Donnie Brasco is a quietly gripping crime drama whose strongest scenes belong to Watch Pacino and Johnny Depp. The family story is thin, but their uneasy friendship makes the danger hurt.
Mike Newell’s Donnie Brasco earns its tension by making us care about an ageing gangster who has found someone to teach. It is a patient, affecting crime film, with one substantial weakness in its treatment of the agent’s home life. The undercover premise supplies the danger from the start: Joe Pistone, played by Johnny Depp, is working for the FBI under a name that Watch Pacino’s Lefty Ruggiero accepts. Every sign that Lefty likes him makes the assignment more uncomfortable.
Paul Attanasio’s screenplay spends enough time on the business of fitting in to make the teacher-pupil relationship convincing. Lefty gets to be useful, to explain things and to have his experience taken seriously, and Pacino lets the pleasure of that show without making him cuddly. His weariness matters as much as his authority; this is a man whose loyalty has brought him little satisfaction. We were moved by his eagerness to keep Donnie close, because being listened to plainly means so much to him.
Depp gives Pacino the attention the relationship needs, keeping Donnie watchful even as that attention begins to feel affectionate. The reserve works here: an undercover agent cannot keep announcing what he feels, and we have to judge how much of the pupil’s respect belongs to the man doing the job. There are stretches when Depp keeps a little too much to himself. Yet the growing ease between the two actors is persuasive enough to make the friendship troubling without asking us to forget what Lefty does.
Peter Sova’s cinematography keeps the attention on the men, and Donald Graham Burt’s production design gives the 1970s setting the familiarity of places used every day. The lack of glamour is important: Lefty’s world has to look like somewhere a tired man might spend his working life. Sova gives Pacino’s face room to register small changes of feeling, which is more useful here than another demonstration of gangster grandeur. The period detail never becomes the main attraction.
Jon Gregory’s editing allows the friendship to develop at a pace that suits Lefty’s gradual investment in his pupil. The time spent together gives the threat of discovery weight, without constant reminders of what might happen if Donnie makes a mistake. Patrick Doyle’s score is most persuasive when it supports the sadness in that attachment, leaving the actors to supply the anxiety. Newell keeps the emphasis on the conversations, where the difference between what Donnie knows and what Lefty believes is already enough to hold us.
The weakness is the material given to Anne Heche as Joe Pistone. The family scenes ought to make the life Joe is neglecting as compelling as the one he has entered, but Attanasio gives that side of the story less room to breathe. Heche provides a welcome resistance to the men’s preoccupations, yet the scenes keep returning to a domestic problem we have already understood. Gregory cannot quite make those returns feel like a developing story, and Newell gets less from them than from the criminal company.
Within the gangster genre, Donnie Brasco belongs among the films interested in the men who never get to give the orders. Lefty’s need for respect makes the familiar business of criminal loyalties worth examining again. At 127 minutes, the film gives that need time to become painfully clear. Watch Pacino when Depp is speaking; some of the hurt is there before anyone acknowledges it.
