F for the Departed

Rating: 4/10 (23 February 2007)

The day long movie, The Departed (it was a mere 2-1/2 hours but seemed like a day), is one of a very few movies I've found valueless. It is difficult to comprehend what the critics and the Motion Picture Academy are thinking in their various homages to this. I guess Scorsese is the magic word.
The last shot in the movie, a rat toodling along the balcony of the corrupt Colin Sullivan's (Matt Damon) luxury apartment in downtown Boston (the luxury apartment that no honest cop in the Special Investigations Unit realizes that Sullivan is living in on his $30,000 plus salary?) is emblematic of the ham-handed approach of the movie's makers. There are probably a dozen missteps by Sullivan that would have raised the curiosity of colleagues with an IQ higher than that of my cats but, hey, we know cops are dumb.
The Departed was totally lacking in finesse or intelligence and pandered to a crowd that has no trouble believing that all cops are either stupid or corrupt (or both); that undercover cops wherever they are are permitted to engage is every sort of violent, brutal and destructive act short of intentional murder by their handlers and that Baghdad-like firefights on the streets of major American cities and blood gurgling (or spurting) out of people's mouths or spattered on the walls and floors are realistic.
The approach of the movie was actually insulting to the audience (and, by the way, to black officers, making the nice black officer from the training cadre one of the principal mechanisms of the hero's undoing). Lest we fail to respect and empathize sufficiently with Captain Queenan (Martin Sheen), the incorruptible head of SIU, Scorsese takes Billy Costigan/DiCaprio (and us) into his home and has Queenan talk about his wonderful wife and son at college. Any suspense about whether Queenan would be among those left standing at the end of the film was instantly dispelled. I immediately ordered a wreath for his grave.
The movie was a waste of a great collection of actors. I'm not a DiCaprio fan but he was OK in the ridiculous role he was asked to play, although I don't consider lip-pursing acting. Mark Wahlberg, as Sgt. Dignam, a foul-mouthed but fiercely honest cop with good street instincts was about the best of the lot. And, in the end, the directors turn him into a cold-blooded murderer. Jack Nicholson was Jack Nicholson, which is OK. I suppose there are mobsters capable of clever one liners somewhere. The opera reverie scene in which he has a fantasy (?) of tossing cocaine into the air like fairy dust over two of his bimbos was, like the balcony rat at the end, insultingly gross.
I wonder what this movie could have been if it had been written and directed by people with intelligence, finesse and reserve.