Martin looking back to himself

Rating: 7/10 (8 July 2007)

Scorcese went back to his past as a filmmaker. In his latest projects he had been exploring the possibilities of moving his camera around, in my view fundamentally in two directions: - exploring space, architecture, the surroundings; - provoking sensations, in this case attached to a character (or several) and transmitting those sensations to us, audience. In this case, i'm naturally speaking of "Gangs of New York" and "The Aviator". The first one was more bold in this concerns, the second was more thought up, maybe more refined and multi layered (it introduced colors, the evolution of time and revived the character centered camera moments). I valued those projects because Scorcese took some risks and tried to make an evolution as a director. He didn't arrive at "safe land" or real conclusions. But that is the meaning of experimenting. trying solutions.
With this one, he put some of those experiments aside. That apparently, i mean. In this picture, Scorecese turns back to his character exploitation. It's all about characters. The actions moves along based on the character's mental state, fears. I talk, of course, about Damon and DiCaprio. Nicholson is no long the fear provoker of The shining, nor the sharp detective of Chinatown (and specially Two Jakes). He brought here some of the comedic kind of performance he developed in his last years lesser projects (this is a side note). So, the over layering of main characters allows Scorcese to make more complex his previously quite simple (and many times uninteresting) game of Goodfellas or Casino. It's a refreshing of his "formula", based, i believe, on trying to extend to the way he ordinarily developed his characters the experimental attitude of his latest projects. I suppose this was to be a side project on his newest tendencies, but i hope the high success this one had doesn't make Martin give up the experiments he had been conducting... Anyway, to this point, The Departed follows the kind construction Scorcese masters the best: the character driven one.
For every technical aspect, this is obviously nearly flawless; and i wanted to watch this without having watched the one which this remakes. I didn't want to base my comment on that other film.
My evaluation: 4/5, nevertheless i hope Scorcese continues his last 5 years tendency, he may get somewhere new to his standards.
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