A testosterone-fuelled turn, The Depahted

Rating: 7/10 (24 January 2007)

Two newly-graduated police officers Billy Costigan (Leonardo DiCaprio) and Colin Sullivan (Matt Damon) are hired by the Massachusetts State Police, one to simultaneously infiltrate the Irish mafia lead by the colourful Frank Costello (Jack Nicholson) and one to investigate leaks within the bureau. Their respective tasks parallel each other at all times, but they never meet. Cue intrigue en masse, coated with tense cat-and-mouse games and green-and-white Irish culture in Boston, making The DepAHted something of a Goodfellas lite.
This is, essentially, all that is achieves. For a 'Best Picture' nominee, The Departed lacks heart and makes up for it by trafficking in violence, suspense and swearing. The aforementioned naturally gets it a long way with most people, and indeed even with me, but since Martin Scorsese is incapable of making a film shorter than two and a half hours, the substance stretches thin. I'm no math whiz but things simply do not add up to a complete film. Much like in Goodfellas, The Aviator and Gangs of New York, Scorsese gets so taken with the setting and atmosphere that he positively dawdles on scenes and the majority of these serve no other function in the story than to get us a feel for the way--and the venality--with which things are run.
The acting, by contrast, is actually good. Jack Nicholson may simply be rehashing his psycho-Jack routine but it works as well as ever and he chews scenery whenever he is on screen. Leonardo Dicaprio inhabits something of a lead role in the film, but his acting regimen consists of shouting as loudly as he can. Billy Costigan is a difficult character to capture the nature of, for he is both contradictory and confused, jockeyed between the Irish mafia and his allegiance to the police department. Matt Damon's slick character Colin Sullivan is a joy to watch as he "rises faster than a twelve year old's dick" in his career, but much credit is also due to Mark Walhberg's streetsmart Dignam who is given some excellent and brilliantly funny dialogue in the script, such as the latter observation about Sullivan. The only problem is that he is at the mercy of a grossly underwritten character.
The big problem that The Departed has is that its story rotates around genuinely unlikeable anti-heroes. I'm not even sure if they'd qualify as heroes, for these are characters with good qualities that are so distant that you need binoculars. It is difficult to slot them in protagonist/antagonist positions because while Sullivan is corrupt and selfish, he is funny, charming and we follow him from childhood. Costigan, by contrast, lacks all the enjoyable theatricality of his polar character and comes across as whiny, moody and desperate in his actions but certainly he is morally right in the film, and quite firmly on the side of good in spite being taken under the wings of Nicholson the mob boss himself.
Without likable characters a wide array of problems follow, but the direction, pace and action of the film cleverly mask most of these. Who cares that all women are hookers (often literally)? Who cares that these is product placement by the bucketload? And who cares that the ending is one huge mess? The fact is that Martin Scorsese knows how to craft a compelling film, and much of this expertise has translated into an enjoyable crime cop drama with Boston accents and slang that snap and crackle like kindling in a fireplace. Ultimately, the actors sing tunes we have all heard before and the story may be intricately-sketched but we have been down this road before, so this is nothing revolutionary. And where, pray tell, is the tracking shot?!
7- out of 10