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| Director Martin Scorsese |
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| Cinematographer Michael Ballhaus |
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| Scorsese on the set with Di Caprio, Damon, and Nicholson |
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| Scorsese on the set with Jack Nicholson |
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| Leonardo Di Caprio on the set |
THE DEPARTED A-
USA (151 mi) 2006
‘Scope d: Martin Scorsese
Heaven holds the
faithful Departed.
—F. Costello (Jack Nicholson)
No one lives and breathes movies like Martin Scorsese, with
this testosterone-laden picture winning Academy Awards for Best Picture, Best
Director (his first win after six losses and 35-years in the business, many
believing it was a correction of former mistakes), Best Adapted Screenplay, and
Best Editing, as not since Goodfellas
(1990) has the pure use of language and particularly profanity in a film risen
to such singular heights, becoming the most humorously provocative aspect of
the film, written by William Monahan, combining the personas of cops and
criminals into one stir fry mix, and they both come out sounding the same,
which is a neverending discourse on politically incorrect use of slang
distinctively designed to immediately offend and as quickly as possible disarm
or render powerless every racial group.
Mark Wahlberg, especially, fresh from INVINCIBLE (2006), his Disney film
as the PG bartender turned professional football player, plays a brash cop who
protects the identities in his Undercover Division, making the most out of
every second onscreen with his extraordinary delivery of machismo trash talk,
who actually needs to be toned down by the more polished and understated Alec
Baldwin, whose presence immediately conjures up images from South Park writer’s TEAM AMERICA: WORLD
POLICE (2004). Jack Nicholson and Ray
Winstone are an interesting sadistic pairing, the crime boss and his heavy,
while the same can be said for Leonardo DiCaprio and Matt Damon, two informer
cops on the force, each secretly answering to a higher power, one on the inside
and one on the outside, who miraculously come together through a police shrink
who sleeps with both of them, Vera Farmiga, without ever knowing it. An accomplished remake of Andrew Lau and Alan
Mak’s INTERNAL AFFAIRS TRILOGY (2002-03), coming out of a Hong Kong New Wave that
was itself heavily influenced by Scorsese, as John Woo dedicated THE KILLER
(1989) to him while Wong Kar-wai modeled his first feature, AS TEARS GO BY
(1988), after Mean
Streets (1973), yet this is set in the Irish sector of South Boston, where
by the end, you need a scorecard to keep tabs on who’s informing on who, a film
that starts out like gangbusters, filled with humor and a free-wheeling energy,
but it sadly fizzles out a bit by the end when it’s time to settle the score,
but the body count is so heavy you may not notice.
With wall-to-wall rock music, most adeptly chosen by Robbie
Robertson of The Band, the opening is quintessential Scorsese, with the use of
the Rolling Stone’s “Gimme Shelter,” The Departed Opening (HD) -
Jack Nicholson Monologue ... YouTube (1:26), with exquisite use of the
‘Scope camera by one-time Fassbinder cinematographer Michael Ballhaus, hard to
believe it’s the same man who shot THE BITTER TEARS OF PETRA VON KANT (1972),
and by the sheer ferocity of power coming off the screen, also making
scintillating use of the Dropkick Murphys song “I’m Shipping Up to Boston,” Im Shipping up to Boston
full scene in The Departed - HQ ... YouTube (2:23), while also featuring a
Van Morrison vocal from the Pink Floyd song “Comfortably Numb” during a sex
scene, The Departed -
YouTube (3:13). Side by side, we get
a highly complex internalized glimpse of both the police force and a crime
boss’s operations, how they use one another for information and try to outthink
the other by using their guys. It gets
pretty tricky having to sort out the jumbled mix of information which needs to be
acted upon immediately, where lives are at stake, but it becomes pretty clear
the risks are enormous and puts a huge psychological drain on the informants,
who continuously appear dangerously close to exposure. This is not for the faint of heart and remains
gripping throughout, keeping us on the edge of our seats until it all falls
apart at the end, much like the INTERNAL AFFAIRS series, which turns into a
bloody massacre of mayhem where you can’t tell the good guys from the bad, as
dead they’re all one and the same. And
that’s the problem here as well, as it becomes overly simplistic considering
the build up of an exemplary darkened world that Scorsese has taken great care
to embellish, probing rapidly shifting themes of identity, trust, betrayal, and
deception, where even in this murky Macbethian atmosphere of paranoiac revenge
where everyone has blood on their hands, it defies belief that when top
officers are killed, no one within the department is held accountable. In the aftermath the film doesn’t even
address what the department does, other than bury its dead with honors,
suggesting it’s completely irrelevant, focusing instead on the stunning
wreckage from a few high powered individuals, both cops and criminals, who
administer their own brand of street justice, which is without paperwork,
served up man to man.
It’s astonishing how much operations manpower is placed
behind this informant information, considering the degree of difficulty and
risk needed to get it, which leads to its highly questionable accuracy. The film raises the question about similar
information utilized by the highest intelligence gathering sources in the land,
the special forces operatives in Iraq or Afghanistan, who are responsible for
sending missiles into the homes of third world families suspecting terrorists
are inside, sometimes resulting in a high death toll of innocents due to
mistaken intelligence, largely from the word of a single informant who may be
playing one side against the other.
Despite its brutality, the film is surprisingly humorous throughout,
right down to the very last shot.
Interesting as well that Scorsese threw nuns and priests into this mix,
begging the question, just who can you trust anymore when every professional
entity protects its own with cover ups and lies? What’s left to believe? Is it safe?
Roughly half the film’s budget went to paying salaries, where Matt Damon
is a pathological liar adept at self-preservation, mentored by Nicholson, a
lifelong criminal, both loosely based on famous gangster Whitey Bulger and his
childhood pal John Connolly who would grow up to become a corrupt FBI Agent, Leonardo
DiCaprio describes his own character as a “constant 24-hour panic attack,”
constantly downing anti-anxiety medicine, while Mark Wahlberg running the
undercover operation is easily the freshest face in the bunch, nominated for an
Academy Award with the least amount of screen time simply for his ferocious and
hilarious use of profanity, as the “f” word, and its derivatives, are used two
hundred thirty-eight times. One of the
few Scorsese films set in the present, very few films capture the amorality of
police culture running amok quite like this one, where the line between moral authority
and criminality is thin, frequently crossed, and usually covered up, mirroring
the mentality of Matt Damon, worried only about self-preservation, as it’s a
culture that protects its own at the expense of the public that it’s sworn to
serve and protect. The only remake of a
foreign film to win an Academy Award for Best Picture, it’s a thoroughly
entertaining tour de force, where Wahlberg’s psychological undressing of new
police recruit DiCaprio is easily the best thing in the film, a blistering profanity-filled
exposé of his family’s criminal history, yet even with that realization they
find a place for him within the police force, but only through a crushing
ostracization that turns him into an outcast, making him feel subhuman, like an
alien in an alien world, revealing precisely how dehumanization defines police
culture.
Postscript
Still contemporary and more relevant than ever following the
needless police murder of George Floyd, when a white police officer kept a knee upon his
neck for nearly 8-minutes, showing no resistance, already handcuffed and lying
on the ground, even after yelling “I can’t breathe,” where the last 3-minutes
are entirely still and motionless, resembling a public lynching (with 5 other
men across the country shot and killed by police that same day!), causing
global outrage, leading to weeks and perhaps months of unending protest against
police brutality, particularly against people of color, who are stereotyped,
dehumanized, brutally manhandled, and treated vastly differently than whites,
suggesting a white supremacist carryover mentality since the era of slavery and
a gross manipulation of the U.S. Patriot Act signed immediately after 9/11 to
counter the impending threat of terrorism, now routinely targeting blacks as
terrorists, where police in America have not gone more than two days without
fatally shooting someone since 2015, so it may not be enough to reform such a
closed and protected system that is so deeply unaccountable to the public it
allegedly serves.
