Downsizing the Mob
When, after an absence of
several years, Al Pacino returned to the screen in Sea of Love (1989),
he looked like a human filament: all dark, burning eyes that never seemed to
blink. His intensity was startling, but you couldn't be sure how to take him.
Always an actor of moods, his timing had become even more capricious. He didn't
speak his lines, he distended them: He never seemed to want to let them out of
his mouth. At once manic and zoned-out, Pacino acted in a hambone universe of
his own, and when he was rewarded with an Oscar for his grandstanding in
Scent of a Woman (1992)--well, as the gangsters in his new film,
Donnie Brasco , might say, "Fuh- get about it."
In
Donnie Brasco , Pacino has been cast as a sad little Mafia second-rater
named "Lefty" Ruggiero, who boasts repeatedly of having "clipped" 26 guys, yet
is always passed over for promotions within the "family." With his gold chains
and fur collars, Lefty is a howlingly tacky parody of a mobster, and Pacino
uses all his blowhard insecurities, along with his patented air of electrified
stupor, to elicit from us an astounding degree of sympathy. Nothing Lefty says
or does comes out right--especially his adoption of a protégé, a young jewel
thief called "Donnie Brasco" (Johnny Depp) who turns out, of course, to be an
undercover FBI agent.
The miracle of the film, which is based on a memoir by the
real "Brasco," Joseph D. Pistone (in collaboration with Richard Woodley), is
that with so many layers of irony, it's so emotionally pure--and so wrenching.
Partly this comes from the tension between the snappy, driving screenplay by
Paul Attanasio and the elegiac tone of the director, Englishman Mike Newell
(along with his magnificent composer, Patrick Doyle). And partly it comes from
Pacino, whose epic self-absorption, in this context, makes Lefty seem
heartbreakingly vulnerable, even while he's blowing people's heads off. It's
hard to think of another American film with this range of moods: satirical,
sometimes hilarious, yet suffused with a sense of loss and riddled with the
kind of violence that makes you recoil and lean forward simultaneously.
I knew the
screenwriter, Attanasio, in college and later, when he was the chief film
critic of the Washington
Post . Watching Donnie
Brasco , I remembered that he loved to quote from a relatively obscure
scene in The
Godfather , the one by the stove in the Corleone
kitchen in which Clemenza (Richard S. Castellano) discoursed on the art of
frying sausages and peppers for young Michael (Pacino). Loose and giddy, a
relief from all the gore and gravitas, the scene made even more explicit the
movie's theme of "family," both real and extended. As nightmarish as the
Corleones' lives came to be, there was still something seductive about being
taken under the wings of expansive father figures with few uncertainties about
what they were put on this earth to do. What a kick to see Pacino, 25 years
later, in the Clemenza role, demonstrating for "Donnie" how to make coq au
vin . This time, though, the scene has an undercurrent of shame. Pistone
knows that he's exploiting the older man's best, most fatherly instincts, and
it tears him up. Later, there's a tiny but significant moment when Lefty
wonders how "Donnie" could be a traitor when he's been a guest in Lefty's
home--when Lefty has cooked for him.
Like The Godfather , Donnie Brasco
revolves around families, except that they're now the source of guilt instead
of reassurance. Lefty seems drawn to "Donnie" because he bears a physical
resemblance to the gangster's own son, a junkie who keeps his distance. So
Lefty's exhortations on the subject of wise-guy etiquette--carry your money in
a wad, not a wallet, lose the facial hair--have an unusual zeal: Lefty is
looking for another shot at fatherhood. Pistone, who dislikes the officious
superiors in his FBI "family," boasts of having his hooks in Lefty, but comes
to dread (and delay) the moment when he'll be pulled out of Operation Donnie
Brasco and called upon to bring about his mentor's demise. There's another
tortured family, too: Pistone's wife and three daughters, who languish in the
absence of a steady father.
I wasn't
looking forward to the scenes with Joe's wife, Maggie, because the
stick-in-the-mud spouse has become such a cliché--although I was curious to see
what the vivid young actress Anne Heche could do with a role in which she
didn't have to shed her clothes. As written and played, however, Maggie's
scenes are intrusions in the best sense: They gnaw on Pistone from another
angle; they add a point to the film's complex geometry. Heche, who played Demi
Moore's doomed doctor girlfriend in The Juror , brings a wounded poetry
to Maggie's bedragglement. Sagging under the weight of running a household--and
of her daughters' unspoken but persistent disappointment--she has no vocabulary
to convey to her husband what she's going through. She can't share his work or
know his daily (sometimes weekly) whereabouts, and you can see how the
powerlessness eats at her. When she finally takes action--changing the family's
phone number without informing him--her justification has a scary force: "Now I
know how it feels to be in control."
On the evidence of his book, Pistone was truly torn up
about having abandoned his family for the years it took him to infiltrate the
mob, but he didn't lose as much sleep over what he was doing to his Mafia
family. That's the screenwriter's conceit. And the actual Lefty seems to have
had much less stature. (The part Pacino plays is a fusion of that Lefty and the
nobler aspects of gang leader "Sonny Black" Napolitano--whom the film reduces
to a remorseless hothead, played by the new king of movie bullies, Michael
Madsen.) The story has been fictionalized, but it hasn't been Hollywood-ized.
Donnie Brasco gives us a novel perspective on gangsters--as the bottom
feeders of capitalism. Underlings huddle in the cold outside a Little Italy
social club, waiting for the boss, who emerges from a black sedan with a fat
cigar in his mouth. Most of the time, these shabby "soldiers" just sit around
and rack their (small) brains for new schemes, worried that if profits fall too
low, they're going to find themselves "clipped" or "whacked." They're like
salesmen who have to meet their quotas or they're out--downsized, only
literally, into small pieces.
Scenes
like the ones in the social club and in the gangsters' homes have a real comic
authority. Lefty, an "animal lover," reclines on a ghastly blue-green lounge
chair in a red sweat suit, watching videotapes of gazelles being pounced on and
devoured by lions. (He longs to be the lion, but he ends up as the gazelle.) He
can't even mount a competent search of Pistone's automobile for a "wire,"
finally giving up with the stereo in a shambles and offering to buy another
car. ("You want a DeVille?") Sprawled on a motel sofa, fielding awestruck
questions from a couple of junior FBI agents, Pistone expounds on the meaning
of the phrase "Fuh-get about it" (which, depending on one's inflection, can
signal fatalistic acceptance, doomed resignation, murderous rage, enthusiastic
agreement, or nothing in particular) in a speech that will live long in the
hearts of gangster-movie mavens. Apart from Lefty's last line in the film,
which is moving but also way too pat, there isn't a single element on which
Attanasio hasn't put a fresh spin.
Nor is there a moment when Newell takes the
easy way out. I've always found his films ( Dance With a Stranger , The
Good Father , Four Weddings and a Funeral ) a little obvious, but his
work here has an authentic sense of place. Donnie Brasco feels rooted.
More important, Newell molds these disparate performers into a tightly knit
family of their own. Depp does fine, believable work. His "Donnie" is cagey and
recessive, and when he reverts to Joe Pistone, he doesn't relax--he gets wiry,
as if he needs to discharge all his tension. If there's a problem with Depp's
acting in general, it's that he's so serious, so concentrated, so unplayful;
his characters almost never have more than a single dimension at a time.
But these are quibbles:
Donnie Brasco is everything it needs to be. It might not have the scope
of The Godfather or The Godfather Part II , yet among all the
gangster pictures since Coppola's epic, it has no peer. ( Goodfellas ?
Fuh-get about it.) Exploring a more mundane milieu, it serves as the missing
link between us and The Godfather --a gangster movie for a mingier, more
cynical era, when even doing good comes with a terrible cost, and where every
family tie is a snap of the wrist away from a garrote.
"Fuh-get about it":
"Donnie Brasco" (Johnny Depp) with FBI technicians (Tim Blake Nelson, Paul
Giamatti) (30 seconds) :
A domestic spat: Maggie
(Anne Heche) and Pistone (Depp) (30 seconds) :
Dreams of the future:
Lefty (Al Pacino) and "Brasco" (Depp) (30 seconds) :
