Rhapsodies

This week I watched a pair of thrillers  involving people going undercover to infiltrate the mob… and perhaps vice versa.

The first film on my list Mike Newell’s Donnie Brasco tells the story of Joseph D. Pistone, (Johnny Depp), an FBI agent who goes undercover as a jewel thief named Donnie Brasco. Soon he befriends a long time mafia soldier Benjamin “Lefty” Ruggiero (Al Pacino). Lefty teaches him the way of the mafia and soon Donnie is climbing the criminal ladder.  Can Donnie make it through this all with his life intact? Especially when his superiors in the FBI keep screwing things up with their own agenda?

As interesting as the tension of whether Brasco’s cover will survive or not, what really makes this film work is the friendship between Donnie and Lefty, and Donnie’s reluctance to let Lefty get caught when the shoe finally drops.  But what was absolutely the best part of this film was Al Pacino as Lefty, playing him as a man who is frustrated that despite being a good soldier, has never made it anywhere in the mob hierarch, gets no respect and is now frustrated that the man he introduced into the life is doing better at it than he is. 

The next film on my list, Martin Scorsese’s The Departed tells the story of violent Boston mobster, Frank Costello (Jack Nicolson) who grooms young man from the neighborhood, Colin Sullivan (Matt Damon) to attend police academy and become his mole in the Massachusetts state police. 

Meanwhile, the police department arranges that Billy Costigan Jr. (Leonardo DiCaprio)A young man from a disreputable Southie background to go to prison on trumped up charges, so that he’ll have a criminal record and street crew when he gets out… Perfect for infiltrating Costello’s organization. 

Soon, both organizations find out the possibility that they have been compromised. So now it’s the job of the mole to hunt down the mole… So who’s going to succeed first?

A remake of Andrew Lau and Alan Mak’s Infernal Affairs, this is a dark, cynical and violent film that is certainly up to Scorsese’s usual standards. While I definitely need to see Infernal Affairs I’ve seen enough Hong Kong action thrillers to suspect that Scorsese was making an effort to emulate many of the pacing and editing techniques used in many of such films. I especially liked how he parallels Colin and Billy throughout the film and Damon and DiCaprio have enough of a superficial resemblance, you get a serious doppelgänger vibe between the two of them throughout the film. 

Finally, Jack Nicolson’s performance was a pleasure. So many of his roles are just him playing Jack it’s a pleasure to see the ocasisional times he shows off his range.