Mike Newell’s Donnie Brasco between Classic Hollywood and the New Gangster

Abstract

This chapter analyzes Donnie Brasco, stressing how this film is positioned at a crucial intersection in the cinematic representation of the mafioso/gangster. Filmed in the late 1990s and released after an unsuspecting success like Quentin Tarantino’s Reservoir Dogs scrambled and reset the gangster genre (the same genre the Godfather saga had canonized twenty years earlier), Donnie Brasco is situated between the old, established representation of the Hollywood mafioso, and the pastiche that will definitively rework it in the twenty-first century – that is to say, between the somber gravitas of the Corleone saga and the glitzy charm of Goodfellas, right into the moral crisis and psychological conflicts of the Tarantino gangsters and, a few years later, Tony and Carmela Soprano. In the author’s words, the “de-romanticization of the mafioso, the complex psychological dilemmas connected to the rethinking of Italian-American identity as a multiplicity of points of view, are all themes that this film explores, helping to re-shape the image of the wise guy into his ‘modern’ configuration.” By keeping a distance from the classic gangster film, Donnie Brasco does not, however, give up the visual imagery of Coppola and Scorsese’s Italian mafia types and, in particular, a meticulous exploration of the codes that constitute acceptable masculine conduct within the Italian mob, offering an intriguing study of masculinity and male relations within the Italian mob.