Who Can You Trust In This World?

Rating: 10/10 (7 October 2006)

Possibly the greatest remake of all time, ripe, multi-layered and entirely its own beast, The Departed is a swarthy, vigorous and masculine film about two men trying to live social lives that are the fundamental antitheses of their internal sensibilities. Their efforts loom to undo them, either by breakdown or lethal revelation. The unfolding of their stories concerns an ethical maze, in which good and evil don each other's camouflage. It's not what it's about but how it's about it, which is invariably concordant with a Martin Scorsese film.
A densely cached, morbidly hilarious and powerfully dramatic magnum opus of its genre, The Departed is set in Boston instead of, well, New York, L.A., Las Vegas. It starts with a soda fountain scene that would fit perfectly in GoodFellas. What is nonetheless purposefully missing is the basic luxury of that film. Rather than a kid who lusts after growing up to be a mobster, we have two kids who ripen as frauds: One becomes a cop who goes undercover as a gangster, and the other vice versa. Both men excel their phony personas. Scorsese and screenwriter William Monahan create sympathy and levels of histrionics in the film's early scenes by showing the "bad guy" mingle with top officials while the "good guy" is abused by top officials, the former procuring a high-class condo with a view from the top while the latter's family disintegrates. The plot's white-knuckled impact relies on frail humanity. After several years, both men come to relate to, and crave the respect of, the men they are misleading. There are implicit father-son relationships all over this film, every single male character being both father and son to another to some degree. And the scenario ties the extra knot of each man being validated by just one or two of the men on the side he's benefitting. If DiCaprio's boss dies, who can corroborate that he is actually a cop? Cunningly descriptive tiers of this safe deposit are fleshed out by the customary apparatus of cell phones and computers. When the directions of the two undercover men intersect, will they ultimately arrive on either side of the same phone call? When the police suppose they have a rat amongst them, what if they appoint the rat to hunt himself? Brief subtleties are fleeting but constant in the film's very tight, very layered editing, for instance the consecutive Catholic imagery surrounding a certain plot revelation. One of the informants following another and the subsequent foot chase is an extremely well-crafted sequence, nearly on par with Henry Hill's frantic cocaine-fueled day racing the helicopter in GoodFellas. Both show Scorsese's virtuosity in employing a panicky, hurried camera, sound and music placement and lots of quick cuts.
The music---clever thematic connotations in the use of Lucia di Lammermoor among its rampant highlights---is so constant it overlaps. Only as the end nears is there any extensive pin-drop silence, which is that much more intense on account of our conditioning to the music. One of the film's rare silences is that long-anticipated interaction by phone, one of the final scenes before one of the arguable climaxes. It is so intense not only because of who's speaking with one another, but because at this point, The Departed has never been this quiet.
It is fitting to gather that Boston blue-collar Irish-American men such as the predominant cast of characters were raised Irish Catholics, and that if they have drifted away from the church's laws, they have regardless not liberated themselves of an air of guilt. Now imagine the guilt when you are concurrently committing crimes and betraying the men who rely on you. Indeed, the motivators in The Departed are the oldest in the book, the notion of one's deepest selfhood, and how it affects each character's deeds, feelings and certainty.
The roots of Leonardo DiCaprio and Matt Damon's performances is that the familiar structure of movies implies that we trust most characters are behaving or communicating for themselves. Yet in nearly every scene in this movie, save for certain pivotal parts, they are not. Both actors channel this racking internal torment so that we can suppose and suspect it, though not see it. They're not sounding alarms to remind us of their betrayals. In that regard, the most truthful and candid characters in the movie are the good and evil men being deceived.
There is another character who is entrenched in an ethical clamp, and may suspect it although she cannot for a long time realize it. That is Vera Farmiga's psychologist who works for the police, and who circumstantially comes to know both imposters. She is at first caught off guard by the "good guy"'s brutal eyewitness street honesty in a scene intercut with his unnerving experiences leading up to his seeing her. She is afraid of getting her feet wet outside her ivory tower status quo, but gradually her allegiance is not to her administrator but to her patient, and what a snarled thicket that turns into.
Really, the entire cast serves a plentiful tonic of equally ornate and nuanced performances, from the leads to Ray Winstone's deeply felt right-hand man, Mark Wahlberg's becoming rendition of an abusive staff sergeant and Alec Baldwin's cheeky, restless veteran, and to fleeting bit roles. And in an utterly self-assured, spontaneous and Oscar-worthy performance, Jack Nicholson makes Frank Costello not just a godfather, turncoat or show-off, but a crafty and infectiously charismatic man whose betrayal runs so deep with his protégé it's horribly sad. And it's representative of his real-life inspiration Whitey Bulger's betrayal of his loyal and desperately dependent Southie community.