The Departed (2007, HD DVD)

What do you get when you combine the plot of a Chinese gangster yarn with the ethos of the Sicilian Corleones transferred to an unredeemed, foul-mouthed, bigoted psychopathic gang kingpin (played by Jack Nicholson) among the embittered but practical "Shanty Irish" of Boston? Not GOODFELLAS, obviously, nor GANGS OF NEW YORK or THE AVIATOR -- thank goodness -- but THE DEPARTED, Director Martin Scorsese's best film in at least fifteen years.

The film answers the question: Are all cops in Boston Irish? (The answer is, evidently, with one or two exceptions, yes!) And it tries to answer the question: How do you play cat and mouse, if all you have to work with are rats? (The answer to that one may be the picture's major weakness.)

Based on Siu Kai Mak's Hong Kong 2002 masterpiece, MOU GAAN DOU [INFERNAL AFFAIRS], the film gives Scorsese something he has not had for one of his gang films (or many others) in years, a serviceable, tightly organized plot. And what a plot! It's almost too much!!

How Scorsese has changed the ethos of Coppola's GODFATHER in THE DEPARTED is inherent to the opening speech of hard-scrabble mob boss Frank Costello (Nicholson):

"I don't want to be a product of my environment. I want my environment to be a product of me. Years ago we had the church. That was only a way of saying - we had each other. The Knights of Columbus were real head-breakers; true guineas. They took over their piece of the city. Twenty years after an Irishman couldn't get a f*cking job, we had the presidency. May rest in peace. That's what the n*ggers don't realize. If I got one thing against the black chappies, it's this - no one gives it to you. You have to take it."

Gang Boss Costello delivers this speech in a convenience store after collecting "protection money" from the owner, coming on to the man's fourteen year-old daughter, Gwen (who will become his mistress), and buying sweets for little Colin Sullivan (who will remember Costello's wisdom, too, when he grows up).

In a hundred words, Costello has personally expressed, on behalf of many city-bred Irish, what the Italian experience was for Vito and Michael Corleone, and what it may be for black Americans or others, in future. There have been two ways up the ladder for fair sized numbers of poor immigrants in urban America: Crime or the Law. But for Blacks or Latinos and newcomers, the American Experience is increasingly a marathon by those trying to run up an accelerating down escalator.

[Thinking of recent racial, gender and political epithets or incidents brought to us by our Media, if you recoil from bad language, vulgarity and bigotry, THE DEPARTED may not be for you. In its 151 minutes, the so-called f-word is used 237 times, crude terms for female genitalia 22 times, and hard to say how many racial slurs and other vulgar terms. No one, Irish, Italian, Black, Latino, Asian, white, heterosexual, homosexual, man, woman, Catholic, is given a free ride. The dialogue sputters brilliantly with invective, so much so, that it is difficult to quote even a little of it without being offensive to someone.]

While Colin Sullivan (Matt Damon), a seeming straight arrow Catholic orphan raised by his grandmother, is dutifully infiltrating (through the Academy) Boston's Police Force, William "Billy" Costigan (Leonardo DiCaprio), son of the only honest male member of his family, is going through training for the Massachusetts State Police.

As the plot and fate would have it, Sullivan signs on as Frank's spy in the Boston Police Special Crime Unit, and is soon accepted as its most confidential agent, but after being put through hell by the good cop/bad cop team of Captain Oliver Queenan (Martin Sheen) and Lieutenant Dignam (Mark Wahlberg), and ostensibly tossed out of the State Police, Costigan is assigned to become an undercover plant for "the staties" in Costello's crime family.

[Going in, to understand the complex plot, it is important to realize that Colin Sullivan is not the only mole Frank Costello has placed in the Massachusetts' police establishment, nor may Billy Costigan be the sole undercover man in Costello's operation. As certain characters express it: "Everyone's a cop." As others say, "Everybody's a rat."]

Mark Damon plays his Colin Sullivan as a devious, insincere social climbing freak. DiCaprio's William "Billy" Costigan is constantly threatening to explode with righteous but repressed honesty. Billy is terribly tried by the fact that (after breaking his already broken arm), Frank Costello takes on the role of a kindly if twisted mentor to this nephew of his old arch gang rival, Jackie Costigan, whom Frank admires more than he does Billy's "southie" airport worker father, a man the Gang Boss might characterize as "never having waked the f*ck up."

Scorsese rattles the action along with great finess, and making rational sense of it all, or trying to, is Madolyn (Vera Farmiga), the police unit psychiatrist, one of the few women in the film, the only sympathetic one -- for sure, a quiet, normal young woman, not that she doesn't have her problems. Madolyn is sought out to become a kind of sex therapist for the stressed Colin, under the guise of being his girlfriend, eventually his fiancee.

For the dodgy Colin, it's a good "career" move. As the cynically practical Captain Ellerby (Alec Baldwin) remarks:

"Marriage is an important part of getting ahead. It lets people know you're not a homo. A married guy seems more stable. People see the ring, they think 'at least somebody can stand the son of a b*tch.' Ladies see the ring, they know immediately that you must have some cash, and your cock must work."

Presently, Madolyn also becomes Billy Costigan's anger management counselor. She ends up having both Colin and Billy in her bed, for different reasons (a violation of psychiatric ethics, perhaps, if a humanly understandable one), and before the end of THE DEPARTED, she holds the key to all the picture's other deceptions in her professional hands.

I really needn't write more about the plot.

Just see THE DEPARTED, and let it happen to you.

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Aside from the plot, which a few critics believe he follows too assiduously, Scorsese also has half a dozen or more little homages, but unlike those he has dotted into recent films like bits of candied fruit, most of them are subtle. They pass by us subliminally. Notice a couple of the more obvious: The grandmother watching the old John Ford masterpiece, THE INFORMER (Victor Maclaglen's Gypo Nolan seeking forgiveness in church from the mother of the man he has turned in to the Black and Tans). Or Madolyn leaving the funeral of the man she loved, and walking straight by the man who betrayed him, out of the frame, as Alida Valli did in THE THIRD MAN (Reed, 1949).

William Monahan (THE KINGDOM OF HEAVEN, Scott, 2005) provides the plot and script adaptations, among the best of the year, cinching even tighter the already marvelous work of Siu Kai Mak and Felix Chong in INFERNAL AFFAIRS. Veteran German Cinematographer Michael Ballhaus (THE FABULOUS BAKER BOYS, 1989) continues to do good work for Scorsese. Production Designer Kristi Zea shows what she did for Scorsese's GOODFELLAS (1990) and Jonathan Demme's SILENCE OF THE LAMBS (1991). Howard Shore's deftly restrained score, highlighted with "found music" by John Lennon, Van Morrison, The Beach Boys, and Patsy Cline, is perfect. And the imcomparable Thelma Schoonmaker, editor on almost all of Scorsese's pictures, has something she has not had to work with recently: A story which (even though you have to keep a sharp eye on it) makes coherent sense, from start to finish.

[Be prepared for instant flashbacks of extreme gore and brutality, which suggest why many of the character's, Frank Costello being a prime example, have some of the problems they have.]

All the male actors give first rate performances -- Damon, Sheen, Wahlberg -- and several we haven't mentioned much, if at all: Ray Winstone as Frank Costello's right hand man, Mr. [Arnold] French; Alec Baldwin's blustering, funny Captain Ellerby; and Anthony Anderson playing his character's name, Brown the uniform cop, the only African American prominent in the cast.

[Afterthought: 12/2/06 -- I had meant to remark that cell phones come into their own in THE DEPARTED. This picture is the first major offering I've seen in which the little "sorcerer's apprentices" vie with the cast to such an aggressive extent, driving on the plot for periods of time while the actors can only watch and google their buttons. If you don't know who is phoning whom, and on which phone, you may have a technologically challenged moment or two in the midst of the action!]

But the film belongs to Jack Nicholson, Leonardo DiCaprio and strangely, perhaps, to Vera Farmiga.

Nicholson's Frank Costello (his name swiped from the New York Murder Inc gangster) is based on the legendary Whitey Bulger, who is said to be in a witness protection program somewhere in America at this moment. [He could be the man sitting next to you on the bus, or that Boston Irish bartender, who always gives you a hard time. Who can say?] Jack Nicholson has added Frank Costello to his master actor's gallery of unforgettable characters.

And as I say, maybe because she is the only girl in this testosterone-mad pack, Vera Farmiga quietly steals all her scenes, as she did more spectacularly in the current BREAKING AND ENTERING. Perhaps, at last, some powers-that-be will recognize the simply engrossing talent and versatility of this actress.

[Looking back, I was proud to notice that I had singled her out in an otherwise nondescript picture, 15 MINUTES, well over five years ago.]

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And so, we have THE DEPARTED, seemingly so whiz-bang, but not really, not entirely. Notice Frank's reference to how the presidency was taken away from his people. Notice how the police ballistics instructor uses the drawings of JFK's head to illustrate bullet trajectories. Notice that Colin, when he can afford it (moonlighting, of course), gets a grand apartment on Beacon Hill, looking out on the golden dome of the Boston City Hall. Notice that . . . rat running along the railing of his balcony.

Martin Scorsese does not have the heart of Francis Ford Coppola's THE GODFATHER TRILOGY, nor the sure Irish fatalism of Clint Eastwood's MYSTIC RIVER, but he has some interesting footnotes.

As another critic put it, THE DEPARTED is Martin Scorsese's vision of a society rotting from the inside out.

THE DEPARTED may not be dear, but it is memorable!

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15 MINUTES: A lack-luster Robert DeNiro film which might be called a poor man's THE DEPARTED, but showcasing Miss Farmigla and a couple of interesting fellow Russians. --

http://www.epinions.com/content_12280368772

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THE AVIATOR: Scorsese's mortifying biopic of Howard Hughes, which I parody in this review. The film is interesting for how much better Leonardo DiCaprio is as the older Howard Hughes than when he is young. --

http://www.epinions.com/content_173092212356

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BREAKING AND ENTERING: A movie, currently showing, which sabotages most of its cast, and only Miss Farmiga manages to shine her way through in a small but entertaining morsel of support. --

http://www.epinions.com/content_281256496772

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GANGS OF NEW YORK: Like THE AVIATOR, this film shows what happens when the academic side of Scorsese's nature draws him into extravaganzas which he cannot contain. This sprawling historical film about 19th New York lacks the cohesive plot which causes THE DEPARTED to succeed. --

http://www.epinions.com/content_86891335300

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Should you wish to read reviews of the Francis Ford Coppola trilogy, to which THE DEPARTED will be compared, go to the following links.

THE GODFATHER: The Mother of Modern Gangster Films contains in an Italian setting all the elements of THE DEPARTED, which conveys a similar but not so rich American sociological experience --

http://www.epinions.com/mvie-review-570B-191D3A8-392EF5B2-prod5

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THE GODFATHER II: Francis Ford Coppola established himself overnight as a master director by at once consolidating the forward drive of the story and showing its origins in this epic American success story. --

http://www.epinions.com/mvie-review-701E-296F98E-39319238-prod5

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THE GODFATHER III: The original theatrical version was put down, but in its Director's Cut, it is arguably the most satisfactory of the three films. It provides a perfect denouement for Coppola's tragic trilogy:

http://www.epinions.com/mvie-review-18CD-3AC1370-39345796-prod5

Funnily enough, only a couple of present day Advisors have read the above reviews of these seminal modern American pictures. One and all are invited to come on down to remedy that situation!

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MYSTIC RIVER: Director Clint Eastwood's Boston Police-Criminal picture, though it lacks the technical perfection of THE DEPARTED, has a heart-crushing truthfulness, a felt human sense of loss and passing time, which seems beyond Scorsese at the moment. --

http://www.epinions.com/content_126315564676