The Departed (2006)
Director: Martin ScorseseWriters: William Monahan, Felix Chong, Alan Mak
Stars: Leonardo DiCaprio, Matt Damon, Jack Nicholson, Mark Whalberg, Alec Baldwin
Studio: Warner Bros.
The Departed is a tale of Boston Irish tough guys on both sides of the law. Matt Damon gives the best performance of his career as the creepy and conceited young wiseguy Colin Sullivan who becomes the protege of south Boston's biggest gangster: ageing sociopath Frank Costello, played by Nicholson. Costello secretly sponsors Colin through police academy to become his personal executive-class snitch on the inside. Meanwhile, Leonardo DiCaprio is William Costigan, a moody kid with a brace of uncles known to the authorities, who is now genuinely trying to make it over to the right side of the tracks with a career in the police. He is headhunted by senior intelligence officers, fatherly Martin Sheen and his attack-dog lieutenant Mark Wahlberg, who offer him a new opportunity: use his family connections and credibility to go into deep cover in Costello's gang.
It's a remake of the 2002 Hong Kong thriller Infernal Affairs, with Tony Leung and Andy Lau, and where that movie emphasised a cool and elegant symmetry between the doppelganger finks, with the storyline indirect, and the violence kept relatively low, Scorsese's movie dots the is, crosses the ts, stomps the skulls and puts Rolling Stones numbers on the soundtrack.
Damon and DiCaprio are nicely contrasted; where Sullivan is smooth of face and style, Costigan is resentful, hunched and clenched, as if wearing a wire coat hanger under his jacket. He just has to sit there and take it when he is harangued - very wittily - by Mark Wahlberg's magnificently abusive undercover cop Dignam, for no reason other than to subject him to a little forensic ball-busting. Costigan makes the mistake of coming back at him with a quotation from Hawthorne, and Dignam jeers: "Wassa matter - you don't know any Shakespeare?" Frank Costello, wearing his own learning lightly, at one stage taps his head with gravitas and growls: "Hey - heavy lies the crown!"Everyone gets good lines in Monahan's screenplay, but the lion's share, understandably, goes to Nicholson himself, each witticism a diamond in the most dangerous rough imaginable. Having menacingly asked after the ailing mother of one of his courtiers, and been told that she is "on the way out", Nicholson grins as if receiving good news. "We all are!" he declaims. "Act accordingly!"
And he certainly does, growling and snarling like an aggregate of the previous dark destroyers in his career, and incidentally finishing the movie with a half-moon gout of blood on his lower lip, as if reprising his Joker from the Batman movies. What a barnstormer this is from Nicholson, the kind of performance that no one else could possibly do, but which he could probably do in his sleep: and in his more heavy-lidded moments gives the impression of actually doing - without it ever being less than fantastic value for money. At one stage, musing angrily on the presence of a suspected rat in his ranks, Nicholson actually does an impression of a rat: two big front teeth suddenly pop out over his lower lip and that great snub nose twitches malevolently. I can't see Pacino or De Niro getting away with it. Whistler once said his exorbitant fees were not for the hours' work at the easel, but for the experience of a lifetime, and that is what we are getting with Nicholson: a great screen actor whose charisma has, through the decades, rolled over like a recurring lottery jackpot. Will the 69-year-old Nicholson get a part like this, with a director like this, ever again?
As for Scorsese, it is a return to the fluent, muscle-flexing movie-making with a visible directorial signature. Gangs of New York, though very good, was atypical. This is an unapologetic, unironised crime-family drama, which the director puts over like a roundhouse punch. It certainly felt like a work from Scorsese's golden years, and even has a scene in an old-fashioned porn cinema, of the sort once patronised by Travis Bickle in Taxi Driver and which surely ceased to exist long ago.
