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The Departed
The acting is exceptional, top to bottom. Jack Nicholson plays the Devil again, but this time he's not clowning; it's a brilliantly original performance from an actor who with rare exceptions has been phoning it in for decades. In About Schmidt, Nicholson was willing to be an old man and play age and experience; his Frank Costello is a very bad old man, a perfect role for Nicholson, and again he's willing to be old, not merely bad. Matt Damon gives a full and serious performance (though never better than when he's flirting, charming, joking, a levity that the film really needs at times). He plays Colin Sullivan, the rising star in the State Police who is both betrayer and betrayed. Mark Wahlberg gives life and power to an essentially one-dimensional role; Martin Sheen and Alec Baldwin do lovely work. The Departed features an embarrassment of actors, and I'm not sure any of them have ever been better.
The Departed is a film about men, full of themes and motifs concerning manhood, potency, rivalry, violence, fathers, sons, nerve and failures of nerve. For all practical purposes, there is only one woman in the film -- and she's a psychiatrist, a shrink whose job is to care for policemen, whose job is to understand them, a sort of secular priest sent to fix what the real priests and corporeal fathers and mothers set into motion -- a hopeless task.
Joseph Morgenstern wrote that The Departed "feels as though it was hardly directed at all." That's a compliment, of course, and I see what he means. I'd only add that Scorsese has become the kind of master whose craft and thought are immanent, felt but not seen. And though The Departed is about cops and gangsters and informants and crime and killing, in every frame you realize that it's about so much more. I left feeling astonished and overwhelmed -- by the power and violence of the story, and by the brilliance of the director. ©2006 Les Phillips |
Now comes Martin Scorsese, with his beautiful tortured story of guilt and anger and blood, Boston Irish this time, and who knew that this would be the most masterful, most fully realized version of the story? The Departed is also a version of the Hong Kong movie, Infernal Affairs, and the screenplay was written by William Monahan, yet this is Scorsese's narrative, with the symmetry and justice and primacy of some Old Testament parable. And Scorsese's direction is beyond accomplished but entirely in the service of the tale itself.
The revelation is Leonardo DiCaprio, who finally gives the performance we all knew he had in him, vindicates the fuss everyone made over him when he was a teenager. His character's torment, aggression, sexuality, fear, betrayal are all apparent in every scene; when other actors are real, he's hyperreal, without overplaying. This performance reminds me of James Dean, if James Dean were five times better. Casting DeCaprio and Damon as characters who function as psychic or moral doubles is a brilliant coup. (There's a great moment in the film, perhaps quite knowingly written and performed, where DeCaprio's character turns to Nicholson's and says, "I could be you.")
The Departed is a Boston film, with the action set fairly recently, but really it is set in an older Boston, not Brahmin but ethnic working class Boston. The first shots of the city are not of the skyline but of the harbor, the piers, shabbier Charlestown and Somerville and South Boston. The modern city is glimpsed almost exclusively from Colin Sullivan's Beacon Hill apartment, a modern condo, spiffy and clean and secular, with the golden dome of the State House so close that Matt could almost touch it . . . and unlike Scorsese's more colorful Italian films most of The Departed is painted in drabber blacks and browns and grays.