Superbly intricate and inhumane

Rating: 10/10 (6 December 2006)

Scorcese is a visual genius, I mean he is able to center the whole film and the whole action on the feelings, suffering and pleasure he can concentrate in the eyes of his actors that are piercing and even branding our own eyes that are trying to imagine the inside of their minds like voyeurs launched onto a world of violence and paranoid thirst for power. The art of this director is to get his actors into situations that will create fear in us and to direct these actors so well that our fear will be the simple reflection of the fright they express in their eyes, essentially their eyes, and also their words. The action of the film is then not that important since it is nothing but rotten cops and rotten gangsters that are trying to infiltrate their respective sides incognito of even the people on their own sides. We are the only people to know who is a mole and who is not, and yet, even so, Scorcese manages to bring a final mole out of the woodwork in the last two minutes of the film. And is the police mole infiltrated among the gangsters really better than the others ? Maybe yes, but it is so tenuous and brittle an impression that we could doubt it. The most important pleasure we find here is that the three main actors are not disappointing our expectations. Nicholson is not abandoning himself to his traditional ticks and habits. Damon is a perfect young prince that can conquer any heart and yet that is so rotten that he appears austere and cold when he turns vicious and fearful. Dicaprio is the greatest satisfaction for us because he is so well directed that he finds some harshness and he uses his eyes so well that we really believe his lovely face is nothing but the mask of a hyena and his straggling beard is the furious mane of some buzzard. And yet we tremble for him and we suffer with every anguished tremor on his face. Apart from that it is quite obvious that Scorcese must have found some tremendous enjoyment in directing three men in that dramatic and tragic situation. No film is wasted on any sentimentalese mash. It is all raw granite and solid quartz.
Dr Jacques COULARDEAU, University of Paris Dauphine & University of Paris 1 Pantheon Sorbonne