Cops and crooks
Movies
Although his works deal with an impressive variety of
subjects, characters, and settings, including high-society in 19th century
Manhattan and the theocracy of 20th century Tibet, Martin Scorsese always seems
most at home in the darker corners of contemporary urban America. His signature
appears most legibly on films like Mean
Streets, Taxi Driver, Raging Bull, and GoodFellas, all powerful
inquiries into the nature and meaning of violence. After his inflated
excursions into American history and celebrity biography in Gangs of New York and The Aviator, he returns to some
characteristic locations and familiar people in his new movie about cops and
crooks, The Departed.
This time around the director splits his focus between two
groups, not only his usual criminals but also the official representative of
law enforcement, ultimately finding little difference between the two. Although
inspired by the Hong Kong thriller Infernal
Affairs, the movie uses some material roughly based on some actual events
of a few years ago in the Boston
underworld, involving the Irish mafia, the local police, and the FBI in a
complicated web of deception, conspiracy, and betrayal.
Employing a number of sequences of rapid montage, frequent
changes of chronology, flashbacks within flashbacks, and a kind of visual
dialectic based on crosscutting, The
Departed suggests in its method the moral complexity of its subjects. Its
two major characters, Colin Sullivan (Matt Damon) and Billy Costigan
(Leonardo DiCaprio), both products of the tough Irish
neighborhoods of South Boston, follow parallel
tracks that occasionally intersect with a brutal violence. A detective sergeant
in the Massachusetts State Police, Sullivan commands a special unit
investigating the boss of the Irish mafia, Frank Costello (Jack Nicholson),
while Costigan works in Costello’s crew of thieves,
thugs, and killers.
The reality of duplicity connects the two men — Sullivan
is actually a spy and a traitor, Costello’s mole inside the police, and Costigan is a state trooper, working undercover inside the
mob. As Costello’s criminal activities grow ever bolder and bloodier, and the
investigation increases in scope and intensity, each operative, suspecting the
existence of the other, attempts to discover his opposite number before he is
exposed. Much of the movie’s suspense and excitement build on the mounting
tension of the two men’s efforts to identify each other, while also avoiding
both friends and enemies, in a series of pursuits and narrow escapes that
culminates in some shocking violence, and ultimately a scene strewn with
corpses like the last act of a Shakespearean tragedy.
The complicated plots and the numerous parallel actions
occasionally intersect in moments when the two men encounter the same policemen
and the same criminals and in their separate relationships with a rather
unlikely police psychiatrist (Vera Farmiga). Each
begins consulting the shrinker but ends becoming her
lover, an ironic competition that, however fanciful, serves to underline the
picture’s relentlessly dialectical structure.
Once begun, the deception and betrayal never end, as events
reveal the presence of other spies and traitors, including Costello himself,
who like his real-life counterpart informed for the FBI even while committing a
number of horrible crimes. Although Scorsese obviously knows the original
mafia, here he exhibits a convincing awareness of the habits and customs of
Irish criminals, even more vicious and treacherous than the Italian gangsters,
and who were in fact rewarded by the FBI for killing off the Italian mob in Boston.
The casting accounts for the picture’s major problems, which
tend to weaken an otherwise complex and fascinating narrative. The director
continues his perplexing enchantment with Leonardo DiCaprio,
who retains the frown he acquired in the dismal Aviator and deploys it at every opportunity with much the same
unsatisfactory result; neither he nor Matt Damon resembles anybody’s idea of a
tough cop/gangster/informant. All the other actors, however, perform quite
well, especially Nicholson as a psychopathic, quasi-intellectual mobster who
quotes Shakespeare and kills without a qualm. In the fine supporting cast, Mark
Wahlberg, of all people, acquits himself well as a
terrifically hostile and profane sergeant who appears to hate everyone with a
nicely democratic sense of equality; he also in effect earns the last word of
the film, behaving with a kind of fierce integrity that counters all the
falsehood and all the treachery.
The Departed (R), directed by Martin Scorsese, is now playing
at Culver Ridge 16, Pittsford, Henrietta 18, Webster 12, Tinseltown, Greece Ridge 12, and Eastview 13.
This article appears in Oct 11-17, 2006.
