No one has depicted the modern underworld better than film maestro Martin Scorsese who has melded cinematic acumen with his Italian-Catholic upbringing to form a trilogy of unparalleled morality plays: Mean Streets, Goodfellas, and Casino. The trilogy has become a quartet by default as the director tackles the Asian cult classic, Infernal Affairs, and has fashioned The Departed, a film so good up until its stunning conclusion, it almost can’t possibly live up to its steadily built, character driven narrative.
Set in Boston, mobster Frank Costello (Jack Nicholson) rises from small time hood to major crime boss. He befriends and mentors a boy, Colin Sullivan, who, as a grown man (Matt Damon) has studied his way to the State Police academy. Simultaneously, another young man, Billy Costigan (Leonardo DiCaprio), is about to graduate as a policeman. A task force is formed to build a case against Costello. Led by Captain Queenan (Martin Sheen) and Sergeant Dignam (Mark Wahlberg), Sullivan and Costigan are recruited for the team separately and unbeknownst to each other. Sullivan takes advantage of his status by tipping off Costello and keeping the kingpin one step ahead of the law. Costigan infiltrates Costello’s crew while Sullivan ironically leads an internal investigation into probable traitors/informants in the police department. Soon, Costello and Sullivan realize that there is a ‘mole’ in their own ranks too, but who can it be? It becomes a perverse game of cat and mouse as the policemen try to expose each other. Furthermore, Sullivan begins dating Madolyn (Vera Farmiga), a police shrink who also counsels and then forms a bond with Costigan. Realizing that he is about to be discovered, Costigan wants to be extracted by Queenan who senses that the situation is desperate. As the task force closes on Costello, Sullivan zeros in on Costigan’s identity by tailing Queenan, and thus good and evil are set on a collision course with startling, tragic finality.
Here we have a dichotomy or duality of two men, Sullivan and Costigan, both intelligent, well read, and streetwise, who happen to be on opposing sides and for a majority of the story, unaware of each other’s identity. Costigan is the noble undercover cop whose life is in ever increasing peril and Sullivan is the hotshot policeman who will do anything to protect Costello. Then there are the surrogate fathers as Nicholson’s Costello mentors Sullivan while Sheen’s Captain Queenan shepherds Costigan. It is amusing to see how Costello sort of adopts Costigan and Queenan is the elder to Sullivan at the police station. It is a parallel family nucleus turned inside out.
The acting is simply put-great. Jack Nicholson convincingly portrays a powerful mob boss with utter arrogance and ruthlessness. His dialogue is chilling and at times outrageously funny. Damon, in his old stomping grounds, sports a New England accent and does a very credible job as the heavy. DiCaprio demonstrates an ever-growing maturity in his roles; his recent partnership with Scorsese is proving fruitful (Gangs of New York, The Aviator). You have to hand it to Scorsese as one of the few directors who can attract the best actors who are dying to work with him. How else could such lead actors as Martin Sheen, Alec Baldwin (who is a riot as a profanity-laced FBI boss), and Mark Wahlberg accept what are essentially supporting roles!
The film does miss on a couple points. It would have meant more if the relationship of Madolyn and Sullivan had been explored with more depth, and the emergence of Costigan in this unlikely triangle would have had more poignancy. Likewise, at the end, those relationships are left unclear and never fully explored as much as we want after we get so involved in these characters good or bad as they might be. The film is a little long but never uninteresting, and when it reaches its astonishing ending, it is sudden and jarring in unexpected ways that reach Shakespearean proportions.
Scorsese is still very much in command of his medium, as he will throw in a cinematic device like an iris-in shot or freeze a frame here or there. (Editor Thelma Schoonmaker, his long time collaborator, is in fine form juggling a dozen characters and maintaining the tension at a very high level for a long time, no easy feat.) Though Scorsese’s early Mean Streets (1973) was a fictional tale of low level hoods, it was also semi-autobiographical in its depiction of the people he knew. Goodfellas (1990) and Casino (1995) took a semi-documentary approach that held a fascination of real life events amid a dramatic storyline. In terms of structure, The Departed, while similar in spirit and energy to his previous crime dramas, shows Scorsese fabricating essentially a purely fictitious story, and as always, he has a knack for depicting the inner workings of organized crime with realistic bravado.
There are echoes of the films, The Corruptor (featuring Wahlberg), Donnie Brasco and Reservoir Dogs (also a Hong Kong inspired plot) with their questions of loyalty and betrayal. While earlier police corruption stories were told primarily from the police/protagonist’s point of view like Serpico or the great Prince of the City, The Departed takes an equal time approach with its protagonists and antagonists.
The movie contains raw violence including a brief but action packed climax. The profanity is excessive but realistic, and at times there are amusing cussing matches between the various factions. It’s hard to wrap your arms around The Departed because there’s just so much to savor and admire while also wishing that the radical change in tone at the end weren’t so jarring to the rhythm of the plot. It’s basically a film about rats, and you know what happens to rats.
***1/2 of **** stars (almost as good as Goodfellas)
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