In the past few years, it seems as if Martin Scorsese has been trying very hard to make films that can't readily be identified as, well, Martin Scorsese films. Gangs of New York and The Aviator are certainly good movies, but they lack the mugs, goombahs and made-men of such from-the-heart Scorsese classics as Mean Streets and GoodFellas.
The Departed is a Scorsese movie and proud of it. And that's part of what makes it so very good. That, and an excellent script penned by William Monahan and a dream cast headed by Leonardo DiCaprio, Matt Damon and Jack Nicholson.
A hugely successful 2002 Hong Kong thriller, Infernal Affairs, provides the blueprint that is essentially a tale of two moles. Or brother rats, if you like.
PHOTOS COURTESY OF LONG SHONG
One, Colin Sullivan (Damon), is deeply embedded in the Massachusetts State Police Department. The other, Billy Costigan (DiCaprio), has newly infiltrated the Irish mafia led by the savage and irrepressible Frank Costello (Nicholson).
In a scenario worthy of Dickens, Colin was recruited at a soda fountain as a kid by a suspiciously friendly Frank who took him under his wing like a surrogate father. He did so, we quickly learn, for the sole purpose of raising his own private rat — an insider who can tip him off whenever the cops are coming his way.
Billy, who also grew up in South Boston, was all but fated to become one of Frank's boyos. To change that was one reason he went into law enforcement. But as far as avuncular Captain Queenan (Martin Sheen) and his hard-nosed assistant, Sergeant Dignam (Mark Wahlberg, in a firecracker of a performance), are concerned, Billy's “tainted” background makes him the perfect choice to go undercover.
The kicker? Each is assigned to find the mole inside their respective group. Or, as Colin exults to his mentor, “Hey, Frank! I gotta find myself!”
Billy isn't quite as enthusiastic. Now that Frank and his lieutenant, French (Ray Winstone, solid), know there's an informer, they're liable to do anything. Begging Dignam to pull him off the job, he explodes, “Do you want him to chop me up and feed me to the poor?”
These two marvelous actors make the most of their contrasting characters — Damon's cock-of-the-walk smoothie versus DiCaprio's scared-stiff sacrificial lamb. It's also a nifty bit of countercasting since Damon (the Bourne movies aside) is generally cast as the “innocent” and DiCaprio as the brash know-it-all.
Yet each is the other's doppelganger, too. Both spend most of the movie getting out of one tight spot after another. In one sequence where Billy shadows Colin, trying to see his face, they even wear almost identical baseball caps and hooded sweatshirts. They're so good, they accomplish the small miracle of preventing Nicholson from stealing the movie.
Not that he doesn't try. Sporting a devilish The Witches of Eastwick goatee, his eyebrows working at hyper-speed, the legendary actor cavorts through the picture, having so much fun that, at times, he teeters on doing, well, a Jack Nicholson impersonation.
Nicholson flirts with showboating, but how can he help it when he's given so many great bits. In one scene, he asks an underling about his mother and the poor man sighs she's dying. Nicholson snaps back, “We all are. Act accordingly.”
The Departed is Scorsese acting accordingly — fast, fluid and light on his feet. He's helped enormously by Monahan's clever adaptation, which firmly transplants the action to South Boston. For instance, one character quotes Freud: “The Irish are the only people impervious to psychoanalysis.”
Bet that wasn't in the Hong Kong version.
Still, much of the movie is vintage Scorsese. A severed hand with a wedding ring still on it. Wahlberg rat-a-tat-tat-ing expletive-loaded lines with Joe Pesci aplomb. Conventional gangster wisdom along the lines of what French tells Billy after the newcomer smashes a bottle over the head of someone sitting next to him at a bar. “There are guys you can hit and guys you can't,” he cautions, sounding like a concerned Boy Scout leader.
The Departed's only flaw — and it is, perhaps, inherent in the concept of adapting a Hong Kong shoot'em-up — is that the film never ripens into something deeper than its splendid cat-and-rat game. Surrogate fathers and fatherless sons are underlying themes, but the emphasis remains on the guns, guts, corpses and, in this case, mobile phones.
That said, the movie is still one of the best of the year — in the histrionic manner of Cagney's White Heat or Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels. Dazzlingly done, with a welcome gloss of comic panache, it's the sort of thing Scorsese does better than any other major director in Hollywood.
Maybe one day Oscar will realize that.
And act accordingly.
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