Donnie Brasco

National Review, April 7, 1997 by John Simon

Whether the hoods make comic asses of themselves on a tennis court or feed hamburgers to a real lion in their Caddie, whether there is bittersweet conjugal sex on a staircase or a wrenching confrontation in a hospital, the rightness never lets up. Jon Gregory's editing is canny in its rubato, matched by Newell's sense of camera angle and position; note, for example, how a pair of red snakeskin boots figures in two very different scenes. Peter Sova, a cinematographer of whom we have seen too little, does atmospheric wonders indoors and outdoors, particularly with cars gliding portentously through an ominously darkling city.

Indeed, the way New York and Florida are captured here makes masterly use of ambience. Production design and costume design are equally flawless -- observe, for instance, those Seventies polyester suits on the wiseguys. And Newell sees to it that the unexpected pervades the quotidian with an ambushing spontaneity about which nothing feels staged. It all goes by with such realistic rapidity that much of Donnie Brasco ripens fully only later, in engaged recollection. I am still mulling over the scene in which Donnie, or Joseph, explains to a couple of FBI colleagues the various meanings a Mafioso can, according to the inflection, pack into the phrase fuhgeddaboudit. There is, however, very little about this film you'll be able to forget.

You will, though, want to forget all about Marvin's Room, should you have the misfortune of wandering into it. It is based on a play by Scott McPherson that made it largely on the much-publicized fact of its author's suffering from AIDS, which soon killed him. Also, the play itself dealt with AIDS, although in a coyly roundabout way that many may have preferred.

The film adaptation, somewhat questionably attributed to the long-deceased playwright, is both tamer (less absurdist) and duller (more explicit and drawn-out) than the play. Poorly directed by the stage director Jerry Zaks, new to the cinema, it features an inept but mercifully brief performance by Robert De Niro, and two horrible ones by Meryl Streep and Leonardo DiCaprio. Diane Keaton, whom I usually dislike, is quite marvelous here, but not enough to make you set foot in this stiflingly overheated, windowless room.