A New Mafia Classic

Rating: 9/10 (12 August 2016)

Scorsese's still got it.
This is not his best film, though it did get him a Best Picture win and that Best Director nod he had been chasing for some three decades. It's not as good or Raging Bull or Taxi Driver or Goodfellas, but it is still an all-time classic.
The all-star cast is a treat to watch. When DiCaprio (who also starred in Blood Diamond, an excellent film I have already reviewed, this year), Damon, Nicholson, Baldwin, Martin Sheen, and Mark Wahlberg (who is at his best here) are in the same film, sparks are going to fly. They do not necessarily make the film, and I wouldn't single out any single performance as Oscar-worthy, everyone is at the top of their game.
What I give this film credit for is embracing its aesthetic. A Boston crime film should feel fundamentally different from a Las Vegas or New York-based crime film. It revels in its Bostonness without rubbing it in the audience's faces. I give credit to Scorsese for continuing to redefine himself. He has made two of the greatest gangster films of all time in Goodfellas and Casino. If he wanted, he could have made this film like that. No one would have complained. Yet he chose to make a fundamentally different film in terms of structure, tone, and plot. It feels as much a film of the aughts as those other two flicks feel like films of the 90's. It is our first great post-Sopranos crime film.
The premise is equal parts simple and genius. There are two main characters. The first is Leo DiCaprio's Billy Costigan, Jr., who grew up in a life of crime and is thus selected to be an undercover agent for the Massachusetts State Police in the affairs of crime boss Francis Costello (Nicholson). Costello, however, has planted a mole in the police in the form of Colin Sullivan (Damon), whom he has groomed for well over a decade.
It is not long before Costello trusts Costigan and the police trusts Sullivan. The two of them are not suspected when each side discovers there is a mole in their ranks. The two men come to recognize each other as moles, and they hunt each other down.
What I love about this film is how it straddles that line between simplicity and complexity. It's simple enough to explain the plot, but there are interesting and fundamental complexities in how it unfolds. This is true of most of Scorsese's films and is a key reason why they are almost always box office successes, but I believe this to be the best example of this, particularly in the relationship between our two main leads. They aren't friends, but there is an interesting respect between them.
There is a lot more gray area and moral overlap that one would expect given the premise. The characters do not stay within the roles they are expected to play, which I really like. It's hard to make the characters in a more premise-fueled film like this three-dimensional, but Scorsese finds a way.
I like the last hour of this film significantly more than the first. The first hour lingers a bit too longer on establishing the premise and characters, and it cuts between Sullivan and Costello too quickly. This film won the Best Oscar for editing, and while I won't say that it's undeserving of that honor- it is a Scorsese film, after all- it doesn't become a really well-edited film until the second half.
The last twenty minutes of this film are fantastic. They strike the perfect chord between orchestrated and spontaneous. At times, it feels almost anarchic, but after the credits roll, it is apparent that everything made perfect sense. It feels like a roller-coaster, except that instead of coming to a stop after throwing the audience for a loop, it takes them for another ride, and another ride after that. The Return of the King was chastised for its 'fake-out endings'. This film takes the idea of the fake-out ending and turns it to its advantage. Each of the endings hit so hard, and piling them on top of each other gives the feeling of a boulder rolling faster and faster downhill until it is going so fast that not even an adventurous archeology professor can outrun it.
Leave it to Scorsese, the greatest maker of crime films, to redefine the genre once again. This film is not without faults. It feels muddled at times. I wouldn't call it the best film of 2006. But it is a titanic, ambitious, revolutionary accomplishment that has not aged one day.