It’s the way he rests his arm on the table and holds the cigarette and strokes his hair, blowing aside a transparent puff of smoke and staring hard-eyed at his ex, Melanie Griffith, sitting across from him in the diner, and the man next to her, whom she has now hooked and who loves her… This way, all the youthfulness of the American eighties is in it, an obsession, at the bottom of which one can feel lonely tenderness… “You think about it better well if you really want her… you have to fight for a woman like that.”
Ray Liotta is Ray Sinclair, and he knows in that moment that the other, played by Jeff Daniels, the reformed office bore, is going to fight, he’s behind because he’s out of prison on parole, and on side tables at the diner sit policemen. The film was called “Something Wild” in 1986, by Jonathan Demme (we call it “Dangerous Girlfriend”), and that means the program of life in the eighties, a promise of life, of adventure. And Ray Liotta, with his black hair and white bodice and the smoke he puffed, was Jimmy Dean reincarnated in it. Even if he won’t be among the winners in the end, there’s no chance.
The energy that Ray Liotta invested in this film, the evil, unrestrained, criminal, murderous and at heart probably hopeless energy has shaped many of his films, time and time again his nasty smile has turned into a short cackling laugh that makes you ice cold ran down his back. He played petty criminals, rarely mafiosi, but also cops or FBI officials, and he was at his best when the two roles overlapped, in corrupt doggedness. His partners and/or opponents in these films were Brad Pitt, Kurt Russell, Sylvester Stallone, Jason Statham, Ryan Reynolds, Andy Garcia. And of course Robert De Niro, Paul Sorvino, Joe Pesci in Martin Scorsese’s “GoodFellas”.
That was Ray’s big break in 1990, a boy with only one wish. “I want to be a gangster” because that’s really cool, because you wear fancy clothes so you look like Hollywood people, because you’re everywhere, in the bars, with the women, terrorizing and killing. The director Scorsese is also fascinated by this chic, he sees the film as a documentary of a lifestyle, three decades in the mafia, and Liotta as his model. Liotta is a survivor here, in the end Scorsese says he realizes the horror he brought upon himself and it’s all way too late, he has to get out but whoever is allowed to be there can’t get out again…
The fact that he wasn’t present at the Mafia class reunion hurt him
The fact that he wasn’t allowed to be part of “Irishman”, the big late mafia class reunion that Scorsese directed for Netflix in 2019, with De Niro and Pacino and Pesci, grieved Ray Liotta, even if he didn’t complain very loudly . But perhaps Jonathan Demme was more his director than Scorsese, and of course Phil Alden Robinson, in whose gorgeous 1989 Field of Dreams Ray Liotta starred as baseball player Joe “Shoeless” Jackson and helped Kevin Costner toss a corn field into a baseball field transform and locate the American dream there. “Is this Heaven?” – “It’s Iowa.”
Ray Liotta is quintessentially American in a lot of his films, even the nasty stuff comes naturally to him. In “Forever Mine”, 1999, by Paul Schrader, another man steals his beloved wife, this time Joseph Fiennes, twice in a few years. The first time it’s simple typecasting, Liotta looks like a pimp, Greil Marcus noted, the second time it’s really good, he looks like Richard Nixon.
Mentor and Apprentice: Robert DeNiro and Ray Liotta in “GoodFellas”.
(Photo: Rental)
In “Blow,” a Pablo Escobar epic by Ted Demme, 2001, he is, to a nice surprise, the father of Johnny Depp, who can’t make his son understand that he’s going to die in the drug business. Once Liotta was played really badly, in “Hannibal”, 2002, by Ridley Scott, he is drugged, his own brain is ripped out of him and served by Hannibal Lecter. In “The Many Saints of Newark”, the Soprano prequel, he plays mob boss “Hollywood Dick” Moltisanti and his twin brother Sally, who is in prison.
Raymond Allen Liotta, born December 18, 1954 in Newark, New Jersey, died on Thursday in the Dominican Republic at the age of 67 while filming a new film.