REVIEW: The Departed, (or, what did Scorsese do to DiCaprio to get him to actually act?)
I take back most of what I’ve ever said about Leonardo DiCaprio.
No, really, I do.
But only because Scorsese made him act.
I originally thought DiCaprio was highly talented (hello? What’s Eating Gilbert Grape? This Boy’s Life? Even, I daresay, The Beach, because I love Alex Garland‘s books…) but just the wee bit lazy, used to coasting through pictures because the camera loves him. (Dare I mention Titanic? I’ll give you a moment to stop blanching in disgust.) I had made a private compact with myself never to see another DiCaprio vehicle.
But then along comes The Departed, and I had to see it. Because it’s Scorsese. And Nicholson. And Mark-freaking-Wahlberg, who has a gift for comedic timing wonderfully unutilised in the roles he picks and yet still giving him a slippery, knife-wielding excellence most of the time. But most of all, because it’s frocking Scorsese. And I was not disappointed.
The basic premise is deceptively simple: it’s Boston, under the Irish Mob. There’s an undercover cop in the Mob, and an Irish mob mole in the cops. Enter cat, mouse, and morality play.
Jack Nicholson plays Frank Costello, a Shakesperean, Faustian, gleefully-vicious and hellaciously smart man who has made it to the top of the organised-crime heap by being willing to outmaneuver anyone, with a generous helping of violence. He’s like the Karl Rove of the underworld. He is the man who has found nothing to limit himself, and he’s damn good at murder and betrayal. This is the grinning Nicholson of Witches of Eastwick, and I for one was happy to see him onscreen despite some campy moments (the fly-eating scene, or the severed hand thing. Ugh.) Scorsese gives us larger-than-life villains who play by their own moral code, so utterly divorced from ours it might as well be from another galaxy–and Nicholson is a perfect vehicle, just like Pacino was.
Frank Costello rules all he sees, and he notices a smart, poor, hungry kid. This is Matt Damon, who turns in a tightly-screwed, finely-delineated portrait of a man whose loyalty rests in the wrong place. Still, you can’t hate Damon’s Colin Sullivan, who works his way through the police academy and law school to make his adopted father proud. Sullivan and Costello’s relationship is twisted, deep, and utterly frocking dysfunctional. Watching Damon through the movie is watching a good man being painted into a corner through his own better instincts–loyalty, gratitude, and the desire to better oneself.
Enter LeoDicaprio as Billy Costigan, a kid from a bad family who somehow managed to fly straight and get into the police academy. Fresh out of the academy, he’s presented with a choice, delivered in one of the most scorchingly-funny scenes in the movie (Martin Sheen as the “good cop” kindly Abraham figure, Oliver Queenan, and Mark Wahlberg as his “bad cop” sergeant Dignam.) Costigan can go into a uniform…or he can go undercover, and use his family’s reputation and connections to bring down Frank Costello.
DiCaprio surprised me. He is, as Froopy remarked after the movie, “an actor playing a man playing an actor,” a hall-of-mirrors trick very few actors could pull off. I wonder just what Scorsese did between takes to strap him down so tightly and make him deliver. His good looks are marred by bruises and scruffishness; the use of the word “rat” several times during the film brings Nicholson’s and DiCaprio’s long noses and weird eyebrows out to perfect effect. When Nicholson and DiCaprio are onscreen, you literally can’t look at anything else.
The story is set up with deft flashbacks, and then the real meat of the movie begins. Costello knows there’s an undercover in his crew. He asks Sullivan to find him–and Queenan and Dignan ask Costigan to find Costello’s mole in the police force. Enter double-dealing, ambition, lies, loyalty, betrayal, and plenty of gratuitous violence.
O, Scorsese, how I love thee.
What really makes this movie are the secondary actors. Vera Farmiga takes over as the police psychologist responsible for keeping Costigan together and getting entangled in a web she never sees until it’s too late; Mark Wahlberg deliverd obscenities with rapid-fire precision; Kristin Dalton is a mob boss’s moll with her own essential amoral innocence; Ray Winstone is the faithful lieutenant and Kevin Corrigan is the drug-dealing cousin Costigan uses to prop up his undercover ID. Without these small gems, the movie would be a star-studded vehicle, and would lack its gutwrenching power. Sadly, Alec Baldwin and Martin Sheen play themselves, but they’re cast so well I didn’t mind.
It was wrenching to watch DiCaprio come unraveled onscreen, and by the time the entire situation slides sideways into escalating killings and double-dealings, one is forced to watch his character come to the realization that he is utterly, completely f***ed. When he says “I want my identity back!” it’s an Everyman’s plea.
But really…don’t hate me here, because I’m going to tell you a secret. The movie belongs to Matt Damon. He’s so good you don’t even notice him onscreen. He’s so goddamn good you can’t decide whether to love or hate him–and even when he pulls the biggest double-cross in the film you can’t hate him, because his love for his girlfriend and the fact of his essential goodness shines through. Damon’s character is an education in how a good person can do utterly bad things when given the right situation–a kind of Michael Corleone with his eye on law school and pangs of conscience enough to make even the most seasoned killer blanch. We become who we pretend to be, and Damon deconstructs over the course of the picture, with only an occasional moment of clenched-fist or rubbing-the-eyes to show the pressure-cooker of his internal state. And it works.
The story is a tragedy, with all the seeds of later events planted in the very first scenes. Scorsese excels in giving us morality plays, and The Departed is a rock and roll Cain’n'Abel–that is, if both brothers never met each other until the end of the story. Ecclesiastical Latin is tossed casually throughout the movie, and Scorsese has a Catholic’s finely-tuned nose for guilt, loyalty, and betrayal.
There are flaws, of course. If Scorsese buttoned DiCaprio and Damon down to make them deliver, he allowed Nicholson free play to be as freaky as he wanted to be. The obligatory sex scene made me think the woman was going to die–it is, after all, Hollywood canon that an adulteress must suffer terribly or be killed. Scorsese also almost punked out on the ending–but the story was so good it literally had to end or we would have had another hour’s worth of movie, and with two and a half hours already onscreen that might not have been a good idea. Still, the ending had the immediacy of a bullet to the head (ironic, because it was a bullet to the head, delivered by the most unlikely and yet most perfectly believable character) and the rest of the movie was ultimately satisfying.
To sum up, if you like Scorsese and morality plays, not to mention Catholic guilt and violence, The Departed is for you. I don’t often recommend seeing a movie in the theater, and almost never after matinee cutoff. But this was worth the nine-ten bucks they’re charging for evening movies these days. I’m glad I didn’t get popcorn.
I would have been too busy watching to eat it.
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October 12th, 2006 at 11:46 am
OMG! Look at that line up of actors!! How can I not see it??
And ol’ Leo has finally done another decent film? ’bout time!
lol
Thanks for the heads-up, I’ll definately keep an eye out for that one
October 13th, 2006 at 5:57 pm
Okay, now I have to see it.