"...and it's your best friend that does it."

Charlie Chaplin, the most famous silent comedian who ever lived, once spoke, "Life is a tragedy when seen in close-up, but a comedy in long-shot." I used to think this was a clever observation, until I tried applying it to a film that's very amusing in the details but crushingly mirthless from a distance.

Based on true events, Donnie Brasco skims the edge of mocking in its depiction of mafia life well past the organization's prime, yet it maintains a kind of gracious awe for the honour among thieves--our hero's point of view. He would be FBI agent Joe Pistone (Johnny Depp, in a penetrating performance), who risks his neck posing, in a years-long sting operation, as Donnie Brasco, a Manhattan jeweller.

When aging gangster Lefty (Al Pacino) contacts him about some hot diamonds, a mentor-protégé relationship is born. Unlucky for Joe's ignorant wife (Anne Heche) and kids, a sincere friendship blossoms from Lefty's tutelage, thus spreading Joe's devotions too thin; before long, he is embraced by Lefty's hierarchal crew, and comes to prefer their violent dealings to bureaucratic hypocrisy and a gasping marriage.

If you're wondering how any of this could be construed as humorous, I've left out the flavour of the gaudy seventies setting, and no words can convey, or do justice to, the almost farcically tentative early exchanges between Depp and Pacino, which are coloured by gibberish terms like "fugazi" and the combination of "forget about it" into the polysyllabic "fuhgeddaboudit." These early scenes culminate in the absurd image of "Donnie" and Lefty feeding forty hamburgers to a famished lion out the back of Joe's Deville. Plus, anything with actor Bruno Kirby is intrinsically funny. But the film's overtones are doomed and inevitable; it becomes a brooding examination of trust upon reconsideration.

Donnie Brasco is often described as "Death of a Salesman" revisited, with Lefty, a cancer survivor, the Willy Loman of crime, a man too sycophantic and soft to achieve the notoriety he so desperately craves. In "Donnie," he has found new purpose, someone to bear his torch and actually run with it, and, although his legacy is unquestionably pathetic, screenwriter Paul Attanasio treats this aspect of the story humanely. (Lefty's flesh-and-blood son is a junkie.) Pacino's brilliant, streetwise turn suggests a hollowly narcissistic version of the schlumpfy Michael Corleone who inhabited The Godfather Part III: a jaded, redemptive soul too ingrained in The Life to ditch it. The genre rarely saw better days in the nineteen-nineties than this lonely memoir.

Columbia Tri-Star Home Video has re-released Donnie Brasco on your favourite format and mine in Special Edition form, part of an ongoing effort to bring their initial 1997 wave of DVD titles up to speed. I own both now, so I decided to do an A/B comparison between them. The results were somewhat disappointing, as not only has a maddeningly brown, occasionally flickering (2.35:1, anamorphically enhanced) transfer been recycled, but the dedicated .1 channel has been dropped entirely from the mix. Granted, the film is not full of low frequencies, and the differences between the subdued 5.0 and 5.1 recordings are minute at best, in this case (Patrick Doyle's grieving score receives an additional, isolated track); the new version is also better compressed in video terms. (Artifacts had previously tampered with sharpness.)

Great supps helped me forget my frustrated reaction to the audio-visual presentation. First up is a screen-specific commentary from director Mike Newell that is unapologetically enthusiastic and extremely entertaining after he gets past the habit of explaining very obvious character motivation. "Christ, that's acting," his reaction to a specific shot of Pacino, has to be the most wonderful and precise thing I've heard a filmmaker say in a play-by-play all year.

Five deleted scenes, with optional introduction and contribution from Newell, underscore Donnie Brasco's delicate structure, though some closure on the lion subplot may have been welcome. Elsewhere, you'll find two featurettes, one, compiled in 1997, at 7 minutes, the other, compiled in 2000, at 23; curiously, the real Pistone's identity is protected in the former (his face is tiled out) but not in the latter--is he no longer a mob target? Finally, we have a photo gallery (set to Doyle's music), talent files, production notes, a DVD-ROM weblink, trailers for Donnie Brasco, The Devil's Own, The Professional, and The Juror (also co-starring Heche), and a collectible booklet.