Donnie Brasco, swaddled humbly, is low-qual’ excoriating, almost damning. I knee-jerk interpret Johnny Depp’s betrayal—its dismal thoughtlessness like a notional cultural precedent—to be an infantile abreaction, intended to goad Pacino’s small-home bosom and provoke dance around the immaculate pillars of Pacino’s perfected, low-fidelity Oedipal transparency (whose humour is so vast and derogative it is spousal), and in this infinitely recursive sense to be absolutely grotesque, un-egoically personal (in an immanent way), too much trembling and pernicious, too-damn-phenomenologically-immoral, to be anything but an odious lying semblance to upturned federal nostrils, whose holier snobbery normally lives a little.
Donnie Brasco (1997)
