The Departed
Starring: Leonardo DiCaprio (Billy Costigan), Matt Damon (Colin Sullivan), Jack Nicholson (Frank Costello), Mark Wahlberg (Dignam)
Written by: William Monahan, from three screenplays by Alan Mak and Felix Chong
Directed by: Martin Scorsese
“When you can assume that your audience holds the same beliefs as you do, you can relax a little and use more normal ways of talking to it; when you have to assume that it does not, then you have to make your vision apparent by shock--to the hard of hearing you shout, and for the almost blind you draw large and startling figures.”
-- Flannery O’Connor, “The Fiction Writer and His Country”
Any time Martin Scorsese unveils a new film, it should be a cause for celebration among cineastes everywhere, although the most frequent reaction is mild-interest-to-indifference. Scorsese is a favorite of critics, who generally (though not always) want to be challenged and provoked, to be jolted out of the comfort provided by the average, cliché-ridden action fest, often at the expense of noting and praising the occasional well-made entertainment. Most audiences don’t want these things from a movie, especially as movie-going becomes more expensive: they want good guys and bad guys, plenty of familiar plot developments, funny dialogue whether it’s motivated or not, and an ending that leaves them feeling good about themselves and the world.
But Marty don’t play that game, never has, so it’s a bit of a shock that The Departed, his latest masterpiece of twisted loyalties and brutal psychology in the underworld, had the biggest opening weekend of any Scorsese Picture since he started making features thirty-four years ago. In one sense this is good news, because it means Marty will get to make another big ticket movie, but the reason the film opened well was not the Scorsese name in the promos. For the core audience of young people who buy most of the tickets, it was the promise of seeing Leonardo DiCaprio and Matt Damon, two major movie stars just now entering full maturity for all the right reasons, paired together in a knock-down-drag-out action film, and for everyone else it was the promise of seeing Jack Nicholson, wild-eyed grand master of all scenery gluttons, once more enveloping an entire movie in his warm, psychotic embrace and making Over the Top seem like the highest of performance arts.
Whether or not The Departed will continue to do good business is beside the point. More likely, it will be that rare, superior Hollywood entertainment which gathers a following over time, finding its audience through word of mouth. In fact, it’s certain that many in the first weekend audience were disappointed: Leo doesn’t play the heartthrob, Jack doesn’t go over the top, in spite of what you may have read or heard (okay, one brief scene), and Matt plays possibly the year’s best villain as if he were still in a Bourne movie, delivering a cool, likeable, nearly omniscient scumbag. And though a few Nicholson partisans in the entertainment press have made the predictable and inaccurate claim that he steals the film from his younger counterparts, the truly surprising actor in The Departed, the one who actually does make off with every scene he’s in, is the always underestimated Mark Wahlberg, who’s all over his role of tough, hateful police sergeant like blood on a Tijuana bull. There’s nothing like a great director to bring out the actor in an actor.
All expectations aside, this is Scorsese’s film top-to-bottom, American cinema’s finest living artist returning with brilliant confidence to the kind of gutter-rat’s-eye-view of crime and the urban jungle that made him famous -- Mean Streets (1973), Taxi Driver (1976), Goodfellas (1990) -- and everyone else involved, Jack included, is only given admittance to the hallowed turf provided they have something to contribute to Father Marty’s vision. The urban cesspool is Scorsese’s Monument Valley, he has permanently scored our consciousness with images defining how the streets and their violence should be shot and edited; all others in our time are either interloping amateurs or, if they’re Quentin Tarantino, John Woo, Wong Kar Wai, they openly pay homage to him like art students tracing masterstrokes (see Notes below).
Father Marty is tipping his collar to the acolytes with The Departed, a wittily ominous title for his remake of the Hong Kong cult classic, Infernal Affairs (Mou Gaan Dou, 2002), a smash hit in Asia that spawned both a prequel and a sequel. Working with screenwriter William Monahan, a former Spy magazine editor who obviously knows Irish Boston inside out, Scorsese adapts the labyrinthine plot of all three films to a richly imagined East Coast milieu steeped in regional accents and age-old corruption, and then lets the emotional roller coaster blast through its paces toward a mad, Sophoclean climax.
It’s easy to see what drew Scorsese to the original story, and what made it a hit in the first place, a fantastic concept for a cops-and-gangsters melodrama snappily fusing the undercover suspense tale with the cat-and-mouse chase movie. The kicker is pure 1930s social drama: two boys from the wrong side of the tracks grow up to take opposite sides of the law, only to find themselves in loyalty-testing predicaments, one of them (Damon) a slick gangster who infiltrates the police department, the other a cop (DiCaprio) sent undercover with the mob. The twist instantly doubles the number of “Will he be found out?” sequences and tugs audience sympathies in both directions, as each mole tries to unmask the other. It would be hard not to make a wildly entertaining movie from such ingredients.
Except this is the maestro at work now, whatever the source material, and you must know the complexity has only begun. In The Departed, Martin Scorsese has wrought a thrilling, all-star epic of American corruption and decline for our time, in which the requisite blood feuds and double-crosses and narrow escapes are just the cruel means the characters use to deny a greater malaise eating at the soul of the world. There is a moral ambiguity at work in the film that is so pervasive, so operatic, and so impervious to received wisdom, weak-minded viewers might find themselves running for church before the finale, not realizing they’re already there.
This is what makes Father Marty such a unique and enigmatic American storyteller, and the reason he’s never quite shaped a commercial groove for himself in his own land: although he’s the most righteous of moviemakers, his films are murky journeys deep into the heart of darkness, where the jungle erases any hope the viewer may have of rationalizing his or her own vicarious involvement in a movie. The good father may be offering up a parable of redemption through the life of a famous boxer, or a gangster who turned state’s witness, or a lonely, nut-job cabbie, but he never soft soaps us into believing that one man’s redemption can or should make anything better. In Father Marty’s world, spiritual awakening doesn’t necessarily free us from damnation.
Scorsese actually started his adult life on the path to the priesthood, but the undertow of the sinful cinema pulled him in a different direction, to the benefit of us all, and his films have always borne more of a resemblance to the stories of someone like Flannery O’Connor than they have to other filmmakers. O’Connor was a Southern Catholic (Georgia, to be exact) whose precisely shaped tales dissected the sins of the well-meaning, the hapless and the confused in our society with an unforgiving clarity, as if she was spitting on redemption when it finally showed up. Literary critics labeled her work grotesque; she said it was realism. O’Connor suffered from advanced lupus and was always too pressed for time to observe the good manners of most mid-century literature, dying tragically young at 40. Scorsese, a frail asthma victim in his youth, tells the same sort of stories in the same way: grim, disturbing mirrors of the contemporary world reflecting distorted, misshapen shadows that we ignore at our own peril, so unyieldingly honest in his concerns that even Christians have never suspected he is firmly one of them.
This is true even when he is in a jovial, mischievous mood, as he is with The Departed. He can’t just tell us a superbly choreographed, action-packed crime story, he won’t, the sickness of the times doesn’t permit mere Roman-style mayhem for the masses. I don’t know how much of The Departed’s wicked, wicked sense of humor, or its claustrophobic atmosphere of hell steadily closing around all of its characters, stems from Hong Kong, and how much flows from Scorsese in full harness, but the result is emphatically more than most of us bargain for when visiting the multiplex. All the opera (Jack isn’t over the top, he’s just rumbling in the key dictated by the composer), all the Sturm und Drang and blood and sin of the film, are anything but aimless; they are screaming toward one of the greatest narrative pile-ups in modern movies.
My advice, which can be applied to all Scorsese Pictures: sit back, relax, let the horror wash over you, and be glad you’re just a passenger on Father Marty’s express ride to oblivion. Or, as the lady who sat behind me announced during the closing credits, go see Employee of the Month instead.
Monahan’s adapted screenplay is outstanding, filled with soon-to-be-regularly-quoted dialogue from the mouths of memorable characters, some of it translated from Mandarin, but most in the profane Bean Town vernacular. And if there were awards for best negotiation by a casting director, The Departed’s Ellen Lewis would take top honors this year, giving us Alec Baldwin, Martin Sheen and Ray Winstone, on top of an already stellar ensemble, transcending the movie shorthand of their familiar faces and lending a quirky gravitas to the insanity.
As always, beautiful cinematography by Michael Ballhaus, giving The Departed its raw visual extravagance, and Thelma Schoonmaker, Scorsese’s only editor since 1980, conducts yet another master class in montage, for those who watch that sort of thing. Wry, excellent use of the Stones’ “Gimme Shelter” as mood music.
Notes
“FILM IS A SUBJECT WITH A HISTORY AND SHOULD BE TAUGHT THAT WAY”: Martin Scorsese (pronounced Skor-SEZ-ee) was born in 1942 in Little Italy, a sickly child in a rough neighborhood who survived by his wits and an unerring instinct for self-preservation, much the same way he has endured in Hollywood as an adult. He is one of the most important American filmmakers of all time, a fact that won’t become entirely palatable, let’s face it, as long as he’s still living. But he’s destined to be taught in conjunction with D.W. Griffith, Welles, Ford and those guys; his distinctive resume speaks for itself.
Scorsese’s best work remains ahead of our time, his innovations in technique and subject matter still too close to the bone, often leaving the hapless moviegoer, conditioned by habit, saying “What the hell just happened?” or, scarier yet, “Ohmygod, who am I?“ It’s the kind of stuff that goes down well in print, that vanishing art form, where our imaginations can censor any imagery we don’t really want in our heads, but is just too uncomfortable on a big screen with big movie stars.
The Departed is Scorsese’s twenty-first theatrical feature since 1972, the year he made Boxcar Bertha for Roger Corman. His finest fictional and semi-fictional achievements include the three urban masterworks mentioned above, plus Raging Bull (1980), After Hours (1985) and The Last Temptation of Christ (1988). But even his minor works and misfires have a compelling integrity that makes them worth the effort -- The King of Comedy (1983), The Color of Money (1986), The Age of Innocence (1993), Casino (1995), Gangs of New York (2002), The Aviator (2004). A fair Scorsese Picture is still worth two good ones from a lesser practitioner.
He was a journeyman editor on the original Woodstock (1970), and since that time he’s also directed some of the finest documentaries about American music ever made, beautifully capturing the final concert of The Band in The Last Waltz (1978), and an entire era of social history in No Direction Home: Bob Dylan (2005). He was an executive producer of PBS’ marvelous seven-hour history of The Blues (2003).
Finally, he’s one of the great teachers of our day. No self-respecting film buff, student, or indie wanna-be can afford to miss A Personal Journey with Martin Scorsese Through American Movies (1995). It’s the best documentary of its kind.
Got Netflix?
TANGLE OF INFLUENCES: Anyone who didn’t feel the Scorsese ethos oozing from Tarantino’s Reservoir Dogs (1992) needs to see Mean Streets again: the jazzy cutting in time and space, the bravura camera movement, the pugnacious insistence on pop music as the best score, the use of blood as both shock effect and metaphor, and casting Harvey Keitel as a sympathetic demon. John Woo dedicated the entirety of his Homeric breakthrough The Killer (1989) to Father Marty; Wong Kar Wai actually remade Mean Streets as a Hong Kong tale for his first feature As Tears Go By (1988), starring a rising young Andy Lau, who would eventually play the undercover gangster in Infernal Affairs.
Listen to Scorsese enough and you might think he’s been influenced by all of cinema since 1895. There’s a certain truth to that, but consistently cited favorites include Michael Powell (The Red Shoes, 1948), John Ford (The Searchers, 1956), Douglas Sirk (Written on the Wind, 1956), Alfred Hitchcock (Vertigo, 1958), and Vincente Minnelli (Some Came Running, 1958), all films and filmmakers he would have absorbed from the big screen, not from TV, as a child and teenager. He’s particularly sensitive to the use of color as something more than just itself.
YE OLD ART VS. COMMERCE: The previous Scorsese film with the biggest opening weekend was Cape Fear (1991), which had the full promotional weight of Spielberg’s Amblin Entertainment behind it, and which actually delivered on its promise of De Niro going obscenely over the top for hours. Generally and unsurprisingly, the closer Scorsese gets to artistic grace, the smaller the box office. Goodfellas barely broke even during its entire run. Ten years earlier, Raging Bull grossed about the same amount, although it’s budget was a tad smaller, making it marginally profitable. The theatrical take for The Last Temptation wouldn’t pay the catering bill for The Departed’s grip crew.
FOLLOW THE MONEY: One of The Departed’s six financing companies, Media Asia Films, is the copyright holder of Infernal Affairs I, II and III. Another Departed financier, Plan B, is co-owned by Brad Pitt and Jennifer Aniston; the film was packaged before the divorce, which is why they’re both listed in the credits as producers (on separate title cards).
Eric has returned to Indianapolis, and lesser internet film
reviewers quake in fear.
|
