Film Review: "The Departed"

Scorsese’s Hall of Mirrors, Littered With Bloody Deceit

By MANOHLA DARGIS
The New York Times
Published: October 6, 2006

There are almost as many films fighting in “The Departed” as there are guys slugging it out. First among those films is Martin Scorsese’s cubistic entertainment about men divided by power, loyalty and their own selves. Hovering above that film like a shadow is “Infernal Affairs,” the equally sleek Hong Kong assemblage on which it is based and which serves as one of its myriad doubles. And then there is the film conjured up by Jack, as in Jack Nicholson, who when not serving Mr. Scorsese’s interests with a monstrous leer all but subverts those interests with a greedy, devouring hunger.

Each Scorsese film comes freighted with so many expectations, as well as the enormity of his own legend, that it’s a wonder the director can bear the weight. Compared with his last fictional outings, the period story “Gangs of New York” and the Howard Hughes portrait “The Aviator,” this new work feels as light as a feather, or as light as any divertissement from a major filmmaker who funnels his ambitions through genre. What helps make “The Departed” at once a success and a relief isn’t that the director of “Kundun,” Mr. Scorsese’s deeply felt film about the Dalai Lama, is back on the mean streets where he belongs; what’s at stake here is the film and the filmmaking, not the director’s epic importance.

In “The Departed” the camera work and cutting feel faster, lower to the ground, more urgent than they have in his recent films. (Michael Ballhaus shot it; Thelma Schoonmaker edited.) The speed and Mr. Scorsese’s sureness of touch, particularly when it comes to carving up space with the camera, keep the plot’s hall of mirrors from becoming a distraction.

There simply isn’t time to think about the story and whether any of it makes sense, including the astonishing coincidences involving its stealth doppelgängers: Matt Damon’s Colin Sullivan, a bad guy who goes undercover in Boston as a state police officer, and Leonardo DiCaprio’s Billy Costigan, a state cop who infiltrates the underworld. Strangers to each other, Colin and Billy are brothers of a kind when it comes to Frank Costello, the gangster played by Mr. Nicholson. The evil this man does and portends is laid out with precision timing in the hair-raising opening minutes.

As the Rolling Stones wail on the soundtrack (“War, children, it’s just a shot away”), Frank moves through the shadows, his face almost entirely obscured. Dispensing Sun Tzu-like truths as if they were Pez candies, he sets his sights on little Colin Sullivan who, with eyes wide as plates, listens rapt. Frank buys the boy groceries, then leans into the girl behind the store counter, whispering something in her ear. (Her face says it’s something dirty.) Minutes later Colin (now played by Mr. Damon) has graduated from the police academy and is thanking Frank for his graduation gift. With a bag of food, the bad man has bought a soul.

Mr. Damon enters the story about the same time that Mr. Nicholson exits the shadows. Too bad he doesn’t stay there until the final credits. This Janus-like actor has long presented two faces for the camera, the jester called Jack and the actor named Nicholson. He has worn both faces for some of his famous roles, but over time he has grown fond of the outsize persona called Jack, with his shades and master-of-ceremonies sneer, and it’s hard not to think that the man has become his mask. Mr. Nicholson has some choice moments in “The Departed”: he owns the thrilling opening minutes and is persuasively unnerving in his early scenes with Billy, whom he only knows as a neighborhood loser ripe for the plucking.

But as the story twists and twists some more, Mr. Nicholson begins to mix too much Jack into his characterization. In Alexander Payne’s “About Schmidt,” he plays a man whose tamped-down disappointment meant that he had to pull the performance from deep inside; he committed to the part without the help of his sidekick persona. In “The Departed” he’s playing bigger and badder than life with engines roaring. It’s a loud, showy performance. Frank even comes equipped with a trove of gaudy accouterments: a goatee like an arrow, a leopard-print robe, a bevy of babes, a severed hand and a ridiculous fake phallus. Another actor might wear these accessories; Mr. Nicholson upstages them.

Mr. Scorsese, no wallflower himself, spends a lot of time vying for attention with his famous star. Mr. Damon and Mr. DiCaprio serve him better. Mr. Damon does some very good work as the buttoned-down gangster hiding a world of darkness behind a facade of normalcy; his boyish looks have rarely looked creepier than when Colin is eagerly doing Frank’s bidding. And Mr. DiCaprio’s own callow looks fit better with his role than they did in either “Gangs of New York” or “The Aviator.” He falls apart nicely, and in the scene in which he stands, anguished and wrung out, over the body of a fallen colleague, you see what Mr. Scorsese might have seen all along: a vulnerability that seems animal-like in its unknowing.

The role generally works to Mr. DiCaprio’s strengths since he has to keep a lid on the character and his own tendency to go overly big; even his physical performance, the way his arms and legs jangle, is more controlled. Billy melts down, but he melts slowly, his panic leaking through the cracks opened up by his escalating fear. Terrified that Frank will discover his identity, he unloads on a police shrink (Vera Farmiga, working hard to make a nothing role count), who also happens to be Colin’s girlfriend. The plot thickens, then reaches full boil among further complications, dirty dealings, blood on the floor and excellent performances from Alec Baldwin and Mark Wahlberg (as detectives), who own their every scene. As do the rest of the actors, they prove that what really counts here, in the end, isn’t the film, but all its swaggering men.

Fine as Mr. DiCaprio and Mr. Damon are, neither is strong enough to usurp memories of the actors who played the same roles in the original — Tony Leung as the good guy, Andy Lau as the bad — both of whom register with more adult assurance. That’s an observation, not an indictment. Comparisons between “Infernal Affairs” and its redo are unavoidable given how closely the screenwriter William Monahan follows the first film’s beats and scenes. But as fans of “Infernal Affairs” (and its two sequels) know well, the Hong Kong film owes an enormous debt to Mr. Scorsese, whose imprint, along with that of Michael Mann, is all over the trilogy. The Hong Kong and Hollywood action films are themselves doppelgängers of a sort, and Mr. Scorsese, himself larger than life, is one of their biggest, baddest daddies.

“The Departed” is rated R (Under 17 requires accompanying parent or adult guardian). The language is dirty and the action bloody.

THE DEPARTED

Opens today nationwide.

Directed by Martin Scorsese; written by William Monahan, based on the screenplay for the film “Infernal Affairs”; director of photography, Michael Ballhaus; edited by Thelma Schoonmaker; music by Howard Shore; production designer, Kristi Zea; produced by Brad Pitt, Brad Grey and Graham King; released by Warner Brothers Pictures. Running time: 150 minutes.

WITH: Leonardo DiCaprio (Billy Costigan), Matt Damon (Colin Sullivan), Jack Nicholson (Frank Costello), Mark Wahlberg (Dignam), Martin Sheen (Queenan), Ray Winstone (Mr. French), Vera Farmiga (Madolyn), Alec Baldwin (Ellerby) and Anthony Anderson (Brown).