Deborah Lipp

The Departed (2006) 9/10
Colin Sullivan (Matt Damon) grows up under the tutelage of Frank Costello (Jack Nicholson), ruthless boss of Boston’s Irish mob. Sullivan becomes a police detective, working as a mole to protect Costello. Meanwhile, Internal Affairs places Bill Costigan (Leonardo DiCaprio) as a mole in Costello’s mob, taking the trouble to first hide any evidence that he is still a police officer. The two moles come closer and closer to finding each other’s identity. Directed by Martin Scorsese.

Among other things, The Departed is a work of technical virtuosity. Here is a film in which all the pieces come together; it is brilliantly filmed, edited, performed, and scored (in Scorsese’s trademark pop/rock style). Scorsese has perhaps never been so confident as a director, so mature.

The movie reminds me, and many others, of Goodfellas, although I caught enticing whiffs of Taxi Driver. Like Goodfellas, The Departed deals with the complex nature of integrity and deception in the world of organized crime. Like Goodfellas, The Departed is overlong, and starts to unravel in the final act, when things spin out of control. (Sort of an interesting dilemma for a film student to contemplate; how do you film things spinning out of control without allowing the picture to fall into the spin it depicts?) The world of The Departed is so dark and violent that it can only be heading towards a bloodbath. Perhaps carefully-constructed happy endings delude the audience into thinking otherwise; perhaps if we were dispassionate we would know that things could only end with a fuck of a high body count. Be that as it may, when the deaths start wracking up, it is shocking. Shocking each time, in fact.

Movies are packaged in a particular way. There’s a shocking death in The Departed, and as horrified as you are, if you’re a savvy movie consumer, you’re also thinking, “Oh, that’s the shock. Now things can proceed normally.” But they don’t; they proceed shockingly. So much so, in fact, that I wasn’t sure I’d be able to write this review this soon—a mere five hours after seeing the film. I left the theater reeling, got into my car still reeling, opened a blank page to write, and just let it sit.

DiCaprio is amazing. I mean, everyone is amazing in this movie, even Mark Wahlberg gives an enjoyable, if one-note, performance. But there is no way any reasonable person can continue to write off DiCaprio as a lightweight. “Your vulnerability, it’s freaking me out” says a beautiful woman, and you see what she sees; a guy so tough, and so incredibly breakable, that it’s almost maddening. Matt Damon is the opposite, a sweet, likeable guy who gradually, bit by bit, reveals himself to be utterly irredeemable. It’s impressive, really, because you know going in he’s a rat, he’s worked his way up in the police force for no other reason than to destroy it from within. Yet you keep looking for the cuddly side, because he keeps showing you it’s there, and so you spend the movie wondering how much of the sweetness is an act. In the end, he does a superb job of letting us know that Colin Sullivan is human, but not good. Good men don’t do what he does.

You want to know about Nicholson, don’t you? Well, if you hate the guy, I can’t talk you out of it. But if you just want to know if he restrains himself, the answer is, mostly yes. He holds the character; an outrageous guy, it is true, so there’s Nicholson pawprints all over him, but he doesn’t wander afield, he plays Costello and not himself. And when Nicholson is really acting, man, that’s a sight to see.