Scorsese's Return to Form

Rating: 9/10 (8 October 2006)

Martin Scorsese's return to form, The Departed, is a complex investigation of the roles death and violence play in people's lives, a classic Scorsese theme. Every one of the characters in the film orients himself to death in some way. The story takes place in present-day Boston where Billy Costigan (Leonardo DiCaprio) is an undercover cop infiltrating the crime ring of Frank Costello (Jack Nicholson). However, Frank also has a mole in the police force, Colin Sullivan (Matt Damon). These two moles gradually begin to recognize each other's existence until the fateful first connection over a cell-phone binds them together in a life-or-death struggle to survive that plays out over the rest of the film. The point of the film is that the poorest of the poor in America's big cities have little choice but to turn to violence to survive, or as Frank Costello puts it: "When I was your age, they would say you could become cops or criminals. What I'm saying is this: When you're facing a loaded gun, what's the difference?" The marvelous acting conveys these different characters' reactions to death. DiCaprio and Damon become locked in a dance of death from which neither can escape. They both have so much to gain from defeating the other, that they gladly risk their own necks. Their working class Boston accents are very authentic, conveying the difficult, unschooled backgrounds from which they have risen, determined to forge better lives like Clarice Starling in The Silence of the Lambs. Just as how her humble origins inspired Starling to pursue her foe to the death, Billy Costigan and Colin Sullivan's impoverished backgrounds reveal why they are so determined to destroy one another.
But how could I forget Jack? Jack Nicholson's character, the mob boss Frank Costello, is the master manipulator of death, someone who profits from violent deeds with no remorse or pity. His purposefully lazy speech and twitchy mannerisms convey a neurotic who has clawed up the ladder with the blood of countless others on his hands. His impression of a rat conveys exactly who he is, a scavenger who preys on society's garbage.
It's a given that this film is engrossing, but Scorsese employs a number of techniques that make it particularly captivating. First of all, he allows us to root for both DiCaprio and Damon, even though one is a cop and the other a crook posing as a cop. That doesn't matter. Good and evil don't apply here. All that matters is the power to survive. Watching these characters deceive their way to survival in the face of death is like watching a wild animal trying not to show fear while staring into the face of a predator. Scorsese crosscuts between these two to make us root for them both much like Alfred Hitchcock does with his hero and villain near the end of Strangers on a Train. We don't want either of these characters to die, because that would be the end of the suspense.
Secondly, whereas Scorsese used eye-line matches, reaction shots, and slow-motion cinematography to capture the psychological state of his characters in the 70s, here he uses percussive sound as the calling card of death. The end of the film becomes a hyper-kinetic bloodbath, which I don't remember as much for its images as I do for its sounds. Particularly, Scorsese's sound designer turned a gunshot into such a percussive alarm, that we don't need to actually see someone getting killed, we hear it. Every time a gun is fired it feels like a portent of doom, a signal that someone has just departed this world, or that all of our illusions and artifice have been stripped away to reveal merely life and death in its most raw form. Whenever I heard a gunshot in this film I was reminded of Mersault in Albert Camus' The Stranger talking about how shooting a man four times was like "knocking four quick times on the door of unhappiness." Likewise, Howard Shore's pulsating Celtic rock music acts as a war anthem driving our characters unswervingly toward their tragic end.
Some people might dislike the jarring nature of the final 30 minutes with characters being killed left and right with little time to process their departures. This is not like Macbeth where Banquo can announce "I am killed" before actually dying. The characters that are killed die in a split second. We have no way to emotionally process their deaths. However, I believe that the final greatness in The Departed lies in the arbitrary, unsentimental way characters are dispatched. That's exactly as Scorsese intended it. Most people in life are not granted the luxury of protracted deaths with melodramatic monologues. Death is all around us. None of us knows when it is coming or how, but we all know that one day we will be among the departed.
The Departed by Martin Scorsese--A