Movie Review: Donnie Brasco

Some of the greatest performances by actors are made great by their electrifying relationships – on stage or on screen – with others. The idea of the ensemble is an honored one in the history of theater and film, and an ensemble can be made up of just two actors. In the case of the 1997 film Donnie Brasco, those two are Johnny Depp and Al Pacino.

This Mike Newell-directed film is a very well-designed Mafia/gangster pic, shot in New York City and Miami. It has a look with which we’ve grown familiar: the lower west side of Manhattan, with its pot-holed streets, crumbling warehouse buildings, and narrow views of the dirty Hudson River and its long-abandoned wharves. It is also cold in this environment, literally. It’s winter in New York, and the gangsters spend quite a bit of time hanging out on the frigid wastes of crumbling street corners, awaiting the visits of higher-ups in the organization. They are all casually dressed in garish, un-ironed 1970’s polyester.

In the warmer Miami environment, the New York gangsters are like bumpkin tourists, overweight and lounging in pools and on yachts in bathing trunks and gold jewelry, with numerous naked women. They are unlettered, violent New Yorkers, and the comedy of the Florida sequences derives from these wise guys being just so many dangerous fish out of water.

Al Pacino plays “Lefty” Ruggiero, a journeyman mobster who has not risen very far in the organization despite having given thirty years of his life to it. He’s a hit man, an enforcer, a disappointed man who feels he hasn’t amounted to much, and he’s right about that. Johnny Depp plays Donnie Brasco, a jewel thief who is befriended and mentored by Lefty and brought by him into the inner circle of the mob. We learn early in the film that Donnie is actually an FBI undercover agent named Joe Pistone, and that his task is to infiltrate the mob and gather information. So Donnie’s increasingly close relationship with Lefty is all-important to his duplicitous purposes.

The film is, as they say, based upon a true story, that of the actual Joe Pistone and his six year-long undercover affiliation with the mob. Pistone has himself written several books on his experiences. The film Donnie Brasco is a well-told tale, although filled with many of the usual clichés that have marked such efforts from Little Caesar with Edward G. Robinson through On the Waterfront, The Godfather, Once Upon A Time In America, Goodfellas, and so on. American culture according to Scorsese, in other words. There are the lower east side Italians and their accents. Various cooking scenes with lots of tomato sauce and pasta. Gruesome murders. The entire vocabulary of “made men”, “wise guys”, “Forget about it!” (a wonderful scene, actually, in which Depp’s character explains this consummately New York City phrase in its many hilarious variations, to a couple of square FBI functionaries), and every one of the gross profanities that are laced through such films like hand-stitched embroidery in a Victorian ball dress. Gore. Mayhem. Gas-guzzling, ugly American sedans. Rough-tongued badinage and in-your-face humor. Frightening weaponry. The usual, in short, for any Italian mobster movie.

Article Author: Terence Clarke

Terence Clarke is a San Francisco novelist, journalist, and film maker who writes about the arts.

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