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Mar 27, 2019 Web Exclusive By Ed McMenamin

A little movie called Goodfellas halted the first attempt at producing Donnie Brasco, when the studio rightly chose to wait until the light from Scorsese’s landmark 1990 mob feature faded.

But even seven years later, Goodfellas’ shadow hangs heavy over the film. Both are based on true stories and focus on low-level wise guys with big ‘70s sedans and even bigger lapels. They scrape together robberies and hijackings and send the proceeds up the ladder. It’s the final days before Federal RICO cases cannibalized the old mob, and those who didn’t snitch fled to Jersey to become Sopranos.

Goodfellas made these sociopaths larger than life. Donnie Brasco, which did become a hit on its own right, brings them back down to earth. That’s a criticism on the latter, in part, but also a bit of a compliment. Newell’s direction lacks Scorsese’s iconic tracking shots, flashy zooms and flare for tension and violent release, or his dark sense of humor. There are nightclub scenes in Donnie Brasco that are lit like a K-Mart. Often, Donnie Brasco looks much more like a product of the ‘90s than it its 1978 setting. But where it lacks in flash and auteur pedigree, no one will accuse director Mike Newell of hero worship, or question whether the film intends representation or endorsement. Goodfellas walked a fine line.

In that way, the script plays to Pacino’s strengths. His “Lefty” Ruggiero is a loser, to put it bluntly. He’s a dutiful lifelong soldier who’s never promoted or included in any big capers. He owes gambling debt to the bosses, lives at home with an adoring wife and a drug-addicted son. He has “cancer of the prick,” as he tells Brasco during a Rodney Dangerfield-esque “I Get No Respect” rant. In one scene, he gives Brasco an envelope full of cash as a Christmas gift, but asks for it back when he leaves. Playing a no-luck lowlife pulls Pacino back from the bluster and scenery chewing that became his late career nadir. There are moments when you can tell the guy is itching for a big “whoo-ah!” And yet he manages not to. You can’t shout the entire way through a performance when no one wants to listen. In that way he’s more like his aging salesman in Glengarry Glen Ross than Scarface.

I can imagine in 1997 Donnie Brasco was seen as a sort of torch passing project from Pacino to Johnny Depp, who plays the titular undercover FBI agent. He manipulates Ruggiero’s unwitting trust and belief that Brasco could be a golden goose to infiltrate the mob. It is one of the last good performances from Pacino, and in hindsight the late ‘90s might represent the artistic peak of Depp’s career, rather than the ordained assent (commercial success of Pirates of the Caribbean notwithstanding). It’s easy to forget what a talented, promising young actor Depp was before he traded craft for wigs and eye liner. Pre-cartoon-era Depp brings quiet confidence to the role of a young man charming enough to fool street-smart hoods, but no so arrogant as to be found out.

As his marriage deteriorates at home, and he becomes closer to Ruggiero than his own wife (Anne Heche), Donnie Brasco comments more directly on the moral ambiguities of undercover work. If Brasco partakes in a vicious mob beating, do the ends justify the means? Henry Hill in Goodfellas showed a slight queasiness, at times, around brutality, or at least compared to the cold-bloodedness of Pesci’s and DeNiro’s characters. Brasco does as well, initially. As the audience’s surrogate learns goomba lingo and mannerisms from Ruggiero, he allows the filmmakers and viewers to approach the subject matter with a Good Guy moral high-ground that Goodfellas never entertained. It’s not until Brasco’s high ground begins to wash away that the tension become a question of the soul, and not just the familiar risks of undercover work. That same question of identity tugs at the film’s strongest dynamic – the father-son like bond that builds between Pacino’s sad old man and Depp’s upstart.

Donnie Brasco is tiring during artless and threadbare montages of nightlife and robberies. But it reaches beyond the sum of its parts to stare down the repercussions of Brasco’s work. Not only on himself and his family, but even on morally bankrupt yet oddly sympathetic men like Ruggiero who tell their wife goodnight, carefully put their belongings into a dresser drawer and head out to meet lifelong friends who might double as their executioner.

Note: This new Blu-ray edition is of the theatrical 126-minute cut. An extended 147-minute cut has been previously released on home video.

Follow Ed McMenamin on twitter at @edmcmenamin

(www.millcreekent.com/donnie-brasco.html)