Word: mobbing
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...Mob genealogy reveals that the New York City mafia powerhouse of the 20th century emerged from a chance encounter on a Brooklyn side street. The year was 1916, and 14-year-old Meyer Lansky was running errands for his father when he accidentally discovered young Benjamin "Bugsy" Seigel in the process of getting his butt kicked by Salvatore Lucania, soon to become Charles "Lucky" Luciano. After beating Luciano over the head with a monkey wrench until he calmed down, Lansky proceeded to befriend Seigel and eventually found the infamous hit squad Murder Inc., While Luciano built a prostitution (hence...
...quite literally so for the hero of Donnie Brasco, Mike Newell's smart, suspenseful and neo-Scorsesian study of lowlife Mob life. Based on a true story, the film takes its title from the alias chosen by an undercover FBI man named Joe Pistone when he penetrated a New York Mafia family in the 1970s. He lived this lie for six years, knowing that one miscue, one bad line reading could be his death warrant. Then he spent twice that time testifying against men with whom he had developed certain dubious collegial bonds. Today Pistone, who emerged lately...
...making a quantum leap from the frothy Four Weddings and a Funeral) observes, Brasco "is a hard man, a brutal man," operating in a narrative that offers him no convenient escape clauses, no soft or fanciful evasions of fate. Forced in anguish to abandon his real family for his Mob family--his wife, whose patience with his absences finally runs out, is very well played by Anne Heche--Brasco must ultimately betray his only real friend in the criminal clan, Al Pacino's very weary, very unsuccessful and finally very touching soldier, a man the movie makes much more appealing...
This is good strong stuff, not least because, as Newell says, Paul Attanasio's adaptation of Pistone's book offers "this absolutely novel point of view about the Mob," dealing as it does "with the lowest rung, the have-nots. I loved being at the bottom of the pond." So, obviously, did Depp. "He absorbs so much," says the wondering Pistone, with whom Depp hung out for weeks, perfecting all his mannerisms--right down to a nervous cough--that "he doesn't try. It just comes to him. And he remembers everything. He's like a sponge...
...known facts of this matter with a lot of very obvious, very movieish fictions. Some of this was doubtless inevitable. Like the terrible end of the story, its ludicrous beginnings--a trampy white woman falsely accuses an anonymous black man of brutally assaulting her, thereby whipping up a mob spirit in Sumner--is known and powerfully shown. What is not available in the historical records is anything very specific about the people, victims and victimizers alike, who lived this story. Nor, apparently, does it offer a suitably heroic figure on whom to center audience attention or a suspenseful and emotionally...