Donnie Brasco

With Al Pacino, Johnny Depp, Michael Madsen, Anne Heche, Bruno Kirby, Written by Paul Attanasio, Directed by Mike Newell
by William Ham

Nobody had a bad word to say about Donnie Brasco when it was released this past winter – in fact, the papers and TV kept reeling off one dizzy encomium after another. It’s got all the traits cine-scribes look for in a flick – a good cast, smart writing, and a story they don’t have to bother poking holes in because it actually happened. But if that leads you to expect a visceral Mob operetta that’ll drive an icepick into Goodfellas‘ neck, look elsewhere. The fault may simply be that, in spite of the aforementioned attributes, the whole gangster genre’s been played out to the point that wheat-chewers in the Midwest who’ve never been off the farm can now speak with authority on the occult workings of the Cosa Nostra. And those machinations are so narrowly defined that even something as wet with verisimilitude as Brasco plays like a cliché. The impressive stuff here is in the subtleties of inter-mob relations – the difference between being introduced as “a friend of mine” and “a friend of ours,” the way the balance of power can irrevocably shift in the course of a single sentence, and why “fuggeddabouddit” is the Mafia equivalent of “aloha.” In words, the sort of stuff the writer of Quiz Show and the director of Four Weddings and a Funeral would notice. Without a single sub-par element in the story of an FBI agent (Depp) who goes undercover to infiltrate a New York gang and ends up in a no-win friendship with an aging tough guy on the verge of obsolescence (Pacino), it still plays like the American Playhouse version of Scorsese – insightful, dramatic, but stripped of oomph. I’m not sure why I’m complaining about a film that prizes intelligence over crass flash and buckets of blood coming out of people’s heads, except to say it’s not impossible to do both. So Donnie Brasco gets two thumbs up from me, just at 45 degree angles.