The City that Bleeds
Martin Scorsese returns to blood-spattered form in "The Departed." (Film Review)
By Michael Sean McGowan
The Upside: Great cast, great script, and Scorsese.
The Downside: Uh, where's the ending?
A sense of place isn't what you would expect from a lot of gangster movies, unless we were talking about The Godfather. For some reason, crime thrillers, mysteries, these sorts seem to occupy space in a matter-of-fact way, nothing about their surroundings rubbing off on their story, nothing about the story being plugged into the history and blood, sweat, and tears that make up the neighborhood streets.
"I don't want to be a product of my environment," Frank Costello says during the opener of The Departed. "I want my environment to be a product of me." And so goes the tell-tale philosophy of Martin Scorsese's latest bullets-n-blood rapturous pop opera, taking the man who just about defined the Mean Streets of New York into the center of the bluest of the blue collar Boston in a crime story so built on individuals who drop their "R"s and use the imperative to "go f*** yourself" as a perfectly acceptable translation for "Hello, how are you- how are the wife and kids?" it almost takes on the resurrected glory of a Sam Peckinpah adaptation of a Dennis Lehane psychological arm-breaker. It's as if Scorsese and screenwriter William Monahan knew that making a contemporary remake, a crossing the borders remake whose originator isn't even five years old yet, ran the danger of feeling like a washed out expatriate, so dug deep to make sure their brain-twisting passion play of loyalties on a non-existent dividing line would be firmly rooted in old neighborhood soil.
Yes, that's right- at first glance Scorsese would be the last person you'd expect to go The Ring and The Grudge terra incognito and start cribbing off the Far East , but The Departed's tale of two cops, one true-blue pretending to be a felon and the other a straight-laced detective with strong ties to his law-deriding pater familias, is actually the work of 2002's indie fav Infernal Affairs, although Scorsese shifts the focus further away from the ironic brothers-in-and-out-of-crime ground of the original and here constructs a more towering, more classically American take on the gangster film- less about "family" and more about the sadistic chess match of cops and crooks to outwit each other. Firmly in the center is Costello, a Boston criminal gadfly who wastes no verbiage raining down contempt on anyone else he doesn't feel is "strong" enough to live the life of throat-slitting endeavor he does, whether it be blacks, Italians, Catholic priests, or a janitor who preferred to live and die poor and honest.
Frank Costello is the kind of role Jack Nicholson could do in his sleep; this is an actor who's touched so many mental envelopes in the last forty years he's run out of places to go where he can be considered a "revelation." What Nicholson does do right, though, is although Costello is a hate-spitting, mentally-unbalanced, almost likeably-sardonic cheese ball, Nicholson keeps it in check, careening close, but deftly out of the range of campy villainy (see Batman) or just plain four-to-the-floor cuckoo clock (see The Shining). He's less character-study, more character which means say goodbye to any notions of this Bean Town blotto acting as Daddy Dearest with a rap sheet. His existence in The Departed serves neither a higher (nor lower) function than any crook in a crook movie- to be the scorn of every righteous cop, in this case Billy Costigan (Leonardo DiCaprio), a Southie make-do who's "fired" from the state police and thrown in prison on a fake charge to make his conversion to the underworld all the more believable as he tries to ingratiate himself with Costello. At the same time, one of Costello's "grooming" projects, a young kid he once bought groceries for when his family was down and out, breaks into the ranks of the state police and into the very unit trying to bring Costello down. Scorsese is definitely above making this a Teflon-coated soap opera- by the time all the chips are on the table, feelings of family, both surrogate and otherwise, have been flushed down the toilet seeing that Costello's A-number-one mole (Matt Damon) himself doesn't see him as anything more than psychopathic scum.
This is the kind of Hell The Departed makes for itself- it's a top-notch entry in just about every category that counts: on-screen mayhem that's a deep-seated thrill (almost no one shoots violence better than Scorsese), Monahan (of Kingdom of Heaven- another story about blood brothers who find themselves on opposite sides of a metaphorical battlefield) cooks up the kind of pulse-sharpening dialogue that's a true crime enthusiast's best friend and an MPAA censor's worst nightmare. Yet, The Departed isn't a great movie, neither in the shadow of Scarface and Kiss of Death nor in the cannons of Scorsese's own work- all craft, but with the nuances unplugged. But even if, like Bringing Out the Dead, The Departed is more skillful than soulful, it is still a Scorsese film, which means it's a double-barrel blast of the best cinema has to offer.
Much like this summer's Miami Vice, even if The Departed can't bring itself to give a nice ol' bear hug to its characters, it at least puts them through some fresh and zero cool motions. It's a shadow-dancing illusionist's trick; Costigan weaving his way through the morally (and literally) crumbling world of Costello's not-so-merry men as he waits for the razor-toed shoe to drop and Damon's Colin Sullivan, chasing his own tail while trying to breach the impenetrable wall blocking himself from the undercovers working the Costello beat. Two very different men hanging onto their ring tone/text messaging lifelines (kudos for the first, and probably only, movie to make these accursed Generation-Y devices actually serve a legitimate purpose) and following the trail of the other up and down the fantastically shot Boston streets, courtesy of cinematographer Michael Ballhaus.
The one big departure from ordinary is the cast- ensemble casts only work in special, rarified situations, not the kind of thing you'd expect to foster and grow in a thriller. Rather than lean and cut-down by tunnel vision, Scorsese wants everything huge here, including packing in, besides Nicholson, Damon, and DiCaprio, a marquee of names who could each, on their own, flagship a movie this size (Mark Wahlburg as a niceties-impaired cop, Martin Sheen as the "real" father-figure cop to the special investigative team out to make Costello into a mug shot). There isn't a weak link in the chain. And in a rather shrewd twist, call The Departed the first police flick not only not to shy away from bureaucracy, but to embrace its world of Boys in Blue as a glass-walled, cubicle-partitioned machine, which easily makes The Departed one of a select few titles to engender as much danger from rampant paper cuts as flying bullets and broken glass.
The only serious let-down is in the last five minutes, as Scorsese treats us to one seat-raising shock after another in rapid succession (another Scorsese telltale sign: the frightening casualness in which very bad things happen) then the movie just stops. No real wrap, no real closure, more like a loose end tied for the sake of a loose end tied and then a black screen and ending credits. Maybe this is Scorsese and Monahan's real vision of justice coming full circle, maybe it's a nod to the intrepid randomness noir is built on, or maybe it's just a stumble in an otherwise excellent film whose bullet-jacketed dreams occasionally outpace its Boston sensibilities. A-
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