Wiseguy Overkill? Are Audiences Really Willing To Watch Yet Another Take On Organized Crime? The Critically Acclaimed Mafia Movie ‘Donnie Brasco’ Will Be The Test
Two men are discussing murder. They are alone in a Cadillac but not really alone: hanging over them is the spirit of a movie genre that has been done nearly to death.
In the scene being shot, Johnny Depp is playing an undercover FBI agent and Al Pacino the low-level mobster who has unwittingly befriended him. On a sound stage in a Park Slope armory in Brooklyn, under the intense but exhausted eyes of director Mike Newell, they go over and over their lines, trying to find a way to make the film “Donnie Brasco,” which opened Friday, not sound like just another mob movie.
“Twenty years you know a guy, you whack him out? Just like that?” says a shaken Depp.
“The man held out. He held out on a coke deal,” Pacino responds.
Depp, as the FBI agent, demands that Pacino say the name of the old friend he just killed, his voice rising to a scream as the mobster wearily insists that to do so would break “the rules.”
The scene had been rewritten many times, the dialogue cut down - and cut down some more - in search of a confrontation terse and real enough to jar the movie out of the genre’s usual tracks.
That was part of the challenge that loomed large for Newell all through the shooting of “Donnie Brasco,” a movie based on the real-life story of FBI agent Joseph D. Pistone, who infiltrated the mob for six years and wrote about it in his 1988 book, “Donnie Brasco: My Undercover Life in the Mafia.”
And it’s a question facing other movie makers as well: How, 25 years after “The Godfather” opened the modern Mafia movie era, can a director keep a mob movie fresh?
After shooting several versions of the scene at the armory, there was a dinner break. Over a salad, Newell spoke about how, as an Englishman who directed the comedy “Four Weddings and a Funeral,” he could presume to add to the canon of American mob films.
“What was the last really descriptive mob movie?” he asked. “I guess that was 25 years ago; that was ‘The Godfather.’ There hasn’t been a simple piece of straight-line storytelling about the mob since then. You try to make comedies about it or they become heavily overlaid with moral questions, just like those late westerns.”
Newell is not the only one pondering those questions, or the first to hear them. Mario Puzo, who brought his novel “The Godfather” to the screen, has heard talk before about the decline of the mob genre - only the medium was not film.
“I remember when I was trying to sell ‘The Godfather,’ everybody said, ‘Who wants another Mafia book?’ That was a strike against it,” Puzo said.
“The Godfather,” now considered to be the gold standard of Mafia films, will be rereleased this month for its 25th anniversary. How would Puzo advise Hollywood to keep the genre alive? “I would say get good writers,” he responded.
Puzo’s latest novel, “The Last Don,” will be coming to television during the May sweeps as a six-hour CBS miniseries. Though the title may acknowledge the decline of the Mafia, the writer contends that compelling and inventive storytelling could continue to keep the subject interesting.
“The mystique of the mob is dying out, because so many of them are going to jail,” Puzo said. “The present-day mob, I think, doesn’t have enough romance. And they’ve been overwhelmed by technology from the FBI.”
Newell pointed out that when the contemporary mob film was born in the early 1970s, with the first two installments of the “Godfather” trilogy, J. Edgar Hoover had reluctantly acknowledged the existence of the Mafia only a decade before. Continuing the chronology, he noted that Martin Scorsese’s “Goodfellas” (1990), about an ambitious gangster, Henry Hill, was emblematic of the yuppie ‘80s.
Newell suggested that in “Donnie Brasco,” the Al Pacino character, Lefty, a constantly broke gambler whose sleeves get more threadbare as the story progresses, is a gangster for the ‘90s.
“Now I don’t know what the definitive mob movie of the ‘90s is going to be, but my guess would be that it’s got to start to be about exhaustion,” he said. “That we are both beginning to be exhausted with the genre - there’s not much more to tell - and that it may be the case that the Italian mob is beginning finally, really, to run out of steam, both because the FBI’s been so successful and also because the mob is now so legitimate, they’re so woven into the fabric here that they hardly need to be criminal anymore.”
After spending time with organized-crime figures in Brooklyn, Newell decided to focus his film not on “generalship” but on survival. “They try and make the scores they make, and they try to keep the loan sharking on track and collect on the numbers,” he said. “It’s grinding daily work. It’s ‘Death of a Salesman,’ this story.”
Another writer familiar with the Mafia, Gay Talese, sees enduring attraction in the mob movie, much as there has been in the recurring tales of strong, silent men out West.
“The Mafia movie was really an urban western. Its appeal was a kind of justice that isn’t recognized in the law,” he said. “The mob movie and the western movie both show men in decisive postures.”
Talese’s works include “Honor Thy Father,” the book about the Bonanno crime family that was made into a television movie of the same name in 1971.
Talese does not believe that the Mafia genre is exhausted yet. In fact, he feels there is still glamour to be attached to mobsters now, because they seem “heroic, in a perverted sense,” in contrast to the FBI, which has suffered a tarnished reputation because of such things as the botched siege at Ruby Ridge.
By that token, Depp’s undercover FBI Agent Pistone serves double duty in “Donnie Brasco”: as a make-believe mobster and as a Fed whose testimony brings down numerous organized-crime figures.
“Hollywood could make an anti-crime contribution that the Justice Department hasn’t been able to,” Talese joked. “One way to kill the Mafia is to kill the film business.” If directors like Scorsese and actors like Pacino and De Niro stopped making mob movies, he suggested, “there’s the end of organized crime as we know it.”
Peter Maas wrote the first two screenplay drafts of the 1972 film “The Valachi Papers,” adapting his 1968 book of the same name, the first insider expose from a mob informant. Like Newell, Maas observed that mob stories drawn from true accounts have an extra appeal. (Notable among such post-“Godfather” films were “Scarface,” 1983; “The Untouchables,” 1987; “Goodfellas,” 1990, and “Bugsy,” 1991.)
This true-life bonus can be squandered if, as Puzo noted, basic storytelling skills flag.
A case in point is “Casino,” the 1995 mob movie directed by Scorsese and starring De Niro as a Las Vegas casino boss. The film didn’t do well at the box office “because there wasn’t anybody to root for,” Maas said.
“I think when they become more fictionalized they’ll run out of steam eventually,” he said of Mafia films.
If mob films don’t go the way of the western, the abiding taste for the vicarious thrill of danger may get much of the credit.
“I think there’s a fascination in the country for people who live on the edge, where it’s a matter of life and death,” Maas said. “Society by and large doesn’t have that any more The western supplied that for a long time. There was always a shoot-out right at the end.”
For better or worse, thugs from John Dillinger to today’s Mafiosi have come across in many films as worthy of respect, or at least of forgiving sympathy.
“We feel that our age is uniquely chaotic and built on shifting sands,” said Newell. “Then we see a society where if you do a certain thing you’re killed, or you do another thing and you are promoted, or you behave in a certain fashion and you are rewarded. There are strong codes of behavior which we don’t have anymore, and I’m sure that’s important to an audience.”
And persistently important to Hollywood, Talese observed.
“The Al Pacinos of the world,” he said, “they can do all the Hamlets they want, they can go upscale with Shakespeare, but where the money comes is the Mafia movie.”