The Departed

Don’t be misled by the four Oscars that The Departed was awarded including Best Picture and Best Director. As a gangster movie it’s okay but within Scorsese’s body of work, a goodly proportion of which has defined the modern version of the genre, it’s superfluous.

A remake of the superior Hong Kong-set crime movie Infernal Affairs (2002) The Departed transposes the story to Boston and reinvents the Triads as the Irish Mob.

Leonardo DiCaprio plays young undercover cop Billy Costigan who inveigles his way into the inner circle of mob boss Frank Costello (Jack Nicholson). The latter meanwhile has his own mole in the police in the form of Colin Sullivan (Matt Damon). Who will be the first to uncover the rat in their ranks?

Of course Scorsese is a master film-maker but content is not his strong point and neither William Monahan who won an Oscar for Best Adapted Screenplay nor Scorsese’s regular editor Thelma Schoonmaker who also won an Oscar are able to give depth to the film’s meretricious surface and even at times stretch credulity to breaking point. Would Sullivan really have bought a swank apartment let alone not questioned by his colleagues? Would Billy really have swanned into Frank’s inner circle with such ease and would not Frank, who is supposed to be super-wiley, not have twigged to him? And so on and so forth. The Departed is a plot-driven film and the convolutions and mounting tension are there but it feels mechanical,  not to mention the fact that it takes too long to tell its story. .

Damon and DiCaprio are both first-class actors but their characters are largely ciphers in the deadly cat-and-mouse chase. For sheer psychopathy Nicholson’s Frank appears to be trying to out do Dennis Hopper’s name-sake in Blue Velvet (1986). Continuing the ‘let’s go Marty-mad” mood Mark Wahlburg was nominated for a Best Supporting Actor for performance that required him to speak almost exclusively in expletives. Vera Farmiga as the gorgeous police psychologist that both men fall for (and while were at it, would Costigan really have been going to see her for therapy when he was a member of Frank's gang?) has little to do but supply some deodorant for the sweaty machismo.

Scorsese has a fixation with graphic violence the rationale for which eludes me and here he indulges it to the max with a Tarentino-ish proclivity for point blank execution by bullets to the skull (he, or Schoonmaker, also exhibit a fondness for Guy Ritchie-style shorthand montages) the culminating example of which lends the movie a rather opaque ending.

 

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