The Departed
When South Boston native Billy Costigan (Leonardo DiCaprio) loses his mother to cancer, local ganster Frank Costello (Jack Nicholson) leaves a memorial card by her grave. It reads "May God give a place in the Kingdom of Heaven to the Faithful Departed." Or something close to that - I wasn't taking notes in the theater.
He's not asking God to give everyone a place in Heaven, everyone who is dead. You get the feeling that Frank doesn't really give a shit if most of the people he has killed got to Heaven or not. No, only the "faithful" departed, the ones who remained true to their God and to themselves, deserve a place at his divine table. It's a question of loyalty. Are you one of the chosen or ain't you?
Martin Scorsese's epic cop thriller The Departed spends a lot of time contemplating loyalty and how, in the end, it really boils down to honesty. We are truthful with those to whom we are loyal, which for most poeple is no one at all, especially not themselves. All the other people, the ones with whom we spend our lives, get whatever side of us that is most expedient and effective for that given moment.
A far superior adaptation of Andy Lau's enjoyable Hong Kong hit Infernal Affairs, The Departed provides yet another opportunity for Scorsese to apply his considerable gifts to a gritty story about crime in an American metropolis. Like the giddy autobiographical whirlwind of Goodfellas or the behind-the-scenes Mob History of Casino, the individual struggles of a few central characters stand in for the incomprehensible complexity of an entire community of thieves, murderers, cops and informants.
Unlike those films, a more detached and quiet approach has kind of removed Scorsese's presence from every moment of the film. Though intense and brilliantly executed, the action sequences and shootouts recall the films of Michael Mann more than anything by Scorsese, especially held up against the comparatively clunky action choreography in Gangs of New York. Mann's Heat was probably the last American cop movie made with this level of intelligence and sophistication. Again, as he does every few years, Martin Scorsese has directed one of the best American films of the year, and if that's not enough good news, this time it's a riveting return to the genre of blood on the pavement, broken noses and brain-smeared warehouse walls. I, for one, couldn't be more pleased.
Shortly before losing his Mom and finding that strange note from Costello, Costigan was ejected from the Boston State Police Academy. He's not "Staties" material, apparently, what with his family's criminal background and underworld connections, and his own history of violence. However, Captain Oliver Queenan (Martin Sheen) and the hotheaded Staff Sgt. Dignam (Mark Wahlberg in his best performance to date) see an opportunity in this damaged young man, who has spent his entire young life straddling the middle-class world of the North Shore with his father's neighborhood of South Boston.
They want to send him undercover into Costello's gang, first by sending him to prison to establish his scumbag credentials. What Queenan and Dignam don't know is that Costello has a mole of his own, the brand-new Staff Sgt. Colin Sullivan (Matt Damon), who has kept his close childhood connection to the gangster successfully under wraps.
It's an ingenious set-up that allowed Lau to mine territory similar to the old Hong Kong classics of John Woo. The duality of law enforcement, how the cops spend so much time working with and observing criminals that the distinction between the two groups becomes hopelessly blurred, looms large over both the Hong Kong and American films. (In an early monologue, Costello wonders aloud whether one's affiliation matters when one is staring down the barrel of a gun. He seemingly concludes that it does not.)
Scorsese works with a much larger canvas, using the cat-and-mouse game of Costigan and Sullivan to explore the vagaries of organized crime in the city of Boston. (We even get a nice little history of urban conflict in Beantown before the opening credits.) The FBI, the Irish mob, the Italian mob, the families of South Boston and all the individual cops and divisions have their roles to play, and their own loyalties, and even if they are on the same side, the ultimate goals are not neccessarily compatible.
In the service of this complicated and sizable undertaking, Scorsese has enlisted a tremendous ensemble of actors, easily the best cast of any major film this year. Because many of these characters get only a few scenes to make an impression, he frequently falls back on typecasting, which ends up working rather well. Ray Winstone, as Costello's right-hand man, has shown in films like Sexy Beast that he's capable of charm and sensitivity in addition to hulking menace, so it only takes him a few moments as the psychotic Mr. French to establish his place in this universe.
Similarly, Alec Baldwin just absolutely nails Ellerby, Sullivan's superior in the organized crime task force. It's a role that seems like it must have been written specifically for Baldwin, the same speedy, gregarious geniality with flashes of buried rage that has cropped up in his performances countless times, from Malice to State and Main. Even Glengarry Glen Ross, really, although the rage isn't quite as buried.
Vera Farmiga, who first impressed me in a surprisingly well-developed role as Paul Walker's wife in Running Scared, expertly inhabits the film's lone female character. Usually, both roels would be completely thankless, particularly the concerned wife part in Running Scared, in which she would sit around the house frantically calling Paul Walker and weeping, desperate in the hopes that he would soon return safely to her side. But Farmiga turned that character into a steely adventuress rising to the formidable challenges faced during a crazed late-night search for her neighbor's missing child. It was great work in an above-average 2006 film that's been thus far overlooked.
If that was a nice introduction, her work here is award-worthy. As the sexy but not-terribly-professional police psychiatrist Madolyn (I forget the character's last name and it's not on IMDB), romantically involved first with Sullivan and then Costigan, she manages to subtly project fear and doubt throughout the film without ever bringing these emotions to the surface. At least, not until the very end.
Unfortunately, she's denied one final scene that's implied but not shown, and it would really have wrapped up her character's arc nicely and provided the actresses with a great close-up moment. A film that already clocks in at 160 minutes should be able to make room for a powerful 2-minute-or-less moment near the end.
There are some difficult scenes to navigate with her and Damon, where we're not sure exactly how much she suspects about his odd cell phone calls and suspicious excuses. Even when we know she's being lied to and decieved, Farmiga never comes off as a victim or a simpleton. Maybe she has swallowed some of the bullshit Sullivan's been spreading around, but she's not exactly an easy mark.
Sullivan has been telling Madolyn some fairly considerable lies, after all, but it's eventually the smaller, personal ones that reveal his true nature. After their first night together, Madolyn wants to set his mind at east about his erectile dysfunction - she insists it's not a problem, but he clams up and refuses to discuss the issue. Later on, Ellerby makes a joke about the usefulness of having a spouse - it lets other women know "that your dick works and that you know how to use it."
Rather than just laugh at this off-color bit of humor, Sullivan feels the need to over-compensate. "Oh, I use it. All the time," he responds. It's a bit of an awkward moment, all in all, just one of many scenes in The Departed examing the effectiveness and practicality of deceit.
Obviously, the plot concerns a variety of lies piled on top of one another. Neither Sullivan, a crook pretending to be a cop, nor Costigan, a cop pretending to be a crook, are being up-front about their real identities. Costigan comes to define his mission in the end not as one of seeking justice or getting revenge, but of getting his identity back. If he can stop lying, he can become himself again. And in the course of finding himself, and Sullivan, he will peel back the curtain on all manner of other lies - unexpected informants, inter-agency secrets, secret alliances and just plain corruption.
But Scorsese also implies that these are two men who are lying to themselves about their true nature. Sullivan spends so much time pretending to be a nice guy, particularly with Madolyn, he's come to believe that this is the dominant side of his personality. He describes to her all activities relating to the cops and to Costello as "my work," and this is probably how he compartmentalizes his dual nature within his own mind. There are the things he does for his boss, which are conniving and brutal and villainous, but they no more define him as a person than the brave, honorable cop character he pretends to be during the day.
Costigan thinks he has a score to settle, the impulse that drives him to the police academy in the first place. But he'll discover over the course of the film that he has no stomach for life in the streets. DiCaprio falls back on some of his favorite acting tricks in some of these scenes - furrowing the middle of his forehead and he slugs Oxycontin to forget the gruesome horrors he has witnessed under Costello's tutelage - but his performance works almost in spite of itself.
(In general, I find him overly mannered as an actor, kind of a male version of Jennifer Jason Leigh. Both are capable of doing great work but they also tend to turn in ornamental performances, in which exaggerated body language and far-out accents stand in for actual emotional resonance.)
Thankfully, in The Departed, his occasionally less-than-convincing Boston accent makes sense in the context of the film - splitting his time between two different neighborhoods has given him a muddled, unclear sense of geographical and social identity.
Which, of course, brings us to Nicholson's Costello, the only person in the movie who does not feel conflicted about his place in the world. He opens the film by describing to a group of assembled children exactly who he is and where he fits in. He's the alpha dog, the guy who sees what he wants and takes it unapologetically, and that's how he was able to take this neighborhood away from the black and Italian gangs. (Though he doesn't use nomenclature as polite as "black" or "Italian".)
When Costigan points out that he should leave the life, that he no longer needs any of the money he's earning from crime, Costello retorts that he has never really needed the money. He doesn't even need the thrill. He does it because he can. At 70 years old, he's still the man in charge and no one can touch him, and every time he organizes the coke deal or sells a bunch of smuggled microchips to the Chinese, he's reasserting his dominance over the entire city of Boston over and over again. Our first glimpse of Costello, before we've even seen his face, is of him shaking down a small business owner for $25 and then sexually harrassing the man's adolescent daughter. He doesn't need that money nor is he actually going to fuck that girl (at least, for a few years). He just likes to remind everyone who's in charge.
Nicholson takes the role about as far as any actor on Planet Earth could have. I could see critics calling him out for overacting, even scenery-chewing, and again Scorsese chooses to have him play directly into his persona rather than creating an original character from whole cloth. But he's just so dynamic in this kind of a role. Depraved and murderous, sure, but so damned affable and nonchalant about it, the result is irresistable. This is definitely his best performance since The Pledge, another criminally underappeciated film, and it certainly looks like the most fun he's had making a movie in a very long time.
It has been rumored that Jack made up much of his own dialogue, but much of the credit for the entire film's success must go to the incredibly dense, layered, nuanced and fall-down funny script by William Monahan.
His only other produced screenplay was for Ridley Scott's Kingdom of Heaven, and though that wasn't really a bad film, it didn't show off this guy's flair for dazzling crudity. There's a Mamet-esque quality to some of the writing here, particularly the hilariously aggressive Bad Cop manner of Wahlberg's Dingam. Seriously, this guy is among the most unrelenting assholes in modern cinema. Conceiving of a character like this is every cop movie writer's dream.
In the hands of a rank amateur, Monahan's script would have still made for a solid film. In the hands of Martin Scorsese, with expansive if unusually subdued cinematography by Michael Bauhaus, it's a good deal better than that. There are a few missteps. The final shot, in which an actual rat crawls along the railing of Sullivan's patio, gets a laugh at exactly the wrong moment. Some of the classic rock musical cues, long a Scorsese trademark, are equally ill-conceived. I mean, what's with using The Stones' "Gimme Shelter" in two inappropriate places in the film? He already used that song in Goodfellas anyway. In fact, there's entirely too many overplayed, famous classic rock tracks in the film, to the point where a lot of the music serves as a distraction.
I'm also not certain what the deal is with this version of "Comfortably Numb" that plays over a sex scene (already an odd choice), whether it's Roger Waters live or some other band, but it kind of sucks and just doesn't work with the context of the scene at all.
There were a few key soundtrack selections I liked. John Lennon's "Well Well Well" perfectly compliments a funny/disgusting back-and-forth between Costigan, Mr. French and Costello and the Celtic punk of The Pogues fits ideally into the film for obvious reasons.
Minor nitpicks aside, this is a remarkable, invigorating late-career success for arguably America's greatest living actor and arguably its greatest living director. Easily, EASILY, my favorite film of 2006 thus far.