The Departed
Director: Martin Scorsese
With: Leonardo DiCaprio, Jack Nicholson
Runtime: 149 mins
Whoever said: ‘You don’t really know a person until they’re dead’? At any rate, this seems to be the theme of Martin Scorsese’s new film, where everyone pretends to be someone else. Matt Damon is a gangster who pretends to be a cop; Leonardo DiCaprio is a cop who pretends to be a gangster; they work, respectively, for and against Frank Costello (Jack Nicholson), Irish-Bostonian crime kingpin, who pretends to be the devil.
I had my doubts when halfway through the film, out of nowhere, came a scene with Costello going to the theatre with a lady, then taking her home for some cocaine and whatever else seemed appropriate, the whole suffused with red light. Unsubtle, Martin. I far preferred Billy Costigan, DiCaprio’s character, having a quiet drink when who should enter the bar but Costello, covered in blood like it ain’t no thing. Ambition cramps Nicholson’s style; his performance is an assortment of bits, entertaining but uneven.
Far better is DiCaprio, who effectively conveys the cramped desperation of an orphan with nowhere to hide but the lion’s lair. Matt Damon makes a weird villain, though – you feel kind of sorry for him when, towards the end, he tries to stroke his neighbour’s dog only to be bluntly rebuffed and ignored. A broad slash through this parade of lonely hearts comes, surprisingly, in the person of Mark Wahlberg, who plays Dignam, Costigan’s gruff but strangely adorable superior officer. I thought I’d never forgive Wahlberg his cowardly turn in The Italian Job, but here he never flinches while chewing through most of the film’s best lines. “Treat FBI agents like mushrooms – feed ‘em shit and keep ‘em in the dark.”
The only way to sustain a film with a hero so alienated you can’t imagine him happy, with Jack Nicholson on the other side (a film with nobody to root for) is to keep coming at us incessantly. Heat had the best setpiece of any action film of the past decade, a shootout so pure and lyrical in its simplicity that the only way to top it is to substitute wits for guns. In a brilliant move, Damon almost wipes out DiCaprio and finds a scapegoat for his own double-dealings; as he sits in his office, listening to gunfire over his walkie-talkie before switching it off, it reminds us of the beauty to be found in well-plotted amorality.
There is no soul in Scorsese’s really rather horrible fictional landscape outside the eyes of Vera Farmiga, Damon’s psychiatrist girlfriend who falls in love with DiCaprio, but who needs it in a film with a gobsmacking finale and which, with few exceptions, treats its characters like so much small change? What is important when a person is dead is whose hands are soiled by his blood – who needs to join him in hell. Those of you who have seen The Third Man will feel plenty clever come the ending.
