Rhetorical Analysis of Donnie Brasco
by Blake McGovern
Donnie Brasco is a film published in 1997 based on the true story of an FBI agent by the name of Joe Pistone going undercover as a jeweler to make his way into the Italian Mob. The film depicts Joe’s (Donnie Brasco’s) trials and tribulations while in the Mob and his struggle to balance his real life at home with his fallacious one. The author, Richard Woodley, attempts to tug at the viewer’s emotional side in a rather violent, dark story in order to pull people on the side of the antagonist, Lefty Ruggiero.
The first interaction between Donnie and Lefty, a mobster, takes place in a bar where Donnie has been spending a lot of time, attempting to assimilate himself into the hooks of Lefty. While Lefty and his mobster buddies are having a drink and chopping it up, Lefty can’t help but notice Donnie sitting all by his lonesome on the other side of the establishment, drinking some sort of alcohol. Lefty then asks his buddies, “Who’s that over there? The guy by the bar with the mustache.” To which one replies: “That’s Don, Don the Jeweler.” The following day, Lefty approaches Donnie inquiring about a diamond ring he bought off of a rather shady retailer. Donnie examines the ring and tells him it’s a “fugazy”, and that Lefty is a “dumbsky” for not knowing it was a fake. This really ticks off Lefty because he feels like he wasted eight grand now, even though it actually is a real diamond ring and Donnie is just giving Lefty a hard time. At this point in the story, the audience doesn’t realize how important Lefty is, but that is about to change due to the fact that he feels threatened by Donnie and his shenanigans. After Donnie calls Lefty a dumbsky, Lefty responds by stating “My mother can hold her head up in any neighborhood in this city when she walks down the block, see? In all the five boroughs, I’m known. Forget about it. I’m known all over the fucking world. Anybody, ask anybody about Lefty from Mulberry Street”. This comes as a shock when the author depicts Lefty in the larger-than-life manner because at the start he seemed like a lower-level mobster, but now Donnie must take more precaution with what he says to him because it is evident now that he has sort of a crazy side to him. The author wants the audience to have a greater respect for Lefty now that he has made his presence known, and since Donnie is the protagonist, Lefty is sort of on the fence between the two (protagonist and antagonist).
After this sketchy first interaction, Donnie and Lefty begin spending a lot of time with one another, and a couple weeks go by then Lefty invites Donnie over for Christmas dinner, and the two exchange money and have a good meal. The issue the author wants the audience to take note of is the fact that Donnie only wanted to stay for a little bit to be able to make it home at a decent hour to see his own family, but Lefty insists that he stays late into the night. At one point in the night, when Lefty is making dinner, he tells Donnie that he went in front of all the skippers of the Mob and went on record with Donnie. To explain this to Donnie, he states “Nobody can touch you now. I’m your man. Jesus Christ couldn’t touch you, because I represent you. So keep your nose clean, be a good earner, follow the rules, and who knows, maybe one day when they open the books, you get straightened out. Come on, lift your glass. I’d die with you Donnie. Anything happens, I’m responsible”. The audience is now aware of the situation Donnie is in because of what Lefty just told him, that if the FBI pulls Donnie out of the infiltration program he is in, the Mob will find out that Donnie wasn’t a real mobster and they will kill Lefty because he swore him in. Looking in from the outside, many wouldn’t mind there being one less mobster alive, but Donnie is building a relationship with Lefty, a real one that is aside from the fact Donnie is an FBI agent. The author does a great job of pulling at the audience’s emotional side, and when they touch glasses and Lefty says he would die with Donnie, it makes it a whole lot harder for the audience to continue thinking of Lefty as someone Donnie is taking advantage of for the FBI’s sake, but rather a real friend.
The next major interaction between Lefty and Donnie takes place when Donnie goes over to Lefty’s place and is approached by Lefty’s wife, who says that Lefty is at the hospital with his son because he overdosed. This takes place after Donnie and Lefty haven’t seen each other in a while because one of the higher-ups in the Mob relocated Donnie to Florida. Once Donnie shows up at the hospital, Lefty tells him to leave and that he won’t be any help, but Donnie refuses to. Lefty then starts to get emotional talking about his son, the drug addict, stating “His heart stopped like a watch. That’s what the doctor said. Just like a watch. They had to wind it back up. Who knows? Maybe next time, they can’t.” To this, Donnie states “He’s gonna be all right. He’ll be all right.” Then, Lefty responds by saying “I love you, Donnie”. The fact that Donnie went directly to the hospital after learning about Lefty’s son even though the two hadn’t seen each other for a long time speaks to the relationship they had built throughout their time with one another. The author’s main goal with this scene was to really implant the fact that Lefty has his complete trust in Donnie, but with the realization of Donnie living a fake life alongside Lefty looming, it is hard for the audience to think about the two of them parting.
Later in the film, Donnie’s wife confronts him regarding a bag she found which contained three-hundred thousand dollars in it, which Donnie needed to give to his buddies in the Mob, but was just holding onto in his house for safekeeping. Donnie’s wife then snaps and says she thinks Donnie hates her, to which Donnie responds “This job is eating me alive. I can’t breathe anymore. And if I come out, this guy Lefty dies. They’re gonna kill him, because he vouched for me, because he stood up for me. I live with that every day. That’s the same thing as if I put the bullet in his head myself, you understand? I’m not becoming like them Maggie. I am them”. The next time Donnie sees Lefty, Lefty confronts him with the task of killing the son of one of the higher-ups in the Mob, and Donnie realizes he must leave the mission because he is not permitted to kill someone as an undercover federal agent. As Donnie is waiting for the son to come into his vision, the FBI announces their presence and breaks the conflict up. In the following days, the agents on the scene confront the mobsters, telling them Donnie was an agent, but they don’t believe it at first because he seemed so much like he really was a mobster. The realization eventually sinks in when Donnie doesn’t show up to their bar for a few days. Lefty then gets a call from his Mob buddies, and when he hangs up the phone, he says to his wife “Honey, don’t wait up for me tonight. I don’t know how long I’m gonna be. And listen to me, if Donnie calls… tell him… if it was gonna be anyone; I’m glad it was him. All right?”
The dialogue in the text throughout the story does a great job or portraying the dire situation Donnie is in, attempting to balance his real life with his FBI mobster one. Sudden lashes of anger from him and others such as his wife and Lefty keep things interesting, especially because the mobsters in the story are portrayed as being very unpredictable, so the anger seen frequently keeps the audience on their toes. There is two possible intended audiences: one being people who want pure entertainment, and the other being people who want to see Italian Mob history of the past mobilized into a film. It does a great job at both of these, included real dialogue from the actual occurrence, and being a very hooking storyline without dull moments. In conclusion, Donnie Brasco is a great depiction of the life or death situation Joe Pistone was thrown into, and the author, Richard Woodley, did an immaculate job of keeping the audience on the edge of their seats.