Review of Donnie Brasco (1997) by Patrick V — 12 Aug 2013

I first saw Donnie Brasco the year it came out, 1997, and didn't think much of it. As a brash 15 year old, what did I know? I took away a few funny quotes to use with my friends such as, "you're gonna kill me with that draft!".

Fast forward 15 years, I decided to re-watch . . . Brasco. This film is surprising on many levels.

The first being the performances by Pacino and Depp. Pacino, perhaps justly, gets broadly painted as a cartoonish and angry actor, but in Brasco the subtle nuances of his character Lefty are praiseworthy. He comes across not as Pacino wedging his personality onto another Italian-American mobster, but a genuinely disillusioned old wiseguy who is bitterly aware that his time is ending. I empathized with Lefty, and isn't that the ultimate goal of the actor?

Regarding Depp: I think Johnny Depp is an overrated actor. A fawning lady's and poor man's Gary Oldman. That said, this is probably his finest work as an actor. Depp is so convincing in his range of emotions: from his "trustworthy" personality when convincing Lefty that he is a connected mobster (the scene in the car when he tells Lefty to apologize), to a troubled FBI agent whose undercover persona is taking over his life (cooking breakfast for his children clad in "wife-beater" T and gold chain), Depp is Oscar worthy.

The drawback to this film is that the storyline is relatively uninspired, although it gets a pass for being mostly true. By 1997, America is well aware of the Mobster/Wiseguy/FBI story, and Brasco is an unfortunate casualty of that timeline: it catches the very end of that era.