Sunday Matinee #81 Donnie Brasco
CAN we think through ALL of the consequences of our actions?
2 Samuel 11:1-15 | EnterTheBible.org
Tenth Sunday After Pentecost | 07.28.2024
Context: David has fallen in love with Bathsheba, a woman he saw, well, taking a bath. A bath, she, bay taking! …Anyway… David sleeps with her, though they’re both married, and he devises a plan to get her husband, Uriah, out of the picture in a way that he believes no one will suspect: he writes a letter.
14 In the morning David wrote a letter to Joab, and sent it by the hand of Uriah. 15 In the letter he wrote, “Set Uriah in the forefront of the hardest fighting, and then draw back from him, so that he may be struck down and die.” 16 As Joab was besieging the city, he assigned Uriah to the place where he knew there were valiant warriors. 17 The men of the city came out and fought with Joab; and some of the servants of David among the people fell. Uriah the Hittite was killed as well.
Donnie Brasco | 1997
IMDb | Letterboxd | RRMC
Context: Undercover FBI agent Joseph Pistone (Johnny Depp) is known to the mob as Donnie Brasco. He works closely with Lefty Ruggiero (Al Pacino) as part of his infiltration process. When the crime family erupts and power exchanges hands, Pistone is pulled from his cover and the FBI tells the crime family who he was. That means they’ll feel Lefty is to blame for letting Pistone get that close to the family. Soon enough, Lefty knows he’s going to be taken out of the picture and tries to leave in a way his wife won’t suspect when he figures it out: he get a call.
Lefty is on the phone. He smokes, a concerned look on his face.
Lefty: Yeah? …Yeah, all right. …All right. Okay.
Lefty hangs up, sits there. Annette comes around the corner, toweling off from a shower.
Annette: Was that for me?
Lefty gets up to greet her.
Lefty: No. It was a guy I got to go see.
Annette: So late?
Lefty: What am I gonna do? Who knows with these people?
Lefty gets up and moves to the closet.
Lefty: Honey, don’t wait up for me tonight.
Annette: No?
Lefty: I don’t know how long I’m gonna be.
Lefty puts on his coat.
Lefty: And listen to me, if Donnie calls… tell him… if it was gonna be anyone, I’m glad it was him. All right? [Lefty kisses her.] Look how beautiful you look. Goodbye.
Annette: …Bye, Ben.
Annette lingers in the doorway, then enters the bedroom. Lefty goes to the front door, stops, then takes off his jewelry and empties his pockets, leaving his money, ID, and valuables home for Annette to find later. He leaves the apartment, never to return.
Commentary:
If you knew people would be hurt by your actions, would you do it anyway?
That is one of the paradoxes of leadership. Few leadership decisions come without a cost, including a cost that can be negative or at least change things up for at least one person. If your company switches vendors, the old company is out your business. If you have to post the final cast list, not everyone who auditioned makes the cut. And if you’re a married king who wants to sleep with married women who takes rooftops baths, it’s quite possible that you could just go ahead and send her husband off to his certain doom and see what happens.
We’ve all been there, right?
I won’t pretend to be one of the world’s foremost scholars of King David, but we know his story is often lauded as one of the most powerful stories of leadership we know today. He is the shepherd boy who would be king, and in many ways he is a good king. But as it is for so many who hold power, it is challenging for him to resist using that power for his own gains. That’s exactly what’s happening here with Bathsheba and Uriah. That family had nothing to do with King David until King David decided he’d have everything to do with that family.
When David decides to send Uriah to war, he knows most of the natural consequences. He knows Uriah will die. He knows he and Bathsheba are more free to pursue one another. But he does not know (perhaps he discounts?) the cost to his own soul for such a selfish act. He kills to get what he wants. Is that what kings do? Sure. But is that what a king anointed by a prophet in the name of God is supposed to do? Not so much.
In Donnie Brasco, Joseph PIstone (Johnny Depp) is not a leader in the FBI, but he does have a very important job. He’s undercover as Donnie Brasco, working his way into the mob to take them down. His work will come at several costs, as well. It impacts his relationship with his fellow FBI agents. It impacts his relationship with his three daughters. It impacts his relationship with his wife, Maggie (Anne Heche). And it impacts his soul as he ends up acting a lot more like the criminal he’s impersonating than being himself.
Could he have seen all of that coming? Perhaps, and this would not be the first story of undercover work taking such a heavy toll. Likely the one thing Donnie couldn’t have seen coming was his friendship with Lefty Ruggiero (Al Pacino). Though Lefty has vouched for Donnie, Donnie knows he will ultimately betray Lefty. Slowly, he realizes that his work leaves his new friend vulnerable to arrest and prison or even worse, a mob hit. He tries to get Lefty to leave, but it’s too late. The wheels are set in motion as the consequences of his actions.
The ending of Donnie Brasco is bittersweet. Pistone’s work as Donnie Brasco leads to dozens of convictions. He and his family move away to start a new life. But he also has a price on his head. And Lefty is killed. We don’t see that. But we see him know that. We see Lefty say goodbye to Annette. We see him prep his own body for burial, as it were. We see him march off to his death. There is a heavy cost to this betrayal.
Lefty is a tragic character and while he was a cold-blooded killer, Pistone / Donnie loved him and regretted that his work for the FBI would lead to his doom. He never got to change the outcome once the wheels were in motion, however. Scripture doesn’t tell us if Uriah knew he was marching to his death. It doesn’t say if Bathsheba knew that David orchestrated Uriah going to war specifically so they could be together, but perhaps she had an inkling that if your husband gets a letter that he’s going to the front lines, he may not be coming back. In the film, we see Annette hesitate as Lefty says goodbye, as if she has a bad feeling about this.
When the consequences of our actions may do good but hurt someone along the way, do we do it anyway?