I thought that Leonard DiCaprio and Matt Damon were the same person!

Rating: 5/10 (21 March 2007)

I know that sounds stupid, but I came into this absurd (but entertaining) movie knowing absolutely nothing about it and actually watched half of it before I realized that there were two different (but physically very similar) actors playing two different police officers. Until then, I had thought that it was some kind of weird metaphor and that I was watching a surreal exercise on the order of "Stay" or, better yet, "Fight Club". (What a coincidence that "The Departed" was produced by Brad Pitt!)
I was attracted to the movie because of my GREAT admiration for "Goodfellas" and "Casino", which in my opinion are the best of the gangster films - sweeping, thrilling, detailed, multi-layered, open-eyed pictures of organized crime to which romanticized pap like "The Godfather", for all of its virtues, can't be compared. (I've watched "Goodfellas" on cable over and over again, and I'm just as fond of "Casino", which isn't played nearly often enough.) And knowing nothing about "The Departed", I watched most of it believing that it, too, is about real-life gangsters. There really was a mobster called Frank Costello, and I assumed that the movie is a factual account of his downfall.
My first clue was the cell phones and beepers, which left me asking myself when such devices first came into popular use. Surely not in the days of the real-life Frank Costello, I told myself. And my unease only increased as the story became more convoluted and increasingly ridiculous. By the end of the film, I had thrown up my hands in despair, having realized that I was had.
I won't bother repeating what many other people have said about the film's plot holes, loose ends and incredible situations. I'll just say this, that it just goes to show you that even a great director like Martin Scorsese, intimately familiar with the workings of the underworld, can come up with surreal nonsense when he puts his mind to it, and when he doesn't have the real world to base his logic on.
PS: Speaking of surrealism, I read on Wikipedia that the real-life "Frank Costello is the godfather to ABC reporter and FBI Assistant Director for the Office of Public Affairs John Miller, whose father and Costello were close friends." Talk about life imitating art failing to imitate life!