Good, but Scorsese's least personal film

Rating: 7/10 (24 October 2006)

In this, Martin Scorsese's least personal film to date, the director's typically freighted acts of ritualized violence are pared down to a simple, brutal efficiency. Gone is Travis Bickle's spiritually cathartic massacre of a compound full of pimps and dopers or Jake La Motta's masochistic bloody atonement versus Sugar Ray Robinson. The one-shot kills depicted here, shocking in their suddenness, are accompanied by the same splatter of brain fragment across pristine surface time and again. In their depersonalized sameness, these acts achieve something of a perfect uniformity to the dehumanized world in which they occur, where life is cheap and identity cheaper, each man an interchangeable cog in a bottomless existential chain game of cops and robbers. Yet this dedication to meaningless chaos saps the scenario of some of its complexity, particularly noticeable in Scorsese's relative lack of attention to moral and spiritual consequence, the rich exploration of which have solidified his legacy as a serious artist.
So, what is at stake? Unlike in his best work, the answer is found in dismissed and belittled subjects. The disdainful treatment of the clergy provides a window into his methods, as he gives neither counterpoint nor context to an early scene in which two priests are accosted and verbally humiliated by a gang lord played by Jack Nicholson. The scene is treated as a blackly humorous anecdote, but the degrading treatment found here and elsewhere in the film, of a profession to which he's mostly shown unique respect throughout his oeuvre (the fact that he nearly became a priest cannot be ignored), suggests that he's in accord with Costello's coarse assessment. This denial of complexity turns up frequentlyincluding an incredibly poor final shot, the selection of which frankly puts his judgment in questionand suggests that what's truly at stake is commercial viability.
If Scorsese's presentation borders on the reductive, the film is given ample weight and complexity through several fine performances and its crackerjack premise: Billy Costigan (Leonardo DiCaprio), an undercover cop trying to earn his stripes, moves up a Boston gangster's (Nicholson) food chain as Nicholson's surrogate son and lieutenant (Matt Damon) infiltrates the city police department. Both moles appear at first to be sympathetic, good men. But as Costigan clings tighter to the fragments of his true identity Damon begins to relish the freedom of his adopted one, eventually resorting to irredeemable measures to protect it. The story provocatively suggests that Costigan is a better cop as a criminal and Damon a more effective instrument for evil as a protected agent, a sly insinuation that the methods and conventions of the police and the underworld are not so dissimilar.
Scorsese, to his credit, crafts many fine suspense sequences. The film is at its best when Costigan and Damon are pressed to work at cross-purposes on the same task, as in a drug deal between Costello and some Japanese buyers, when the imperiled moles clandestinely use cell phones to send signals to their respective teams. This scene, and two deeply upsetting deaths, fulfills the promise of the scenario, propelling it to near-greatness. The fact that it falls short may be attributable to Scorsese's indulgence of Nicholson's worst impulses, playing a multifaceted character as a dime-store Mephistopheles, thereby softening the story's profound emotional impact and coarsening its tone. As affecting as DiCaprio and Damon are, Nicholson plays it from the outside, relying on tired gamesmanship to undermine the narrative austerity. Just as Nicholson's failure to understand age-appropriateness paints him as an old man trying vainly to be a kid again, Scorsese's comparatively grown-up attempts at striking the right balance between the sacred and the profane are infinitely preferable to this stab at postmodern chic.