Good film, lacks a certain something though...

Rating: 7/10 (21 September 2007)

A remake of the 2002 Hong-Kong film 'Infernal Affairs', this will inevitably be remembered as "the film that got Scorsese his Oscar", rather than on its own merits. Nevertheless, it's still a good movie, entertaining and with an excellent plot. Jack Nicholson overacts with his familiar anarchic streak, a mad glint in his eyes, mixed in with an occasional hint of cold-blooded menace. Hardly a believable turn, but good fun nonetheless. Leonardo da Caprio is all tortured angst, and very good at it too (the beard helps, making him look about 10 years older). Matt Damon is less convincing - he's made more sympathetic the 'Infernal Affairs' character, and, well, he's just too much of a 'good guy'...Maybe I only say that because I saw the 'Bourne Ultimatum' recently. Mark Whalberg's smaller role is well done; Martin Sheen doesn't really have much to do.
Having seen 'Infernal Affairs' first, I was inevitably going to compare this to it this 'remake'. The plot is pretty similar, but it's been 'Scorsese-fied' - you could argue that it's as much down to the screenplay as the direction, but perhaps the screenplay was influenced by a perception of Scorsese as 'auteur', so tailored towards his preoccupations and styles. Who knows, I'm ignorant of the collaborative (or otherwise) process that went into the making of this film, I'm just speculating. Let me clarify what I mean by 'Scorsese-fied': stuffed full of language (c word, f word liberally splashed through it), sexual references, references to the church, lashings of bloody violence (everytime someone's killed - a major character, anyway - they invariably end up lying on the floor in a big pool of blood. What is it with Scorsese and pools of blood? End of Taxi Driver, the bounty hunter character in Cape Fear, blah blah.) Although Infernal Affairs was unsubtle in several respects (it had a big streak of sentimentality running through it which, from my limited experience, seems to be a characteristic of some of Oriental films), it in a way made something more interesting, 'deeper' out of the story. THere it was connected to Buddhist notions of the cyclical nature of life - there was a quote from a Buddhist text at the beginning of the film, and this cyclical thing was pretty obvious throughout (and even more so if you watch the IA sequels). So we were left in no doubt that the cycle would go on - even if the protagonists died, others would take their place, and the game between cop and criminal would continue, as would the killings. That wasn't stressed nearly as much in 'Departed', particularly with the ending, where Damon's character pops it (rather a ham-fisted touch, I felt, particularly when the camera swept up from his body to a shot of a rat in the window, in front of the view that we saw Damon looking at several times in the film, the view that represented his conflicted desires to be both cop and criminal, or whatever it symbolised).
Another thing 'Departed' lacked was the fascinating relationship between head cop and head criminal, a mixture of friendliness and hatred. Sheen was a peripheral figure, and it's hard to imagine Costello, as played by Nicholson, having a particularly complex relationship with any other character: too cartoonish and OTT for that. His death at the hands of Damon (a cold-blooded murder in the original) becomes an emotional reaction to Nicholson's desire for him to be a son-figure, which comes out of the blue and, well, just doesn't convince.
What is Scorsese's intention with this remake, then? Is he trying to simplify it into just another cops and robbers/gangster movie? Is he trying to do a 'Heat' and show that there's little difference between those on the right and those on the wrong side of the law? (There is a line somewhere which makes this point - Costello: "When you decide to be something, you can be it. That's what they don't tell you in the church. When I was your age they would say we can become cops, or criminals. Today, what I'm saying to you is this: when you're facing a loaded gun, what's the difference?"). Maybe he's just addressing his familiar preoccupations with male violence, repressed Catholic guilt, sexuality (not such a big part of this film, though there is a scene in a porn theatre), hints of racism ("Twenty years after an Irishman couldn't get a f*cking job, we had the presidency. May he rest in peace. That's what the n*ggers don't realize. If I got one thing against the black chappies, it's this - no one gives it to you. You have to take it") - though to be fair, for once, there is a black character in the film who does more than get shot or appear on a street. The opening voice-over raises the familiar church/criminal options, the desire to amount to something rather than be just another poor person in the city, mixed in with the desire to belong to a close-knit community, to feel like you belong: i.e. the criminal fraternity (a big part of 'Goodfellas') - "I don't want to be a product of my environment. I want my environment to be a product of me. Years ago we had the church. That was only a way of saying - we had each other. The Knights of Columbus were real head-breakers; true guineas. They took over their piece of the city." But these themes aren't really addressed or expanded on as the movie continues, as we instead get to see Nicholson chomp on the scenery, often in a way that's played for gruesome laughs. There's just a feeling that something's missing - fine though this film is, it's not Oscar-worthy: my theory is that it only won at the Academy Awards because the academy feel guilty for short-changing Scorsese back in the years when he made acclaimed, ground-breaking movies. But it's not bad; not bad at all.