Well done, to a point

Rating: Null/10 (18 October 2006)

There is little doubt that Martin Scorsese is one of the finest directors currently at work in America. Pictures like "Raging Bull" and "Goodfellas" established him as a master of the art. There is also evidence that, like the gangsters and heist artists he sometimes depicts on the screen, Scorsese is always looking for that one big score, the movie that will put him on easy street. He searched for it in "Cape Fear" and "Gangs of New York" and he's back in the hunt again with "The Departed." Scorsese's talent and craftsmanship cannot be disputed. He has the amazing ability to create a milieu, a textured background, fill it with interesting people and events and weave them all together. And despite his less than successful forays into other genres, he usually comes off best when he sticks to the genre that made him famous, the gangster flick. Scorsese may hate gangster films for all I know, just as James Cagney did before him, but he is smart enough to realize they are his bread and butter.
But like so many directors today, Scorsese is trapped in an industry that focuses so much on the youth market, in today's world, a poorly educated youth market that is swimming in media excess. This is the age, not of information, but rather of too much information. This is an age where movies and TV are more influenced by the computer screen than any other force in society. And as most of us know, computers have to have some type of information occupying ever square inch of the screen. So today, TV shows may have opening credits at the bottom of the screen, but they are often overlaid with promos for the show coming up next, even though the viewer isn't even into the current show yet. And since the information is overlaid, you actually can't read either, much less pay attention to the picture on the screen.
Up on the big screen, directors like Peter Jackson can make a horrible mess of his remake of "King Kong," by filling the screen with so much action the film is hard to follow. Don't have the big gorilla fight one T-Rex dinosaur, have him fight three of them, while falling down a bottomless pit and trying to save the girl at the same time.
The fear that letting up for even a second will lose this short attention span audience is slowly strangling the entertainment industry.
"The Departed" falls into this trap. It moves along with the speed of light and even though I found myself checking my watch when we'd crossed the two hour mark, I still enjoyed the movie.
Then came the ending.
Not only did one bad guy meet his maker, they all did. Even people who we didn't know were bad guys died in a hail of bullets. I almost expected the final scene to be somebody pulling out a gun and committing suicide, adding their own body to the pile.
Whether all this carnage was needed, or whether Scorsese just thought that's what kids wants these days, we will never know.
Does the film work, yes. Would I recommend it? Yes, but only with the warning that it contains much bloodshed and too much action for most of us to easily follow the plot.
Is the acting good? Mostly, yes. Leo DiCaprio and Matt Damon are good in lead roles, Martin Sheen, Alex Baldwin and particularly, Mark Walberg are good in supporting roles and actress Vera Farmiga provides some very welcome relief as the love interest, if only in that her scenes provide some of the few moments of calm in this frenetic story.
What about Jack? Nicholson ranges from brilliant to just plain Jack, an actor who is basically playing himself and done it so many times he is now almost a parody of himself.
Is the story credible? Hard to say. It is supposedly adapted from an Asian gangster film. It provides a look into the Irish mob in Boston and thus seems to be fashioned in part on the career of Whitey Bulger, a Boston mob leader who was also an FBI informant and who is still a fugitive.
Lastly, I have one question for the director. Why did he call his fictional crime boss Frank Costello, naming him after a very real Italian-American crime lord once known as the Prime Minster of the Underworld. Costello was probably the most powerful mobster in America during the 1940s and early fifties. He was a dapper dresser and soft spoken hood who lived at the Waldorf Astoria, frequented the Stork Club, and, since he was top man in "the outfit" which reached from New York to New Orleans, Miami to Los Angeles, he probably very rarely turned up in warehouses in the middle of the night where he could get caught in the middle of shady deals. He went to prison, alright, but for what they eventually got most of the big hoods on, a tax rap.