Hierarchical ldd(1)

I see many interesting details but no direct answer to the question asked.

The ‘hierarchical’ version of ldd is lddtree (from app-misc/pax-utils):

$ lddtree /usr/bin/xmllint 
xmllint => /usr/bin/xmllint (interpreter => /lib64/ld-linux-x86-64.so.2)
    libreadline.so.6 => /lib64/libreadline.so.6
        libncurses.so.5 => /lib64/libncurses.so.5
            libdl.so.2 => /lib64/libdl.so.2
    libxml2.so.2 => /usr/lib64/libxml2.so.2
        libicui18n.so.49 => /usr/lib64/libicui18n.so.49
            libstdc++.so.6 => /usr/lib/gcc/x86_64-pc-linux-gnu/4.7.1/32/libstdc++.so.6
                ld-linux.so.2 => /lib64/ld-linux.so.2
            libgcc_s.so.1 => /usr/lib/gcc/x86_64-pc-linux-gnu/4.7.1/32/libgcc_s.so.1
        libicuuc.so.49 => /usr/lib64/libicuuc.so.49
        libicudata.so.49 => /usr/lib64/libicudata.so.49
        libz.so.1 => /lib64/libz.so.1
        liblzma.so.5 => /usr/lib64/liblzma.so.5
        libm.so.6 => /lib64/libm.so.6
    libpthread.so.0 => /lib64/libpthread.so.0
    libc.so.6 => /lib64/libc.so.6