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The Departed
[Fart noise]
2006
Review: October 13, 2006
Director: Martin Scorsese
Starring: Matt Damon, Leonardo DiCaprio, Jack Nicholson, Vera Farmiga
If you want.
THE SETUP:
There’s moles on both sides of the law, and they need to discover the other.
DISCUSSION:
I have just never responded to Scorsese [okay, I liked Kundun]. I just don’t find much meaning in all that macho blustering, and I find his movies very unemotional and cold. I also just don’t respond to gangster movies. I don’t find them compelling at all. So this may account for my feeling of intense annoyance when walking out of The Departed.
The first 20 minutes are fantastic. Scorsese lays out the histories of Damon as Sullivan, being a good boy and rising up the police ranks while all the time beholden to Nicholson’s Boston crime boss Costello. DiCaprio has a more troubled history [during which I was never convinced WHY he wanted to be a cop], but both of their stories are laid out in a very quick and energetic way. The friend I went with was talking about the quick, staccato editing here that “is almost like the intro to a TV show where they tell you what happened last week,” but for me it really worked.
So Damon goes on this elite police force and DiCaprio is asked to go undercover with Costello. From there it’s all Donnie Brasco, Donnie Brasco, Donnie Brasco [okay, there’s one gangster movie I responded to], with the additional wrinkle of that both guys need to discover the identity of the other one. There are lots of near-misses, lots of one-person-relaying-information-while-the-other-is-too, and gallons of macho bluster and OTT mugging from Nicholson [who wasn’t quite as bad with that as I expected]. There is funny faux-Mamet patter like Alec Baldwin quickly saying “I’m gonna go outside and get a smoke. You want a smoke? No? What are you, some kind of fitness freak? Go fuck yourself,” or a guy, after being shot in the knee. Whining “I thought I was supposed to go into shock. I’m not in shock. It hurts!” that are amusing, but that's when you still believe that this story is going to come to something.
I can’t even be bothered to talk about the many twists and turns, because in the end they turn out mostly to be just time-wasters, and as we headed into the last hour I started thinking “Why do we need this scene? This scene could go. And what about that scene before? That was just another version of the many scenes we’ve seen before” which is not something I think any filmmaker wants the audience to be concerned with while they’re watching a film.
And finally, it just doesn’t come to much. Maybe it’s a case of my expectations; I thought we were building toward a big showdown between Damon and DiCaprio where they would really have at it, and then it’s getting to be 30 minutes ‘til the end [I was definitely waiting], then 15 minutes ‘til the end…. And that’s when I really started to turn against the movie. Which is not even to mention the overall dissatisfaction of the ending. I want to avoid giving anything away, but suffice to say that the thing I wanted to see, we did not see. And we saw a whole lot of something else that, yeah, I guess it’s one worldview, but it’s not a worldview I find particularly compelling or interesting. And it’s kind of a worldview that you don’t need two-and-a-half hours to express, and is probably why I was so bitter that I felt this movie wasted so much of my time… for that. But Scorsese seems to be unable to make a movie that is less than two-and-a-half hours, and if he did, well, how would we know that it’s an important film?
My friend [who liked it a little more than I did] asked me “well, how is this different from De Palma?” [And I was indeed sitting there wishing De Palma had directed it instead.] My answer was, well, in De Palma there is emotional content that gives me something to get involved with, whereas with Scorsese it’s all tough guy blather with a little emotional stuff [here, the psychologist] thrown in for a little color, but the focus is on the guns and the cell phones and the tension and just how very hard these guys are. Wow, they sure are hard, tough guys, Marty. Wow. Secondly, when De Palma enters into a set-piece, the sense I get from what’s on screen [and this is highly subjective, just my feeling] is that he’s inviting you, the audience, to play along and he wants you to enjoy it. The sense I get with Scorsese is that he wants you to passively sit back and admire his skill. Add that to how cold I find his films, and the sense I get is of Scorsese casting himself as the tough guy through his show-offy-yet-stand-offish technique, just as his films are filled with tough guys that he is unable to be. Yeah, yeah, Marty, you’re the man, okay? Now go be the man over there.
The final shot is a somewhat sledgehammer-subtle message that there will always be corruption in the highest offices of power. Is this a statement? Well, obviously it’s a statement, but is it an interesting statement? Did we need a 150 minutes to tell us this? Especially given the current state of Congress?
Everyone else loves this film, so take that as you may. As I said, I just don’t respond to gangster movies and I just don’t respond to Scorsese movies. The performances here are all very good and it’s certainly well made but… take a half hour off and I’d be fine. And change the ending.
SHOULD YOU WATCH IT?
Everyone else loves it.
