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I haven't read the whole thing so I don't know how spoiler free it is. I don't want to know anymore than I already do.
but, um.. he likes it. hey mikey!
Scorsese Takes Boston,
And Electrifies With Departed
By Andrew Sarris
Martin Scorsese’s The Departed, from a screenplay by William Monahan, based on Andrew Lau and Alan Mak’s 2002 Hong Kong crime thriller Infernal Affairs, provides an electrifying entertainment for this fall moviegoing season in its police-mobster machinations and deep undercover penetration by both sides of the law. In this respect, The Departed strikes unexpectedly deep chords of tragic poignancy with the emotional fallout from an atmosphere of perpetual paranoia so characteristic of our post-9/11 world. No one can completely trust anyone else.
Mr. Scorsese and his associates have assembled a remarkably charismatic cast to impart coherence and conviction to a narrative that could have easily dwindled into an affectless succession of gratuitous intrigues. Jack Nicholson makes his first appearance in a Scorsese project as the paternalistic but ruthless South Boston mob boss Frank Costello, who has become the prime target of the Massachusetts State Police. A young rookie cop from South Boston named Billy Costigan, played by Leonardo DiCaprio, has accepted an assignment to go deep undercover in the Costello mob, which requires that he literally change his identity by serving time in prison on a fake assault conviction. Billy already had mob connections in his family, and was motivated to undertake this dangerous mission by a desire to exorcize the demons of his tainted family.
Mr. Scorsese, who worked with Mr. DiCaprio in the generally underrated Gangs of New York (2002) and The Aviator (2004), thereby felt an unusual rapport with the actor over his difficulties in dissembling: “As an actor, I knew Leo would convey the conflict of a young man who has gotten himself into a bad situation and then wonders what the hell he is doing there. You can see it in his face; you can see it in his eyes. That’s one of the reasons I like working with Leo—he knows how to express emotional impact without saying a word. It emanates from him. He is quite extraordinary to watch.”
Mr. DiCaprio’s Billy is, however, only one side of the elaborate doppelgänger edifice that Mr. Scorsese and his Boston-savvy scenarist, Mr. Monahan, have constructed out of the two-way betrayal idea imported from the Hong Kong–based original, Infernal Affairs. Hence, while Billy is agonizing in his private hell of mob infiltration, Matt Damon’s Colin Sullivan is sailing through the ranks of the Massachusetts State Police Department to become a plainclothes detective in a Special Investigation Unit under Captain Queenan (Martin Sheen) and his persistently and profanely suspicious second-in-command, Sergeant Dignam (Mark Wahlberg). Here the chain of command becomes entangled in the inbred secretiveness of all police bureaucracies. Hence, though both Queenan and Dignam supposedly answer to the head of the Special Investigations Unit, Captain Ellerby (Alec Baldwin), they are the only members of the unit who know that Billy has infiltrated the Costello organization.
But what no one at the top—not Ellerby, not Queenan, not Dignam—knows is that Colin has been groomed from the time he was 12 by Costello himself to infiltrate the Massachusetts State Police Department. Like Hitchcock, Mr. Scorsese prefers suspense to surprise in his narrative, to the point that the audience is always one step ahead of the characters as they thrash about in search of the ever-elusive mole in the midst.
To add to the almost comical convulsions of paranoia on both sides, we are very casually informed that Costello himself has gained immunity from the F.B.I. as one of their paid informants. Thus, systematically botched sting operations and incomplete surveillance enable Costello to pursue his drug deals, to facilitate his extortion of merchants and shopkeepers and, finally, with post-9/11 flair, to traffic in instruments of terror with Chinese gangs.
The heart of the film, however, concerns the blighted lives and choices of the two co-protagonists played by Mr. DiCaprio and Mr. Damon. These two action superstars would normally never be cast together in the same picture, especially since they look remarkably alike when they are surly or snarly. Police psychiatrist Madeleine, played by Vera Farmiga, hammers home the doppelgänger device by becoming involved with Colin and Billy, first as patients and then as lovers. Her scenes with the two men are very lucidly written and resourcefully acted, and thus relieve some of the relentless tensions of their impersonations. Rumor has it that Madeleine’s part was expanded to give the film some air in its almost suffocating progression to an inexorably nihilistic climax.
Just as there are two turncoats mirroring each other on either side of the legal divide, so there are two parallel organizations representing the conflicting interests of the cops and robbers. In line with this parallelism, Frank Costello mirrors his adversaries in the state police—Captain Ellerby and his underlings, Queenan and Dignam—with his own cold-blooded second-in-command, Mr. French, played by the brilliant British actor Ray Winstone, and French’s two blood-splattered henchmen, Fitzy and Delahunt (David O’Hara and Mark Rolston).
Mr. Scorsese pays fleeting tributes to two noir classics from the past, first in a cemetery scene reminiscent of Carol Reed and Graham Greene’s The Third Man (1949), and then with an almost subliminal invocation of Costello’s first name and his Irish-Catholic heritage from John Ford and Liam O’Flaherty’s The Informer (1935). All in all, however, Mr. Scorsese has shown in The Departed, as he has never shown before, an ability to integrate his explosive acting set pieces with a seamlessly flowing narrative. It may be that the sheer intensity of Mr. Monahan’s identification with Irish-Americans has given Mr. Scorsese enough distance from his traditional Italian-American roots to enable him to be more detached and contemplative about the Irish-American milieu of The Departed. Whatever the reason, it is truly an occasion for rejoicing.
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