The best film of 2006

Rating: 10/10 (3 February 2007)

He's back! He was never exactly gone, but he's back! The musical mix of Italian opera with the Rolling Stones, the quick-cut edits and off-kilter camera-angles, the hyper-violent stories about unstable people in the underworld. Only one guy can put all these elements together into something that transcends the sum of its parts, and that's Martin Scorsese. His new movie "The Departed" is his finest work since "Raging Bull".
It is not an insult to this movie to say that it has much the same plot as "Mean Streets" and "GoodFellas": Impressionable kid (Matt Damon) grows up loyal to a mob boss (Jack Nicholson) who gives him the fatherly affection lacking in his own home, but then comes to realize that the man he idolizes may not have his best interests at heart.
This is not to say that Scorsese is slavishly following his old formula (the way he did in "Casino"). The movie is about South Boston Irish instead of Brooklyn Italians. Robert DeNiro, Harvey Keitel and Joe Pesci are nowhere to be found. Scorsese does not make a cameo.
But the biggest difference is the one that I feel puts this movie a cut above "GoodFellas": There is just as much--if not more--attention paid to the police trying to take down the crime boss as there is to the criminals themselves.
The basic conceit--taken from the Hong Kong film "Infernal Affairs"--is that Massachussetts state policeman Colin Sullivan (Damon) is feeding information to mobster Frank Costello (Nicholson). Meanwile, Billy Costigan (Leonardo DiCaprio), while technically not on any law enforcement payroll, is asked by the cops to become a member of Costello's gang and secretly feed information to his police handlers. Neither man knows who the other is until it is too late.
I liked that the movie focuses on the parallels between the two leads. Sullivan looks up to Costello as a father figure, just as Costigan loves Police Captain Oliver Queenan (Martin Sheen). And both father figures have fierce lieutenants who don't particularly like their young charges. Costello has Mr. French (Ray Winstone), and Capt. Queenan has Lt. Dignam (Mark Wahlberg). Both are in love with police psychiatrist Madolyn (Vera Farmiga).
I also liked that for all the plot twists and double-crosses, there is no sense of the surprises being forced by a filmmaker who is a little too proud of his own cleverness (i.e. "Millers Crossing", "The Usual Suspects").
As much as I loved this movie, I found myself asking some questions once it was over. Like how is it possible that two artists of the stature of Scorsese and Nicholson never worked together before? When are they going to work together again? (Please let it be soon.) How could the Academy nominate Peter O'Toole for a dull role and ignore Matt Damon, who was the soul of this film? How could the Academy nominate Alan Arkin and Eddie Murphy for supporting roles in their cheesy films, but not Jack Nicholson or Alec Baldwin in a masterpiece?
In 2004, after 14 years of big-budget misfires, Scorsese finally proved with "The Aviator" that he could make a great film that didn't have the look or feel of his work in his 1973-1990 low-budget heyday. And with "The Departed", he proves that for all the wannabes who have sprouted up since 1990 (Michael Mann, Ted Demme, David Chase, etc.), the best person to go to when you want the look and feel of Scorsese's early work is Scorsese himself. Not quite as great as "Mean Streets" or "Raging Bull", but slightly better than "Taxi Driver" and "GoodFellas". 10 out of 10.