"The Departed" in Real Life

Rating: 10/10 (13 February 2016)

That was the first thing I thought when I started watching this very slow-burn take on the life and times of Whitey Bulger.
I have read a few other reviews that seem to agree, this film starts of slow, and pretty much remains slow, but with each new development more corpses are buried under the pier, and you have to ask how can anyone remain clean? "1000 faces of delusion" maybe put it the best, "It's not Goodfellas but in that lineage of unspoken titillation at what people get away with; it seems we'll always want to be flies-in-the-wall in the same room with horrible men".
And as much as I enjoyed Goodfellas, Casino, The Godfather Trilogy, and even The Departed, those were fantasy stories maybe slightly based on real life figures.
But the image of Whitey Bulger is so unusual that this story is fascinating. And Bulger's own background - This film does not touch on his alleged involvement with the MK-ULTRA Program, but it shows this somewhat charismatic crook in a most realistic manner.
Johnny Depp seems to have been born for this role, he even looks a lot like the man, makeup aside. And what starts out as an idealistic young FBI agent, Joel Edgerton as John Connolly, ends up deluding himself. It all sounded so good, when he met Bulger and proposed a way to take down a rival Mafia gang, but what started out as something "for the good of all" (of course, except for the rival gang) ended up as an escalating pile of bodies and a geometrically increasing Body of Lies. In setting up an ambitious alliance with Bulger, Connolly forgot why he was doing it, and from then on was a total loss.
It seems that anyone who became involved with Bulger's business became horribly dead as well. And Bulger did not stop with Business Associates, family and friends were not immune. But we still approach the character as a human being, his relations with his mother and "little brother" Billy (Played well with a great accent by Benedict Cumberbatch) are all the same things we all have in common. And the fact that Billy Bulger was somewhat protected from the worse part pf Whitey's activities, seems like what our family members do for us.
Regardless of this, there are no "Happy Endings" here, and the bad guys don't get away with it. In the long run, everyone has to account for their actions. I would only hope real life is the same.