seems troubled by what a listener might make of it. We laughed at the comfort of his account, then felt uneasy because that same comfort made the criminal business seem ordinary. Martin Scorsese gives him the space to establish that closeness, which helps explain why this remains the performance we would start with. Liotta makes us willing to hear Henry out long before we have considered whether we should.
The danger was already there in Jonathan Demme’s Something Wild (1986), his breakthrough, where his volatile ex-con helps turn a comedy into a thriller. Field of Dreams (1989) gave him the gentler part of the ghostly baseball player Shoeless Joe Jackson. Those two roles matter because the gangsters and villains that followed GoodFellas can make his casting look narrower than his acting was. He could be vulnerable as well as threatening, a quality still present in Killing Them Softly (2012). Scorsese never worked with him again, which remains a missed opportunity.
The later crime films show how much depends on what he is given to do. In Steven Soderbergh’s No Sudden Move (2021), he plays Frank Capelli, the gangster whose wife is sleeping with Del Toro’s Ronald. It is a useful role for an actor whose presence makes the prospect of an angry reaction entirely credible. Yet our strongest attachment is to Cheadle and Del Toro, working out how far they can trust each other, mostly in cars. Liotta belongs in this company, but the film gives us less reason to dwell on him.
Elizabeth Banks’s Cocaine Bear (2023) makes the limitation plainer. As Syd, the man who sends Eddie and Daveed, Liotta supplies the unblinking menace, but the film hardly knows what to do with him once he arrives. We can recognise the value of that casting without mistaking it for a substantial use of the actor. He is still unsettling in a film that spends too much time waiting for its creature to return. For a second film after GoodFellas, try Field of Dreams rather than another gangster role.
Biography
Ray Liotta was an American actor. Born in Newark, New Jersey, he studied acting at the University of Miami and began his career with a role on the soap opera Another World before making his film debut in the early 1980s.
He received a Golden Globe nomination for his performance in Something Wild (1986). Liotta became widely known for his roles as Shoeless Joe Jackson in Field of Dreams (1989) and Henry Hill in Goodfellas (1990). Later credits include Frank Capelli in No Sudden Move (2021) and Syd in Cocaine Bear (2023). He died in 2022.
