The Departed
dir. Martin Scorsese
2006

"Ordinary fuckin' people; I hate 'em. Ordinary people spend their lives avoiding tense situations. Repo man spends his life getting in to tense situations. Let's get a drink."

-Bud

Don't get me wrong: I liked "The Aviator." The performances were dynamic and engaging, the story was compelling, the tone of the melodrama wasn't too heavy or too glib (both dangers when dealing with a figure like Howard Hughes...or John Hughes for that matter.)

But...

It was a film that pretty much any decent director with adequate budget and a good drama coach and DP should have been able to pull off. There was little in it distinctly Scorsese!

Not so, The Departed.

From the opening segment where Nicholson explains how a Mick like him survived in an underworld full of Guineas to the slow strum of The Stones' signature gangland piece "Gimme Shelter," you know that Marty is fuckin' BACK.

The Departed is a remake of the 2001 Hong Kong cop thriller Infernal Affairs. Fans of the genre will know Hong Kong cop thrillers (City on Fire, Hard Boiled) to be bullet-riddled over the top macho frag fests. Fans of the genre will not be disappointed with the Americanized Departed.

Unlike GoodFellas and Casino, which paint a somewhat appealing image of the mob and then reveal the violent horror, or Raging Bull in which the characters are just fundamentally trapped in their amberlike borderline existence, the characters in The Departed all seem to be forcing themselves into tense situations for no readily apparent reason. This is no narrative flaw, however. The nihilistic determinism just signs us up for the rollercoaster ride.

There's no Ray Liotta pining for the good old days ("I always wanted to be a gangster"), no Robert DeNiro or Joe Pesci elaborating on their complex mob ethos: there's just cops, robbers and guns. And, of course, some of the robbers are really cops and some of the cops are really robbers.

But, as Uncle Jack says: "what difference does it make when you're facing down the barrel of a gun?"

The performances are a flat out joy to watch, all around.

Matt Damon is very believable as the corrupt State Police detective who seems too clean cut to be that clean cut. He's making quite the career for himself being "the guy who talks to you like you're an idiot." From "how'd'ya like them apples?" to "why do you think poker is gambling?" to "it's running out, you Arab retard" to "Jack, you have to give me what I need and let me run this my way," I only hope that Damon and I shuffle off this mortal coil at around the same time so I can watch him explain to St. Peter how things work in Heaven.

Nicholson is just having too much fun being Nicholson. But he takes the Nicholson thing to some new places the likes of which we haven't seen since Batman.

Mark Wahlberg, Martin Sheen and Alec Baldwin play "the guys whose every conversation ends in a fistfight."

But, gotta say, the real standout is DeCaprio. His burned-out undercover suicide trip makes Prince of the City look like Officer Friendly. He's bloodshot, he's tense, he's ready to snap.

Quibbles:

1) This is a sausage festival. The only female character of any note is Vera Farmiga's Madolyn (the love interest.) Performance was fine, but they didn't give her much to do. This is a very plot-heavy film for Scorsese, so it would been nice if she was, you know, part of the story. Instead she sort of sits there and uses her therapy words as Damon talks to her like she's an idiot and DeCaprio screams at her like she's an idiot.

2) We get a lot of scenes of people running down the street screaming the details of sensitive police operations or organized crime into their cell phones. It really made me miss the velvety tension of Keifer Sutherland's Jack Bauer. THAT man can work a cell phone.

3) There are a number of things that flat don't make any sense. But, then again, from what I've heard of FBI/local cop joint mob investigations, this isn't unrealistic.

Four stars, Uncle Jason sez check it out before I ram this cell phone down your throat you lace curtain Irish drunk-ass motherfucker. Yeah, I'm talking to you, shithead. Fuck you and say hi to your mom for me and tell her I'm sorry I had fuck her in the ass but her cunt's just too nasty.

Fuck you.