Donnie Brasco

Most films in this archive take a real organisation and invent people to put in it. This one takes a real operation, a published account written by the man who ran it, and a court record produced by the prosecutions that followed, and stays close to all three.

What it gets right

The central relationship, which is the thing the film is actually about.

Benjamin Ruggiero vouched for an outsider, taught him the manners of the life, and complained to him for six years about a career that had gone nowhere. The film's version of that — an ageing soldier who has given everything to an organisation that has given him almost nothing back — is supported by the record rather than invented for pathos. So is the ending it puts him in: Ruggiero was the man who had vouched, and vouching carried the consequence.

The texture is right too. The film is largely about waiting, driving, eating and being bored, which is what the surveillance record and Pistone's own account both describe, and which almost no other film in this archive is willing to show.

What it changes

Compression, mostly, and the ordinary kind.

Six years become a manageable running time. Several people become one person. The chronology of the family's internal fighting is simplified, and the positions of some of the men around Ruggiero are adjusted to keep the story on two faces.

The one to be careful about

The film ends where the operation ended, which leaves the impression that the story closes with a man going home.

It did not. Napolitano was killed within weeks. Ruggiero was arrested, convicted, served eleven years and died of cancer. Pistone testified through the middle of the decade and lived under an open contract. The operation produced more than a hundred convictions, and the family it exposed took another two decades to finish falling apart.