Will probably stand as the greatest work of film in this decade

Rating: 10/10 (8 October 2006)

The Departed reviewed by Sam Osborn
My problem when reviewing a film like The Departed is that I tend to veer towards broad exclamations of cinematic history and directorial brilliance and, at times, a kind of divine intervention with the art of movie-making. Anyone who read my review of Brick will understand my overindulgence in writing about great film. And so with that said and with you readers warned, let me just make my one embarrassingly broad statement about The Departed: if the following three years continue as the preceding seven have, this film will probably stand as the greatest work of film in this decade.
Scorsese has a tendency to hold such titles, as his Taxi Driver is often thought to be the best film of the seventies, contending with Chinatown and The Godfather. Raging Bull is often thought of as the greatest film of the eighties, even though it was released at the very cusp of the decade. And Goodfellas, made in 1990, is often thought of as the great American film of the nineties, contending maybe with Schindler's List and Silence of the Lambs. But whether or not my broad prophetic praise is of any worth, it's simple and seemingly natural to admit that The Departed is, at the very least, a damn good slab of cinema.
The story is loosely based off the hugely successful Hong Kong action trilogy, Infernal Affairs. I say loosely because Scorsese has made a work of intense originality here. The story may have the skeleton of its predecessor, but screenwriter William Monahan has massaged out a flesh that's boldly American. The characters are the offspring of immigrants; Irish immigrants who found opportunity in this land whether or not it was held under the pretense of legality. The most villainous of these is Frank Costello (Jack Nicholson), the serpent's head to the Irish Mob of Boston. Nicholson is in overdrive here, snarling his vicious lines with every pound of evil his goateed face will allow. When he executes a crying couple on a beach and the woman crumples sideways instead of forwards, Costello chuckles to himself, looks to his partner and snarls while laughing, "she fell funny."
Opposing Costello is Oliver Queenan (Martin Sheen) and his partner Dignam (Mark Whalberg), heading up the painfully secretive undercover portion of the Special Investigations Unit in the Massachusetts State Police. The film works as a quiet battlefield, with each side manipulating the actions of an inside man. Costello's boy, Colin Sullivan (Matt Damon) is a quickly rising detective for the police, soon to be heading up the force supposedly hunting down Costello. Queenan's boy, William Costigan (Leonardo DiCaprio), is an unlikely cadet turned undercover agent who scuttles his way into the inner circle of Costello's crew. The result is a game of two cats and two mice, all lunging for the same prize of ousting the rat.
No directorial prodigy could have made this picture. It's not a debut of unlikely brilliance or any farce of beginner's luck. The Departed is a film that could only have been made by a master of the art form. Without effusing too broadly, it's a work of experience. Scorsese has a deep hat full of tricks, and the choices he makes as to the tricks he'll reveal are choices no textbook, no teacher, and no film critic can explain. Only a man with so many movies under his belt could have constructed this film as it is, and trying to catalogue the vast number of techniques he utilized in the process would probably only reveal that Scorsese knows more than me about the art of cinema.
But I can at least say that it's rare for us to be so affected by an action movie. We fall in love easily enough in a romance, we scare pretty easy by horror, and we're all devastated by the sadness expounded in a historical drama. But only in the most original works of the action genre are we left so completely flabbergasted as The Departed left us. Rating: 4 out of 4
Sam Osborn