Paying Respects to The Departed
Given Martin Scorsese’s gritty, wise guy oeuvre and a mega-talented cast fronted by fellow AFI Lifetime Achievement Award winner Jack Nicholson, we just couldn’t miss Scorsese’s retelling of the 2002 Hong Kong flick Infernal Affairs. (See the ad in the top right corner of the page? Don’t those faces, those colors and that “R” promise profanity, violence, and maybe even some sex? Hey!) So last Friday night—yeah, we’re a bit behind—we beat the devil to Ballard’s Majestic Bay half an hour early for the eight o’clock show … to find a hundred other people had beat us there. Good for Warner Bros. accountants, bad for our necks.
Sixty seconds into The Departed, we know we’re in for some vintage, street-level Scorsese. There’s a raspy Jack voiceover, a tough New England neighborhood vibe, and the Stones’ Gimme Shelter behind it all. (Sure, we heard this song in another Scorsese film. Who cares?) Maybe twenty minutes later, when the story’s been deftly set up and a single title card hits the screen, we realize we hadn’t noticed the lack of opening credits. Sweet.
Frank Costello (Jack) is an aging, old school Irish Mob boss who for about 20 years has served as father figure to Colin Sullivan (Matt Damon), a freshly minted Lieutenant of the Massachusetts State Police. In return, Costello benefits from Sullivan’s Special Investigations inside info and nick-of-time raid warnings. They’re both cocky and bold—the boss’ arrogance stemming from a twilight perspective of his successful career, and the kid’s from his quick ascendance up the department’s corporate ladder and, no doubt, his handsome mug. They’re not untouchable, though. As a priest’s assistant warns Costello later in the film, “pride comes before a fall.” He’s right: the “Staties,” after years of fruitless pursuit, finally have a solid plan to take Costello down.
This plan is constructed by a laundry list of other Big Actors: Leo DiCaprio as conflicted police academy flunky Billy Costigan, recruited to infiltrate Costello’s tight crew; Alec Baldwin as a sweaty, swaggering, brass-balled honcho tasked with taking down local kingpins; Martin Sheen and Marky Mark Wahlberg as the only two cops who know Costigan’s true identity. There’s more testosterone in The Departed than was slapped onto celluloid in Raging Bull and Glengarry Glen Ross combined, and it isn’t a bad thing. Don’t be surprised if, come that morning in late January, a couple of these names are on Oscar’s short lists. The performances—and the Boston accents—are solid.
So who’ll find out who’s a rat first? Will Costigan discover Sullivan’s connection to Frank Costello before Costello’s Irish roughnecks figure out who among their circle is an undercover cop? This taut tent-pole conflict is more than enough for your standard suspense flick plot. But wait! There’s more. Vera Farmiga—the luminous, giant-eyed, Ukrainian actress we’ve never heard utter long northeast vowels and never seen look so good—is the Staties’ emotionally vulnerable shrink, Madolyn. And she’s seeing both Sullivan and Costigan, albeit in different capacities—for a while. Soon enough, the emotion swimming behind those eyes is a pool of confusion, affection, and guilt. As the only female in a hard picture stuffed with hugely famous men, Farmiga’s Madolyn could have easily become cardboard-and-lace set dressing, but instead, she plays a key role in bringing the story to an unpredictable close.
William Monahan’s (Kingdom of Heaven) obscenity-dipped and zinger-dotted script gracefully hopscotches to that inevitably visceral third act without a single superfluous scene—though some do go on a bit long. The Departed’s voluminous cast also backfires a bit in that we can’t remember more than two characters’ names five minutes down Market Street. (Thanks, IMDB!) But it delivers on that ad’s promise with mean streets, big performances, a touch of sex, and sporadic fits of brutal violence. Damn, we love a good old R-rated movie. And, a couple of films and videos aside (Bringing Out the Dead, anyone? Bad? Seriously?), we love Scorsese.
