Directed by: Martin Scorsese Starring: Jack Nicholson, Mark Wahlberg, Martin Sheen, Ray Winstone
After two bombastic period pieces failed to land Scorsese the ever-elusive Oscar, he seems as desperate as ever to lay hands on the golden statuette. With The Departed, he returns to the seedy territories of organised crime that he knows best and engineers a nominally potent weapon for his latest assault on the awards season. More stars flock to The Departed than to Ocean’s 11 in an attempt to help Scorsese get the long-overdue recognition. The weapon is loaded with a brilliant idea of a plot, which for once awards equal attention to the police and the mobsters. All the prerequisites for a genre masterpiece are ticked off with energetic urgency. Is The Departed the tour de force all logic dictates it will be? I am afraid it is not.
The Departed is a remake of the much-lauded Hong Kong film Infernal Affairs (sadly, unseen by me), which ironically is said to owe a lot to Scorsese’s virtuoso opera on the world of crime. It boasts a brilliant set up – both the mafia and the police try to outsmart each other by placing informants within the ranks of the enemy – but it is too complex and difficult to handle and degenerates into a chaotic mess, underscored by a farcical finale. The effort to plug holes and tie loose strings in the complex chess game of a plot does not allow for any character depth. As a consequence, The Departed is plot rather than character driven, which is bizarre for a Scorsese film. This would have been fine if the script was ticking as clockwork, but it is more like an intriguing concept car that breaks at every sharp turn.
Matt Damon plays Colin Sullivan, the rogue cop who has been groomed from childhood to infiltrate the Boston police force; and Leonardo DiCaprio is Billy Costigan, the police academy trainee who is selected to infiltrate the organisation of the elusive mad mobster Frank Costello (Jack Nicholson), Sullivan’s master. Bizarrely, rather than focusing on Sullivan and Costigan, Scorsese decides to make the most of having Nicholson on board and makes his part much larger than it needs to be. Nicholson, in turn, goes over the top from the word go, as if on another Oscar mission himself. The affect of his overacting, which is encouraged here, is intriguingly disorienting at first, but then gets counterproductive.
Where gangster Costello need to send shivers down the spines of everyone in sight, Nicholson comes up as overly theatrical and amusing. In contrast, the controlled menace of Ray Winstone’s performance makes Mr French, Costello’s second in command, much scarier. The rest of the cast, including Alec Baldwin and Martin Sheen, is in fine form doing mostly what they do best, with special kudos going to Mark Wahlberg for his foul-mouthed turn as the bad-cop half of the tandem in charge of the Boston Police undercover department (the good cop is Sheen). The problem is that the mirror conflicts of the two protagonists living with a big lie are brushed to the sidelines at the expense of the Nicholson’s acting fireworks. On top of that, screenwriter William Monahan cannot resist the lure of combining the love interest of Sullivan and Costigan in one woman – a police psychiatrist played by Vera Farmiga – which needlessly eats further screen time and is left unresolved. Damon manages a performance which echoes a less nuanced Mr Ripley; his dilemmas are purely situational. DiCaprio’s performance is mesmerising, but the motivation of his character Costigan remains a mystery throughout.
The Departed is by no means a failure; its premise is truly engaging and its positives generate enough goodwill to carry the audience interested well beyond the film has a right to. The misguided focus, however, means that intriguing never evolves into engrossing; that promise never evolves into greatness.
