By Steve VinebergMartin Scorsese’s The Departed runs for two and a half hours but it moves like lightning. The visual style is unusually restrained for Scorsese, but he’s brought all his editing know-how to bear on the William Monahan screenplay, which transcribes the 2002 Hong Kong thriller Infernal Affairs. That ingenious little movie, which was directed by Wai Keung Lau and Siu Fai Mak, featured Andy Lau and Tony Leung as secret adversaries—Lau, a cop with a covert connection to the mob and Chan, an undercover cop pretending to be a mobster. In The Departed, which Monahan and Scorsese have relocated to Boston, Matt Damon plays Colin Sullivan, whom mob boss Frank Costello (Jack Nicholson) has planted in the police force. And Leonardo DiCaprio is Billy Costigan, whom Captain Queenan (Martin Sheen) and his right-hand man, Dignam (Mark Wahlberg), have placed high among Costello’s confidants, his identity unknown to anyone else—including Sullivan’s supervisor, Ellerby (Alec Baldwin), who is seeking to bring down Costello. The Departed is slick and exciting. But it’s dross.
Scorsese stages the picture like a raucous, violent vaudeville show, alternating a handful of big acts. Some focus on the working of Costello’s little empire, where he makes mordant jokes while his wry, ironic lieutenant, Mr. French (Ray Winstone), provides the muscle. When Costigan, fresh from a rigged expulsion from the force and a rigged jail sentence and a brief career peddling dope with his not-too-bright cousin (Kevin Corrigan), is admitted into Costello’s inner circle, his struggle to retain some sense of his own identity—like Johnny Depp’s character in Donnie Brasco and Ken Wahl’s on the TV series Wiseguy—plays against the eruptive, macho exchanges between Nicholson’s Costello and his aides, none of whom—except for French—he trusts entirely.
Every now and then Costello holds clandestine meetings with Colin, whose fealty he won when Colin was a bright schoolboy. Colin has known Costello for long enough—and has risen high enough in the ranks of the police—that he feels brave enough to call him down when he thinks Costello’s being unreasonable. (His trump card, of course, is that he’s been very efficient at keeping Costello out of jail.) Meanwhile Billy, increasingly feeling the squeeze and certain that Costello has his own mole in the force, sneaks his own rendezvous, with Queenan and Dignam.
Then there are the police-precinct sessions where Sullivan, thinking fast to keep Costello in the clear, whips up schemes to bring his opposite number out into the open and challenges the opposition of higher-ups like Dignam, who thinks he’s a callous careerist and doesn’t like him. There are no quiet scenes: Even the tête-à-têtes between Sullivan and Madolyn (Vera Farmiga), the police counselor he romances and moves in with, are composed of machine-gun banter. Queenan and Dignam send Billy to see Madolyn professionally, and he gets under her skin. (Their first encounter, which ends with him asking her out for coffee, is so stylized and overheated it doesn’t make much sense.) The plot, like that of Infernal Affairs, is built, of course, on the ironic juxtaposition of the two young men, the protagonist (Billy) and the antagonist (Colin)—both cops with South Boston connections (in Billy’s case, only on his dad’s side; his mother’s people, as Dignam never tires of pointing out, are lace-curtain Irish), both linked to Costello and to Madolyn, both moles engaged in a pursuit of escalating intensity to uncover each other’s identity.
Scorsese dashes from one story to the next, with so much kinetic skill in the cutting (supervised by Scorsese’s pet collaborator, the master editor Thelma Schoonmaker) that you may not notice that the scenes he’s positioned next to each other usually don’t match up but only give the illusion of operating in contrast to one another. The way Scorsese creates fireworks with the editing to cover the faulty construction in the script are a showman’s trick, just as the restless, thrusting camera in GoodFellas faked you into thinking the picture was moving forward. (It didn’t—it lacked a dynamic protagonist.) And though Scorsese foregrounds it and dispatches it with speed and volubility, much of the dialogue is pure show-biz.
As a realistic vision of police procedure and the underworld, the movie doesn’t scan—especially the scenes built around Costello and French. Nicholson can’t possibly believe in what he’s doing here; it’s even less grounded in emotional realism than his Batman performance as the Joker. And you can’t believe anyone would sign up to march under this man’s command. Winstone, with his hoarse voice and held-in-check line readings, is almost as theatrical. Watching some of this movie—like Colin’s courtship of Madolyn, where he sweeps her off her feet—you may feel the way I do at a good production of a David Mamet play: pleasurably scammed but scammed nonetheless.
The Departed is a big-budget prestige picture that’s high on finesse and low on substance. Take a gander at Infernal Affairs and you can see the difference almost immediately. The two main characters are equally matched: Chan is a good cop fighting to resist the temptations of mob life while Lau is a crook disguised as a cop who, day by day, feels more acutely the pull of the moral, above-board life. The woman he lives with is trying to write a story but conflicted over whether her hero is a good guy or a bad guy; the man lying next to her in bed is a real-life embodiment of the same dilemma.
The extreme choices Colin Sullivan makes in the last act of The Departed seem motivated entirely by ambition (Dignam sizes him up correctly), whereas Lau’s—though, in plot terms, they’re the same choices—emerge from a moral struggle. Monahan’s idea to eliminate the woman writer and have the police shrink involved with both men is a device that makes the two men seem like alter egos, whereas the way Lau is written in Infernal Affairs really makes them doubles. And though it’s 40 minutes longer than its source, The Departed has no room for the kind of understated, poignant details that knock you out in Infernal Affairs—like the moment when a funeral parade for one of Chan’s supervisors (one of the few men who know his true identity) passes by and Chan, watching from a deserted alley, lifts his hand in private salute. Or the scene where Chan runs into an old girlfriend in the street he hasn’t seen for some years. She has a little girl in hand, and when Chan asks the kid’s age she deducts a year so he won’t know the child is his. (The filmmakers don’t clue us in until after Chan has taken his leave of them: The little girl corrects her mother, who answers with a laugh, “I always forget.”)
The Departed comes closest to some kind of substance in DiCaprio’s nervous, besieged performance, which is as good as Depp’s in Donnie Brasco, and in Sheen’s depiction of a police captain whose dedication to his men meets the ultimate test. Damon is clever and personable, but Mark Wahlberg shows him up, effortlessly, simply by being the thing—a South Boston working-class kid—Damon is working his ass off to impersonate. And maybe it isn’t all that simple: Playing yourself never is, and the truth is that Wahlberg has turned himself into a good young actor in recent years, proving that what he pulled off in Three Kings was no fluke. When Three Kings’ director, David O. Russell, tapped him again for a part in I ♥ Huckabees, Wahlberg was the only member of the celebrity ensemble who managed to maintain the existential-screwball style and still suggest a real human being.
The only shortcoming in his performance in The Departed is beyond his control: his aggressive, spewing character doesn’t make any more sense—at least, he didn’t to me—than one of Mamet’s verbally diarrhetic salesmen or petty crooks. I could buy Dignam’s abuse of Costigan in the early stages of Costigan’s training as an undercover agent (he’s playing bad cop to Queenan’s good cop), even if I secretly kept hoping Costigan would paste him one. But once Billy’s been under for six months and delivering steadily and worried about cracking under the pressure, Dignam’s refusal to lay off him for 30 seconds seemed so counterintuitive (and counterproductive) that I just assumed he kept up the stream of ad hominem insults because Monahan was bent on making their scenes colorful and entertaining.
Well, they are, and so is the movie. But there’s less to it than meets the eye.
Steve Vineberg teaches theater history, dramatic literature, and film at College of the Holy Cross. He is the author of three books: High Comedy in American Movies: Class and Humor from the 1920s to the Present (2005), No Surprises, Please: Movies in the Reagan Decade (1992), and Method Actors: Three Generations of an American Acting Style (winner of the Joe A. Calloway Prize for Best Book in Drama, 1991). He writes regularly on movies and theater for The Boston Phoenix, The Threepenny Review, The Christian Century and The Perfect Vision, and has also been published in The New York Times, The Chronicle of Higher Education, Pakn Treger, The Oxford American, Sight and Sound, American Film, Film Quarterly, and other publications.
Photo: DiCaprio, Winstone, and Nicholson in The Departed
