Better than Aviator or Gangs, worse than Goodfellas

Rating: 7/10 (3 October 2006)

If The Departed had been directed by anyone else, especially someone without the pedigree of Scorsese, I would have been pleasantly surprised and left the theater more than satisfied. However, movies like Goodfellas, Raging Bull and Taxi Driver have infected me with an extremely high standard for anything with Scorsese's name on it, and while this movie is good, it is not in the same league as those classics.
To begin, Scosese probably went a little over the top with casting. I realize that big names bring big bucks, but having dominating talents like Alec Baldwin (if you don't agree, see Glengarry Glen Ross or any one of his stints in SNL) or Martin Sheen in supporting roles is distracting. Such recognizable faces removed any sense of anonymity or realism from those roles -- they felt more like cameos than real characters. Not that Scorsese is the first to make this mistake; The Thin Red Line suffered from this same fatal flaw.
There were also some underdeveloped relationships that I had trouble sinking my teeth into. In particular, the affair between Vera Farmiga's and DiCaprio's characters seemed contrived, particularly later in the movie when I wondered what exactly DiCaprio "wasn't there for." It's not that the actors failed to do there jobs adequately; it's more like there was some critical scene left on the cutting room floor that would have explained the characters' behavior towards the end of the film.
On the plus side, for the first time in a Scosese movie, I was not annoyed by DiCaprio's presence. While he still looks young, this movie called for a younger actor. This is in stark contrast to The Aviator, where DiCaprio looked like a child with a mustache glued on his lip. Nicholson was fun to watch, of course, and Damon gave a particularly strong performance as a charming alpha male with a menacing streak lurking just beneath the surface. Mark Wahlberg is from Boston and therefore has the accent down pat, but I thought his dialog was a little over the top. This is not his fault really; the writers probably could have better developed the reasons behind why Wahlberg's character hated DiCaprio, and most the other characters for that matter, so much.
I suppose I probably went into the movie having the wrong expectations. Not every movie can detail the rise and fall of a criminal family. Had this movie been too much like Goodfellas, I'd be complaining about Scorsese riding his own coattails. Looking over the reviews on Rotten Tomatoes, apparently I'm alone in thinking this movie is not the next American Classic. I wish there were some way to see Scorsese's next movie without knowing he directed it.