Another Serving of Scorcese's Overbaked Ham

Rating: 1/10 (31 July 2008)

If less is more, then more is less. That is a lesson that, in all his years as a film maker, Martin Scorcese never seems to have learned.
Never satisfied with mere excess, Scorcese continues to take original, intricate and downright terrific ideas, and bludgeon them into twisted ruins of predictable, derivative, deep-fried sleaze. Scorcese never saw a story so simple he couldn't pack a ton of gratuitous mayhem into it, or a concept so straightforward he couldn't belabor with a ton of profane verbiage, or a character so layered he couldn't redraw it as a cardboard cutout, or a plot so complex he couldn't dumb it down to the level of a five-year-old. As has become habitual with Scorcese, none of his characters can get shot just once, or break his neck instead of splattering on concrete, or get cut with a knife instead of an ax, or survive the movie at all if Scorcese thinks he can get a cheap gasp out of killing him off. Perfect fare for an audience so saturated with decades of Stallone, Schwarzenegger and Bruce Willis garbage that no one bothers to ask for logic any more, and starts to fall asleep if denied a hemorrhage for ten minutes at a stretch.
The plot developments and time lines in The Departed are so far-fetched as to reek with implausibility. I won't repeat these; others have enumerated them. But Leonard DiCaprio -- a terrific actor, by the way -- is so ludicrously miscast that his own cat would know it. Here he is, flying into a cold rage with his baby face and beating up on gangsters with his skinny arms... If this milk-fed child were put within a hundred yards of the sort of people he so blithely cons and pistol whips in this outing, he would drop dead of fright. His nemesis, Matt Damon, is every bit as cardboard an imitation of evil as Leo is of good. And Jack Nicholson is... Jack Nicholson. Which ain't bad, or at least it wasn't bad the first fifty or so times we saw it, and we've seen him do it better.
Scorcese's female "characters" -- one supporting role to a film -- are usually given little more to do than bob their heads up and down in some guy's lap. He departs slightly from his usual crass misogyny in this film. At least this woman has a job she can perform standing up. But one must wonder how effective she can be in her chosen field -- that of psychiatrist -- being so indecisive and obtuse. A head shrinker who doesn't know her own mind, indeed. Scorcese might tell you that the choice is intentional, and ironic, and therefore somehow meaningful. Nonsense. He can't help it. He must undercut and dilute any strength his women might have. His treatment of them is consistently dismissive, stereotyped and mean-spirited. His whole body of work, in fact, is so testosterone-drenched and chauvinistic, he seems to be begging us to believe he's a heterosexual, when no one would think to doubt it if he didn't protest so much.
The only good thing about this hash is the soundtrack. But there's nothing original about it. Scorcese just hired someone to go down to a music warehouse and shuffle out what fit the picture. Not much way you can go wrong, shoving "Gimme Shelter" into just about anything. So go buy the originals. Not the soundtrack; it will only add to the profits for this overblown mess.
There is a great story buried in all the junk weighing down The Departed -- realistic, ironic, bitter and layered -- or there was a great story, until Scorcese's ham-handed execution turned it into this childish blood feast. As in "Casino," "Gangs of New York" and that preposterous trash about ambulance drivers, there is an underlying reality that could have been brought to life and memorably rendered.
The great pity is that Scorcese has real talent. He has shown it on many occasions, and throughout "Raging Bull." It comes through even as he's trampling on his own better instincts. There's a great director in him, but he doesn't trust himself, or the adolescents he is apparently making movies for, to remember that subtlety, simplicity and grace are cinematic virtues, even if employed occasionally. No, he has to ramp up the volume and the sarcasm and the adolescent rage and the bloodletting until the whole business is just annoying to anyone but a pre-teen. He loads every scene down with inhuman dialog, over-the-top action and ludicrously improbable plot developments -- and then presents it as raw realism. If he was dealing in science-fiction, that would be something else. But he isn't. Boiled down to their basic elements, most all of his films are simple, straightforward stories. Seldom does any of the excreta he piles onto them elevate them to the level of originality, and never to art. It only lowers them to run-of-the-mill cinematic pabulum.
Scorcese is bound to share billing in future textbooks on film making with Oliver Stone, another artistic quack who routinely kills his healthy patients by over-prescribing medicines they never needed in the first place, and then chopping them up on the operating table with a chainsaw to compensate. But all this makes heaps o' profits, and ensure that Scorcese will never lack for an audience or his next directing job. Lamentably, all he is really doing is contributing, in his own way, to the lowering of the national IQ. And there are far, far too many vultures — in the media, in politics and in entertainment -- already working that angle.