Movie Review: Donnie Brasco - Page 2

What makes Donnie Brasco an exceptional film is its clear-eyed presentation of deep, but betrayed, love. In his effort to infiltrate the mob, Donnie uses Lefty mercilessly, allowing the older man to teach him everything he needs to know to make himself indispensable to the gang operations. As their relationship grows, though, Donnie’s affection for Lefty does also, until a considerable father-son affection emerges that grows in time into unrestrained love. Donnie is very smart and takes to those things quickly for which it took Lefty years to learn. Donnie ingratiates himself to the upper-level made men and, because he is so good at things, he surpasses Lefty in his rise through the ranks. Lefty sees what’s happening and, despite his personal disappointment for himself, is happy that it is he who has brought this new guy in. Donnie is a rising star in the mob, and Lefty was the man who gave him every opportunity and taught him how to manage those opportunities.

Pacino plays Lefty as a rough, gutty man with few brains but a lot of street-wise bravado. He’ll kill if asked to. He’ll do whatever you want if you’re the boss. He kow-tows to Mafia authority figures, and is obsequious and deferential to them in a kind of fear-muddled way. He’s violent. He suffers not at all from remorse, and is a very bad man. He also is long-married to a woman he treats well, with whom he has a heroin-addicted son whom he has loved all his life. The son is about forty now, and is a major disappointment to Lefty. That love gets transferred to Donnie because Donnie is the kind of guy Lefty had always wanted to be himself, the kind of guy he wished his own son to become.

Depp’s Donnie — that is, the FBI agent — is ruthless to the point that he actually turns his back on his relationships with his wife and three daughters. The wife, played with accurately conflicted tender outrage by Anne Heche, grows to hate her husband, as do his daughters. But Donnie — the Mafia guy — comes to love his mentor Lefty, whose advice, he knows, has been given to him out of a sense of fatherly caring.

The scenes – and there are very many of them – in which Lefty and Donnie are simply talking to each other, are set-piece primers on how fine actors can show developing relationships, conflict, the foreshadowing of betrayal, humor, anger, love and much else, just through conversation. The best moments in the movie are those in which these two men are seated in chairs mumbling to each other. It might be the front seat of a beat up late-model Cadillac as Donnie endlessly drives Lefty around New York City. It might be two lousy chairs in a hospital hallway as Lefty’s real son is dying of a heroin overdose. It might be a couple of stools in a smarmy Brooklyn bar. It might be simply the edge of a frigid wharf, where the two are complaining about the cold. You learn about these men from what they say, but more profoundly by how they speak with each other. Despite all the hum-drum elements in this film, derived from almost every other mob picture ever made, the depth of character and feeling that these two actors bring to the story serve to make Donnie Brasco into a film that explains what real love — felt, intense, honest love — between two men can really be like.

Article Author: Terence Clarke

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

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