Frustratingly enjoyable

Rating: 6/10 (27 December 2006)

A frustratingly enjoyable movie, it ALMOST gets there. It's got more emotional guts/nakedness than Scorsese usually allows these days, but those guts are isolated in DiCaprio and Vera Farmiga's performances. Nicholson isn't out of control, exactly, he's just a symptom of Scorsese's tonal problems: he's playing vaudeville, while DiCaprio plays psychodrama and Farmiga and Matt Damon are playing repression. Except unlike Farmiga, Damon can't (or doesn't) suggest the complexity of what's going on under that repression. I liked how the excitement techniques were embedded in a relatively intimate, character-based approach where Goodfellas, say, is ALL direction. But as a result, when things blow up at the end, it feels pretty cheap, and I say fooey on the jokey final shot.
One more thing: the street-language is almost as automatic a mannerism as the Rolling-Stones-over-tracking-shot business. The homophobic stuff is put to use in terms of the themes of masculinity and role-playing, but the racist s*** is really getting old.