Mike Newell is a director we trust with a difficult friendship. His patient work with actors makes Donnie Brasco quietly painful, though his taste for different genres has produced less persuasive work when the action takes over.
Fi1m perspective
In Donnie Brasco (1997), Al Pacino's Lefty Ruggiero has found someone to teach, and Johnny Depp's Joe Pistone has to let him. Joe is an FBI agent working undercover; Lefty believes he has acquired a pupil. Newell lets their friendship develop through conversations without repeatedly announcing the danger. We felt increasingly uncomfortable as Lefty grew fond of him: each sign of affection made Joe's deception harder to watch.
That interest in people survives some considerable changes of genre. Dance with a Stranger (1985) established Newell's feel for period social realism, with Miranda Richardson and Rupert Everett among his actors. The international breakthrough of Four Weddings and a Funeral (1994) led to Hollywood work, including Donnie Brasco and eventually Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire (2005). The later return to British films such as Great Expectations (2012) suggests how little interest he has in staying with one kind of story.
In Donnie Brasco, editor Jon Gregory gives Lefty time to invest in his new companion, allowing the friendship to become convincing before asking us to fear for it. Patrick Doyle's score works best when it attends to the sadness of the attachment and leaves the anxiety to the actors. Newell keeps their conversations at the centre, trusting Pacino and Depp to hold our attention. They do, and the threat of discovery needs little additional emphasis.
His attention is less evenly distributed when the film goes home to Joe's wife, Maggie, played by Anne Heche. The family scenes repeat a problem already understood instead of giving her a story that develops alongside the men's. Heche supplies welcome resistance, but Newell cannot make these passages as involving as the criminal company. It is a substantial weakness in a film we otherwise recommend warmly: his care for the central friendship does not extend far enough.
Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time (2010) is a less happy fit, its action sequences short on excitement and coherence. We do not need a recognisable personal style from every director, but we do need a reason to stay interested when the actors stop talking. For a first encounter, choose Donnie Brasco and give Pacino and Depp time to get acquainted.
Biography
Mike Newell is an English film and television director and producer. Born in St Albans, Hertfordshire, he read English at Magdalene College, Cambridge, and trained at Granada Television before beginning his career in British television drama in the 1960s.
Newell directed the romantic comedy Four Weddings and a Funeral (1994), which won the BAFTA Award for Best Film and earned him the BAFTA Award for Best Direction. He later directed Donnie Brasco (1997), Mona Lisa Smile (2003), Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire (2005), Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time (2010) and The Guernsey Literary & Potato Peel Pie Society (2018). He received the BAFTA Britannia Award for Artistic Excellence in Directing for his career up to 2005.
