By Noel Murray and Jim Ridley
Director Mike Newell doesn’t have the visual chops of a Scorsese, a De Palma, or a Coppola, so it’s no surprise that his mob picture, Donnie Brasco, isn’t a visceral wonder like The Godfather or GoodFellas. In Newell’s hands, the montage—so vital to the narrative drive of most crime films—becomes as disjointed and confusing as your typical music video. Donnie Brasco covers four years in the life of an undercover F.B.I. agent, but with Newell’s clumsy sense of exposition, it could just as easily be four months. The man simply has no panache, no zip: He brings no style to the table.
But then, stylish gangster melodramas are a dime a reel. Mike Newell’s gift is guiding actors to fine performances (as demonstrated in his delightful Four Weddings and a Funeral). With Donnie Brasco, Newell takes two of the best actors in the American cinema, Al Pacino and Johnny Depp, and with the help of a rich script by Paul Attanasio creates a marvelous, affecting character study.
Johnny Depp plays the title character—or, rather, Joe Pistone, an F.B.I. agent who spends six years masquerading as Donnie, a jewel “specialist.” When the movie opens, he has already spent two years working his way into the mob. Through careful planning, he catches an extraordinary break: He hooks up with Lefty, an aging gangster with over 20 hits to his credit. Lefty makes Donnie his protégé, teaching him all he’s learned in three decades of delinquency—unaware that he’s spilling his secrets to the man who could be his undoing.
Al Pacino’s Lefty is a remarkable creation—the Mafia equivalent of a 30-year company man who never rises above shift lead on the factory floor. He knows the rules and follows orders, but that just makes him a “mutt”; though thousands of dollars pass through his hands every day, none of it ever sticks to his pockets. He’s a born loser, lacking the vision or leadership to make a name for himself. Even when his branch of “the family” assumes more responsibility within the organization, it’s Donnie, not Lefty, who gets the perks and the visibility.
Similarly, Depp almost steals the film from Pacino. It’s difficult for any actor to play alongside Pacino without aping his style of tics, shouts, and hand gestures, but Depp locks onto his character and takes him deep. As Depp plays him, Joe Pistone is a faint memory. Brasco is fully at the helm, and as the time approaches to pull out and let the law step in, there’s some question as to whether Pistone/Brasco will abandon his disguise—or even if he should. After all, the mob Pistone infiltrates is a pretty pathetic bunch, reduced to bickering over the coins in busted-up parking meters. Left alone, they’d likely whack each other anyway.
Paul Attanasio’s previous screenplay credits include the solid Disclosure and the masterful Quiz Show, but his finest achievement may well be the creation of NBC’s Homicide: Life on the Streets (along with Barry Levinson and Gail Mutrux, who also coproduced Donnie Brasco). Attanasio’s strength is his fascination with human weakness—he writes with an understanding that we are susceptible to doubts and temptations, and that our best intentions can be misplaced. Donnie Brasco is about people doing their jobs through sheer inertia, even though they know the dreadful ramifications of their actions.
But Attanasio has also written a very funny film, built on naturalistic dialogue and careful explication of the mundane machinations of criminals. And Mike Newell is in his element with this sort of character-driven screenplay. He holds the camera on his actors and lets them talk about the nuances of the cosa nostra—like the variable meanings of the phrase “fuhgeddaboutit,” or what the word “friend” really describes. At the end of the movie, as a man, knowing he is leaving his house for a rendezvous with death, carefully removes everything valuable from his person, no flashy camerawork is necessary. The details tell the story.—Noel Murray
In Brief
Booty Call The name—like pork rinds, Miller Lite, or Men Behaving Badly—perfectly illustrates the content of this tasteless, blatant, and sometimes hilarious raunchfest about two horny heroes, Bunz (Jamie Foxx) and Rushon (Tommy Davidson), out to score with the eminently fine Nikki (Tamala Jones) and Lysterine (Vivica A. Fox). What transpires shows how far screen standards for dumb sex comedies have relaxed since 1981’s demure Porky’s. Gags about condoms, dental dams, and anal sex rule, and the scene that leaves audiences hollering has Bunz moaning in ecstasy, unaware that a dog, and not his date, is slurping his privates.
The movie, not surprisingly, was written and directed by guys—which may account for the scorn heaped upon Nikki for waiting seven weeks to sleep with her man. However, the movie’s battle of the sexes is evenly matched, and there’s a refreshing lack of coyness in the movie’s handling of sex. Far more offensive are the crudely stereotyped Asian characters, who, unlike the film’s other crude elements, never transcend their crumminess to earn laughs. Still, it’s hard to hate a movie in which a man describes a former date as “a hamhock-eatin’ wildebeest,” or in which a woman reaches orgasm by forcing her lover to imitate Jesse Jackson. In its funniest moments, Booty Call proudly lives down to its expectations.
Dante’s Peak This fast-paced, brain-dead lavapalooza about a dormant volcano suddenly raining destruction on a Northwestern town represents the future of megabudget disaster movies: expensive digital effects peopled with the cheapest cast possible. My colleague Noel Murray started laughing right from the credits, which (apart from top-liners Pierce Brosnan and Linda Hamilton) form a roll call of obscure character actors assembled under generic guidelines like “Weaselly City Official” and “Stubborn Grandma.” As a result, this may be the first movie in history in which the casting director pounded his fist on a table and screamed, “Get me a George Dzundza type!”
Credit cost-efficient producer Gale Ann Hurd for adhering to the same creed emblazoned across The Relic: One actor looks pretty much like another when chewed by a latex monster or sloshed by computer-generated lava. Money was nonetheless well spent on director Roger Donaldson, who keeps traffic moving faster than the speed of credulity, and cinematographer Andrzej Bartkowiak, who creates ominous textures from blizzards of ash. However, I suspect “Leslie Bohem,” the credited screenwriter, is actually the name of a software program that randomly collates subplots, characters, and dialogue from every disaster movie since 1937’s Hurricane. As such, its value at most is $39.95, and I hope the producer got Tetris free with the package.
Lost Highway David Lynch’s enigmatic thriller is neither as senseless as critics bemoan, nor as visionary as admirers proclaim. It is, however, a fascinating puzzle, and it’s the first work Lynch has done since the Twin Peaks pilot that seems driven by, not grafted onto, his familiar obsessions: the duality of identity, the demonizing power of sexuality, the totemic significance of the mundane. The bisected plot is a partial spin on Hitchcock’s Vertigo, or even Pulp Fiction: Parallel film-noir universes collide, intersect, and eventually fuse, with a smitten dupe (Bill Pullman) and a mysterious femme fatale (Patricia Arquette) morphing into different identities.
Unlike the unsettling jolts in Blue Velvet, which ruptured the synthetic tranquillity above a seething underworld, the violence Lynch wreaks here on noir conventions—indeed, on narrative form itself—adds up to little more than a stylistic exercise. But the movie isn’t childishly sadistic, like Lynch’s contemptible Wild at Heart. And feverish new sensations abound. Patricia Arquette burns through the movie’s haze of affectations like a slutty comet; her second entrance, staged in heart-stopping slow motion to Lou Reed’s “This Magic Moment,” packs alarming heat. The best scenes in Lost Highway suggest that an adult sensibility may one day emerge from Lynch’s traumatized-adolescent fixations.
subUrbia In which Richard Linklater’s genuine empathy for the denizens of strip malls and all-nite gas ’n’ sips butts heads with the misanthropic one-upmanship of Eric Bogosian’s play. In the Texas suburb of Burnfield, a group of self-consciously disaffected youths spend an eventful night in and around the parking lot of a 24-hour convenience store; resentments emerge, tempers flare, and characters complain about their lack of ambition or connection, only to needle each other about why they even care.
As always in Linklater’s films, the ensemble acting—by Giovanni Ribisi as the group’s cynical but yearning leader, Jayce Bartok as a painfully earnest rock star, Steve Zahn as a zonked mooch, and Amie Carey as a would-be performance artist who longs for escape—is excellent, and the director’s feel for the aimless drift of time in a small town is uncanny. And Bogosian’s writing is cruelly precise: When a character describes being impressed by a celebrity sighting, the choice of the celebrity—Sandra Bernhard—speaks volumes about the person talking, the person listening, and the grotesque trappings of fame in general. If only he weren’t so doggedly superior to his confused, miserable kids, who are continuously punished by their creator for their fragile illusions and pitiable pretensions. In subUrbia, Bogosian ribs phonies the same way Holden Caulfield did, but he’s willing to watch the kids in the rye run right off the cliff.—Jim Ridley
As always in Linklater’s films, the ensemble acting—by Giovanni Ribisi as the group’s cynical but yearning leader, Jayce Bartok as a painfully earnest rock star, Steve Zahn as a zonked mooch, and Amie Carey as a would-be performance artist who longs for escape—is excellent, and the director’s feel for the aimless drift of time in a small town is uncanny. And Bogosian’s writing is cruelly precise: When a character describes being impressed by a celebrity sighting, the choice of the celebrity—Sandra Bernhard—speaks volumes about the person talking, the person listening, and the grotesque trappings of fame in general. If only he weren’t so doggedly superior to his confused, miserable kids, who are continuously punished by their creator for their fragile illusions and pitiable pretensions. In subUrbia, Bogosian ribs phonies the same way Holden Caulfield did, but he’s willing to watch the kids in the rye run right off the cliff.—Jim Ridley
