The Departed
Written by William Monahan
Directed by Martin Scorsese
Warner Bros.
2006
Rating:


The Rolling Stones' "Gimmie Shelter" is an operatic piece of pop, a wailing wall of the barbarous sins men commit against each other. Mick Jagger has never been more brooding than he is here, detailing nothing less than an apocalypse that's "just a shot away." The song cuts deep, feeling expansive thanks to the haunting guitar work by Mick Jagger and the howling vocals of Merry Clayton, yet it nonetheless feels lithe. A bit long for a pop song, the Stones don't waste a minute and it's undiminished by the fact that it's "nothing more" than what the band did so spectacularly in its prime, namely making great, immortal rock songs.

"Gimmie Shelter" fittingly opens "The Departed," Martin Scorsese's return to the crime genre. The director has used "Gimmie Shelter" twice before in "Goodfellas" and "Casino." "The Departed" is a gangster movie like those films, yet, like "Gimmie Shelter," there's a disarming amount of soul to the work Scorsese does here in telling "nothing more" than a violent tale of cops and robbers.

Souls are of great importance to "The Departed" — named for a line in the Catholic "Prayer for Souls in Purgatory" — and the film begins with the purchase of two of them. In Boston 1975, larger-than-life Irish mobster Frank Costello (Jack Nicholson) sees well-mannered altar boy Colin Sullivan (later played as an adult by Matt Damon) in a grocery store. Costello buys the boy milk, Wonder Bread and cold cuts for his family and a comic book to reward young Sullivan, and in the process he begins grooming the boy to become an informant for him in the Massachusetts State Police. The purchase of the soul of William Costigan Jr. (Leonardo DiCaprio) is less outsized yet far more sinister. Costigan wants to work for the state police but his qualifications are questioned by Capt. Queenan (Martin Sheen) and his vicious right-hand man Sgt. Dignam (Mark Wahlberg). Queenan sits silently as Dignam methodically eviscerates Costigan, saying Costigan will never make it as a police officer because of his family's criminal history. Costigan will be thrown off the force unless he's willing to do something for them: work as an undercover officer in Costello's crew. Sheen gives Queenan the same fatherly gravitas he gave to his President Bartlett on "The West Wing," but make no mistake: Queenan's manipulation of Costigan is ultimately far more vicious than Costello's treatment of Sullivan.

Now that longtime nemeses Costello and Queenan have their pieces on the board the game can begin. The fates of Sullivan and Costigan have as much consequence to them as fallen plastic pawns, but Scorsese takes them deadly seriously. The script by William Monahan is steeped in themes of existentialism; masculinity; betrayal by and of father figures; James Joycean ideas about Irishness; Eugene O'Neill's New England-based sense of tragedy, trauma and vernacular; and rats, all colliding in a psychologically rich portrait of deteriorating identities. "The Departed" is based on the Hong Kong movie "Infernal Affairs," and though Monahan has impressively remained close to that film's well-oiled plot, he has replaced its mechanics with soul.

Yet "The Departed" remains an impressive hall of mirrors, a film that thrills on a visceral and intellectual level because it lavishes so much attention on matters of story, performance and cerebral cinematography.

Scorsese hasn't done work with a cast this uniformly excellent since perhaps "Raging Bull." Even actors in small roles, like the always great Ray Winstone and Anthony Anderson, manage to shine. Vera Farmiga, who brought brutal grace to her performance as a recovering drug addict in "Down to the Bone," is given little screen time in the man's world of "The Departed," making her ability to deliver real depth to her role as the police psychiatrist who beds both Sullivan and Costigan a real marvel. Wahlberg proved himself to be a surprisingly nimble comic character actor in "I Heart Huckabees" and he does similarly great work in his role here as Dignam, ironically named for a dead character in Joyce's "Ulysses." His scenes with Alec Baldwin, who plays officer Ellerby, crackle like a dark comedy routine written by David Mamet for Abbott & Costello.

Nicholson's work as a much different Costello is as superlative as his performance in "About Schmidt," if for different reasons. "About Schmidt" features an internalized Nicholson at his most restrained, while "The Departed" is Nicholson unbound. Nicholson has been accused of overacting, but he does nothing more than invest a two-bit mobster with the grandeur he thinks he possesses.

DiCaprio has never been better. The lack of depth he displayed in "Gangs of New York" and the actorly mannerisms of "The Aviator" are gone. By the end, as he grapples with the possibility of his real persona vanishing, DiCaprio is feverish in his intensity.

Damon's performance has been relatively overlooked, which is easy to do: he's not the hero like DiCaprio's Costigan and he's not the grandiose villain of Nicholson's Costello. Sullivan is a smooth criminal, and never more so than in the great scene where he asks Farmiga's character Madolyn on a date. Damon uses his naturally boyish demeanor to his advantage in a movie where appearances are relentlessly deceiving.

Scorsese's return to the crime genre that has earned him so much acclaim after a 10-year hiatus isn't an act of redundancy. Working again with cinematographer Michael Ballhaus ("Gangs of New York," "GoodFellas"), Scorsese's camera work zooms and tracks like usual, though it does so with more fury in the face of the story's urgency. Scorsese, ever the film scholar, continues to invest his scenes with visual references, this time to "The Third Man," "The Informer," "Scarface," "The Untouchables" and "The Great Train Robbery," just as he has in the past, but the references this time feel more vital, resonating as they echo from context to context. The cross-cutting by Thelma Schoonmaker is as powerful as it has been since her first collaboration with Scorsese on his feature-length debut "I Call First (a.k.a. Who's That Knocking on My Door)," except here it's even more vital, raising the stakes each time the celluloid frame shifts from character to character.

In the end, "The Departed" may in fact be nothing more than another Scorsese crime picture in the sense that it's an operatic, brooding cinematic force, a wailing wall of the barbarous sins men commit against each other, that sits comfortably among the other great, immortal films of Scorsese's oeuvre.

Posted Saturday, January 20, 2007

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