Joe Pistone

During one of the free previews of the premium movie channels, I had the opportunity to record Donnie Brasco, not having done a post on it here before. It's available on DVD and is going to be on the Epix channels in the comind days if you have the premium channels and wish to watch it.

Johnny Depp plays Donnie Brasco, a jeweler in Brooklyn in late 1978. Or at least that his story that everybody believes. In reality, his name is Joe Pistone, and he's an undercover FBI agent who's been given a job of infiltrating the New York Mafia. He meets Lefty (Al Pacino), a mid-level mobster working under Sonny Red. It's a difficult case that requires Joe to be away from his wife Maggie (Anne Heche) and kids for long stretches, without his being able to tell her why he's away. (You'd think she knows he works for the FBI, since the real life Pistone had been in the FBI for several years before the Donnie Brasco operation.)

Lefty befriends Donnie, and brings him into the organization, which doesn't seem to be particularly successful since it's engaging in small-time fencing of stolen goods. Donnie is fitting in with them, to the point where one of his FBI handlers wants Sonny Black (Michael Madsen) to expand to Florida so that the FBI can get more sources. Donnie is able to do this, and in the process, become a direct underling of Sonny Black rather than Lefty.

However, there are problems brewing. One is domestic, where Maggie is getting increasingly irritated with only seeing Joe irregularly and at unannounced times. It gets to the point that she's ready to ask for a divorce.

More worrisome is the business side. Lefty is reading a story in Newsweek on the Abscam affair, and sees the same yacht that they had been on together down in Miami, so he knows something is up. This, combined with a raid on the bar Donnie has opened down in Florida leads Sonny Black to realize there's a stoolie in their midst. This leads to some rubouts, and Donnie becoming more like the men he's supposed to be surveilling, making him increasingly frightened of what he's becoming.

Donnie Brasco is a pretty darn good movie, with an excellent performance from Depp in what is more of a stretch for him than the other actors faced, I think. That it's all based on a true story makes it even more fascinating. The only problem I had is that I found myself looking for anachronisms. There's a fair amount of period music used, although several of the songs were released months to a year or so after the events depicted. (I listened to a lot of Top 40 radio growing up.) More humorous for me was a newspaper mentioning the death of John Wayne while Donnie and friends were in Miami. I thought Wayne died in 1978, but in fact he died in June 1979, so this wouldn't be an anachronism. But: during that same scene, Donnie/Joe is calling his wife back in New Jersey, who is complaining about it being 12 degrees with a bunch of snow on the ground. In June!

Of course, those anachronisms are a very minor nitpick and things most people wouldn't stop to think about. Even if you do, Donnie Brasco is still excellent.