Great Mafia story

Rating: 9/10 (26 May 2020)

The following review is an extract from the book "Mafia films - a guide", which is now available on Amazon. This book is very interesting not only for gangster movie lovers, but also for people who like to read about real Mafia history and facts, as the real events in which some of the movies are based are also analyzed.
"The film is based on real events, and tells the story of FBI agent Joseph Pistone; the first to infiltrate one of the five powerful Mafia families in New York. In the late 1970s, as he tells in his autobiographical book, Pistone was given the mission of breaking into the city's Mafia circles (...) . Pistone, of Italian background, was familiar with the lifestyle of the mafiosi who controlled the New York underworld. He too was a tough guy who spoke and moved like them, who knew very well their mentality and their way of doing things. That's why his superiors thought he would be the ideal agent for such a job, an infiltration task that aimed to hit the Mafia from the inside with a forcefulness never seen before.
(...) Big would also be Pistone's conflicts with his wife Maggie. She and her daughters could hardly be seen by the agent during the time of the infiltration, for obvious security reasons. Over the months, Maggie would notice a change in her husband's personality; who, in her opinion, was playing the role of a mafioso "too" well...
All this can be seen in the film, which is quite true to the real story - as Pistone himself has admitted. The former undercover agent, now in the witness protection program, worked as a consultant during the making of the film.
"Donnie Brasco" came to theaters in 1997, almost 20 years after the events shown in the film. The truth is that already in 1991 there was a project to bring Pistone's infiltration of the Bonanno family to the big screen, but it was postponed - especially because shortly before, in 1990, Martin Scorsese's famous and successful "Goodfellas", another film about the Mafia based also on real events, had come out. In the 1991 "Donnie Brasco", it was not Johnny Depp but Tom Cruise who was to play the main character; but Al Pacino was already the actor who would play Lefty Ruggiero.
Al Pacino plays a brilliant role playing the haggard and frustrated gangster. He constantly feels displaced within the family. He, who has always "worked hard" for the clan, considers it unfair that it is always others who rise in the hierarchy. This can be seen very well in the sequence of the yacht, when Lefty goes very excited towards the Florida Mafia boss to greet him, but this one ignores him and only wants to know where "Sonny Black" is.
While most of what we see in the film happened in real life, screenwriter Paul Attanasio and director Mike Newell took some artistic license by slightly changing some aspects of the story. For example, the Japanese restaurant scene is completely invented. On the other hand, the film suggests that the closest gangster to Pistone/Brasco (Johnny Depp) within the Mafia was Lefty Ruggiero (Al Pacino), when in fact the agent's closest contacts were with Sonny Black (Michael Madsen). Tony Mirra, who introduced Pistone to the Bonanno family, doesn't appear at all in the whole film - and that's a pity, because his volatile and psychopathic character (very well described in the book) could have make the movie even greater: Joe Pesci would have been the perfect candidate to play him."