A review of the film “Donnie Brasco”

For some reason, it took me two and a half decades to catch up with this excellent movie from 1997. By then, Johnny Depp – who takes the titular role – had been through the increasing madness of the “Pirates Of The Caribbean” series and endured two highly-publicised court cases with former partner Amber Heard. This work is a reminder of just how fine an actor Depp was earlier in his career.

Here he plays an FBI undercover agent who infiltrates the New York mob and works his way into the trust of increasingly senior mafiosi. The tension is like a taut piano string and the outbursts of violence like the crashing of a piano lid. A lot of attention is paid to style: the cars, the clothes, and above all the language. There’s a wonderful sequence in which the informer explains to some FBI colleagues the different meanings of the phrase “Forget about it”.

The powerful central performance of Depp is backed up by superb support roles, most notably Al Pacino, the mob middleman Lefty Ruggiero whom Brasco befriends and who vouches for him with the other gangsters with profound consequences for both of them. Michael Madsen is always good and it was interesting to see Anne Heche in the only significant female role (a few days before I saw the film she died as a result of a car accident).

Surprisingly for such a quintessentially American movie, the director was the British Mike Newell who had previously made “Four Weddings And A Funeral”, as different as you can imagine from a mafia movie.

The most astonishing aspect of “Donnie Brasco”, however, is that it is loosely based on a real story, an undercover operation by FBI agent Joseph Pistone between 1976 and 1981. At the conclusion of the film, we are told that his evidence led to over 200 indictments and over 100 convictions and that subsequently he has lived under an assumed name with a $500,000 open contract on his head.


 




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