Honestly, You Should Watch Gotti

Much has been made of Gotti, the years-in-the-making train wreck of a biopic about the life of the Teflon Don. It has 29 producers, including MoviePass (RIP). It was directed by E from Entourage. All the music was done by Pitbull. It has a 0 percent on Rotten Tomatoes. The consensus when it came out was that literally anything else would be a better use of your time.

But honestly, Gotti is an education in film you never knew you needed. You should just watch Gotti.

To be clear, it is not a good movie. Watching Gotti is like watching someone put Goodfellas through Google Translate five times in a row. It tells the story of John Gotti through the eyes of his son, and through flashbacks so confusing you’d have an easier time keeping track of Inception. Moments that could induce real pathos—like the death of Gotti’s 12-year-old son—are broken by lines like “He didn’t even have hair on his prick.” The lighting is terrible, as is John Travolta’s old-age makeup (even though he is already older than John Gotti was when he died), and the only thing you walk away with is the thought that the guy who played John Gotti Jr. is suspiciously buff.

But watching someone attempt to hit every mob-movie trope breaks down the genre in a way a screenwriting class never could. Because everyone in Gotti is trying, desperately. Gotti is a movie that wanted to be a great mob movie and completely missed what makes mob movies great.

The thing about the mob is that on its face, it’s enticing. You basically hang out with your friends all day, make a ton of money, and earn the respect of your neighborhood. When John Gotti dies at the end of Gotti, they roll newsreels of the Queens neighborhoods he serviced, where people cried and told camera crews how much they loved him and how much he took care of them. This is what mobsters convince themselves they are—community servicemen, just here to take care of the people the government has forgotten.

Gotti somehow never shows this camaraderie and generosity. The closest it gets is John Travolta sympathizing with a young man on the street who mentions his boxing gym closed down, while one of his cronies puts his arm around an old lady carting home her groceries. We don’t see the gym reopen. We don’t see the old lady thanking the men for their help (because they don’t). And save for one scene where people are setting off fireworks in the street, we don’t see anyone having any fun. The one time someone gets a fancy restaurant reservation, it’s at 6 P.M., and then he is murdered. This is not “the life” everyone wants in on.

The other key part of mob movies is, after you show why everyone’s itching to be in the life, you have to show the terrible things they do to maintain that hypothetical extravagance that we never see. And while Gotti has its fair share of murder, the film pretty much treats it as not that bad. The enemy is the RICO Act, and the things these guys do are presented as wholly justified and even noble. This could be a successful way to do things if, say, the film were going the Sopranos route, intentionally depicting these guys as a bunch of dopes who do nothing but play cards and bitch about each other, and whose petty, emotional grievances wind up getting everyone killed. But what’s truly beautiful about Gotti is that it means every word.

Gotti is based on the memoir of John Gotti Jr., nicknamed the “dumbfella” by New York media after the FBI found a typed list of basically every mob member who attended his wedding, plus some of their titles within the hierarchy. This does not appear to be the work of someone who has considered the life he’s lived from all angles, which makes it, I don’t know, perhaps the most realistic mob movie ever. The mob of Gotti is boring and small and violent and stupid, and it thinks it’s rich and classy and, more than anything, meaningful. The movie thinks it’s showing you why John Gotti mattered, when all it really does is show you how confusing and pointless this entire life is. That it doesn’t mean to makes it all the more effective movie-watching.