“Gimme Shelter” blares in the background, warning of a “mad bull lost its way” and that war is “just a shot away.” A man’s profile lurches slowly forward in the shadows. He is a devil lording over his own self-made hell. He speaks slowly, savoring his words and their terrible meanings. “I don’t want to be a product of my environment,” says the ruthless Irish-American kingpin. “I want my environment to be a product of me.” His name is Frank Costello, and South Boston belongs to him.
Costello (Jack Nicholson) has been the “rock star” of Boston crime for decades, but the Massachusetts State Police are determined to bring him down.
Young officer Billy Costigan (a never better Leonardo DiCaprio) will infiltrate the gang from undercover, but the cops don’t know that Costello has his own mole, Colin Sullivan (Matt Damon), rising the ranks of the “Staties.” When both groups smell rats in their midsts, Costigan and Sullivan scramble to maintain their false identities and race to expose each other before the bullets start flying.
Costigan has been trapped between identities all his life. He was born the son of a Southie baggage handler, but his high IQ and idealism eventually led him to the force. He has a need to do good in a city that seems to reward only the wicked. Sullivan bought into Costello’s idolism from a young age, and, though he now dreams of starting over in a different city, he’s too entrenched in his life of crime to let it go.
Costigan and Sullivan even end up circling the same woman, a police psychiatrist (Vera Farmiga) drawn to the damage she senses in both men. She’s dating Sullivan but connects to Costigan’s vulnerability and begins to wonder if she’s settled down simply because that’s what people are expected to do. And, of course, she cannot see the connection between the two men until it’s far too late.
The scene is set for a sort of Shakespearean tragedy in which profanity is poetry and pistols take the place of poison-filled cups. Before it’s all over, somebody will have to take the long fall.
If the plot sounds familiar, you may have seen Hong Kong’s 2002 hit “Infernal Affairs,” which writer William Monaghan adapted into the screenplay for “The Departed.” A major step up from Monaghan’s ambitious but muddled script for “Kingdom of Heaven,” “Departed” is dense but lean, throwing out a lot of vital information quickly and effectively, with little time for padding or looking back.
What’s exhilarating about the film is the way the stakes never seem to lessen from moment to moment. The large web of characters expands and contracts unexpectedly, shifting focus from one lead to another with tension that never flags. One watches with mounting anticipation and dread as Costigan repeatedly has to talk himself out of a noose, but there’s also great fun in the way scenes reveal, at the last minute, that someone was listening in on a private conversation or that the person on the other end of a phone line was the last person you expected. While there is little to connect to emotionally in this film, its visceral pull is undeniable.
Scorsese is in top form again after some overreaching in “Gangs of New York” and “The Aviator.” “Departed” brings to mind both the inexorable forward sweep of “Goodfellas” and the dizzying disorientation of “After Hours.”
The director knows what tricks to use and when to ratchet up the suspense to almost unbearable levels. When a Costigan tails Sullivan through a dark alley, Scorsese uses tilted camera angles, stylized lighting, and almost comic book-style shadowing to tinker with the mood, but none of it feels distracting or out of place. These are simply the best tools to tell the story at that particular moment. Always a master of tone and pace, he employs everything from swooping cameras to iris shots to make his points, yet none of it feels forced.
Neither do his daring aural choices. The Rolling Stones, Beach Boys, The Dropkick Murphys and a Van Morrison cover of “Comfortably Numb” all blare away on the soundtrack at one time or another, and Scorsese weaves them in and out of scenes like commentary and bookends. Even when the songs are absent, he fills the soundscape with so much noise that the film’s few quiet moments really register. When Costigan walks up to an abandoned building in total silence, you can’t help but panic. The sound of a vibrating cell phone creeping across a table will haunt your dreams.
And nobody does violence with as much kick and reverence as Scorsese. There are bursts of blood and other acts of savagery, yet it never feels exploitative because Scorsese is interested in the causes and effects of such violence. He wants to see who’s doing what and why and not shy away from the after effects. Consider how his camera stays perfectly still and nonjudgmental in an agonizingly long shot of Nicholson and goon Ray Winstone repeatedly smashing DiCaprio’s hand. Scorsese’s static camera doesn’t overtly comment on the action. It lets the brutality of the moment speak for itself.
The cast is also excellent. DiCaprio digs deep into Costigan’s angst and fears, showing a man whose nerve endings are exposed from having the weight of the world piled on his shoulders. Damon gives great snarl as the only slightly remorseful Sullivan, with a braggart’s air that comes from holding so many cards. Farmiga is good, too, as the woman caught in the middle, and she adds a tenderness to her scenes with DiCaprio that proves vital to where the story is ultimately headed. Martin Sheen and Mark Wahlberg add heft to supporting turns as committed cops, while Nicholson and Alec Baldwin, as a sweaty, overeager G-Man, score laughs playing a lighter tone, but even their more off-the-wall schtick doesn’t feel entirely out of place.
No one but Nicholson could pull off Costello, a freak show in a leopard print tie, a madman who can successfully seduce you before he sticks a knife in your gut. Whether Costello is brandishing a dildo or a severed hand, eating a freshly dead fly or diving nose-first into mountains of cocaine, Nicholson can make the excesses seem perfectly natural. It’s the loopy unpredictability of his character that makes him dangerous. His gallows humor permeates what would otherwise be a very somber film.
Despite straining too hard for a final visual metaphor, Scorsese evokes the broken spirit of South Boston in memorable, disturbing ways. It’s a place that’s dead, dying, rotting from the inside out, buckling under the weight of its own bad history. The streets are as gray as the morality, a man’s murder can be rationalized by the thinking that “if he was killed, he probably did something wrong.” Loyalty is a cruel joke, futility in action is a fact of life and everything is governed by the misplaced violence of the trapped and impotent. In Southie, you can either become a cop or a criminal, but as Costello notes, “When you’re facing a loaded gun, what’s the difference?”
It’s still more flash than heart, but with Scorsese at the helm, what’s the difference? It’s a bleak, powerful rumination on cops and robbers, blood and sinew, fathers and sons, and failing systems, yet it wears these ideas lightly enough that they never get in the way of the film’s bing-bang entertainment value. In short, “The Departed” is a near masterpiece.
THE DEPARTED
Warner Bros.
Rated R
STARRING:
Leonardo DiCaprio, Matt Damon, Jack Nicholson and Mark Wahlberg
THE VERDICT:
Scorsese’s stylish film features stellar performances, excellent camera work and writing, the result almost perfect.
FEATURE:
***1/2 of ****