The Best So Far For 2006

Rating: 10/10 (9 October 2006)

My first thoughts walking out of the theater were, "wow that was great but it wasn't as good as Goodfellas." Few living directors have such built in levels of expectations as Martin Scorsese; his past will always be difficult to live down but he mostly does an amazing job with his all-star cast in The Departed. Given access to Hollywood's greatest talent allows him to create a vividly interesting and intensely watchable crime film. Everyone will have their favorites but for my money Alec Baldwin in the most consistently entertaining even with limited screen time.
The film is long, but doesn't seem long. If you are weighing the film from an investment standpoint I doubt that there are many places that you can go for two and a half hours and be this enthralled for only about eight bucks.
Back to The Goodfellas comparison. One of the reasons that that film had such a visceral appeal was that Ray Liotta was pretty much an unknown at the time. We got to know Liotta as Henry Hill, we didn't have many previous roles to work through in our establishing empathy. Sure he played in Field Of Dreams, but it was a brief appearance. In The Departed we never feel the same level of cathartic involvement because the actors are still just actors.
In the end this is but a minor quibble as the action is so riveting, the performances so well presented and the story so engaging that it doesn't matter much that we don't have that same level of emotional involvement.
Oscar time for Marty? Who knows. Most thought that the breakthrough would come with The Aviator (A great historical-visual masterpiece) but it was not the case. If the opening weekend means anything this will be probably be the director's most successful box office creation. Maybe that has been the real barrier to Scorsese getting over the top. While the violence is certainly ever present it seems to be less violent of a film than Taxi Driver or Goodfellas because of the way the violence is presented on the screen. It just sort of happens and it's happening just fits into the way that the plot unfolds.