Tuesday, October 24, 2006

Movie Review: The Departed

The Departed is Martin Scorcese's remake of a 2002 Hong Kong film called Infernal Affairs. It's being widely praised as his best film in a long time and a return to form. I found myself about an hour into it thinking it just grips you and pulls you along and never pauses, it was a lot of fun. But by the end of the film I thought it never coalesed into a point and therefore was merely about the violence so purvasive throughout. That was a real shame because this film could have explored a lot and been fun like its predecessor, but it's almost like there was a conscious effort in the script to dilute it.

The Departed is set in Boston and deals with the Irish mob led by Frank Costello (Jack Nicholson) and pursed by the police. Oliver Queenan (Martin Sheen) and Dignam (Mark Wahlberg) head special police unit of undercover agents and recruit recent police academy graduate Billy Costigan (Leonardo DiCaprio) to become a deep undercover mole in Costello's organization. Ellerby (Alec Baldwin) heads a more traditional police unit trying to catch Costello and using information that Queenan's informant provides. However they don't know that Costello has his own mole in the police force, Colin Sullivan (Matt Damon). And to make things a bit ridiculous, Sullivan is dating Madolyn (Vera Farmiga) a police psychiatrist who Costigan starts visiting.

See there's a lot going on here and deep undercover moles are interesting and it's really interesting to have one on each side. DiCaprio's character should be the most interesting, what crimes must he commit to convince the bad guys he's one of them? Theft? Intimidation? Beating people? Murder? While they show him in a few difficult situations and looking sullen a few times there isn't much more. Nicholson would only do the film if they beefed up his character and he's in a disproportionate number of scenes (he even gets a few Satanic shots). He's good in them, but I think as a result everyone else is neglected. Baldwin and Wahlberg just deliver invective, Sheen's only character development is saying his son is going to Notre Dame. Farmiga's psychiatrist develops a few interesting storylines but then they're just dropped.

All the acting is very strong, the direction is strong too, the movie is absorbing, but the script (or maybe the editing) watered things down. The original had more cat and mouse as the two moles tried to find each other and had more drama about the toll their jobs were taking on them, so it must have been a conscious decision to remove that while making the movie an hour longer. They also introduced more holes in the plot. If you enjoy this, go rent the original and enjoy that more. If you want to see what exploring parallels between the police and criminals looks like, watch The Wire.

The Departed is a good film, but certainly not great. For Scorcese's last great film you still have to go back to Goodfellas

*Spoilers*

When I saw the original, they made a big point that only the police captain knew about DiCaprio's character being a cop. I thought it would be interesting if they killed the captain and what would the mole do? Well that's exactly what happened in the film. The Wahlberg character wasn't in the original and seems added to be there for the last scene, but it completely dilutes the significance of Sheen's death. There are many ways for DiCaprio to get his identity back, talk to Wahlberg (he was just suspended), talk with the police psychiatrist he was visiting, or check Sheen's cell phone records. Also, I never believed that Costello would leave his tapes to Costigan as opposed to Mr. French or even Sullivan. I was also bothered that Madolyn She finds out Sullivan is bad and does nothing about it.

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