Chron Movie Review
A beautiful, bloody masterpiece
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By AMY BIANCOLLI
Copyright 2006 Houston Chronicle
Crown him the king of the underworld.
After decades of chronicling American outlaws, Martin Scorsese has made his finest film since
Goodfellas — a bloody, bloody-good crime saga about allegiance and betrayal within a South Boston panoply of hoodlums and cops.
The Departed is a hard, visceral work, as unsentimental and shocking as anything the director has done. And as vicious: If you don't have a cast-iron stomach, cultivate one or stand clear.
Devotees will note the reappearance of certain Scorsesean themes, from the lost-son motif to the Judas motif to the discomfiting juxtaposition of religion and death; a prominent character dies in cruciform, his arms spread-eagled against a garbage bin. The director also remains as fascinated by ethnic tribalism as he is by gangland loyalties, exploring the tough Irish-Southie fealty that drives both police work and crime.
Adapted by screenwriter William Monahan from the 2002 Hong Kong thriller
Infernal Affairs,
The Departed features an intricate plot, an epic scope and a cracking-good cast that includes prickly supporting turns from Alec Baldwin, Martin Sheen, Mark Wahlberg and Ray Winstone. So massive and admirable is the whole ensemble that it seems unfair to single out just one actor, but there he is: Jack Nicholson as Frank Costello, a Boston mob boss who's the target of a state police investigation into organized crime.
Among the cops assigned to the case are Colin Sullivan (Matt Damon), an upright young plainclothes man with a squeaky-clean record, and Billy Costigan (Leonardo DiCaprio), a cadet with family ties to several criminal bottom feeders.
This makes Costigan ideal as an undercover mole, and it makes the plot ripe for ironic jerks and twists: As we soon learn, the speckless Sullivan is a dirty cop who works for Frank. So there's a rat on the force, and there's a rat in the gang, and lies lead them both through a maze of deadly consequences.
Damon is a cold customer here, as smooth and opaque as frosted glass. No one sees through him. As his girlfriend, Vera Farmiga is the opposite — transparent, mottled with doubt — and as his counterpart, DiCaprio displays a gift he didn't own only a few years back, the gift of tormented average Joe-ness. Having shed the last confining bonds of it-boy superstardom, he's finally just a man. His outbursts seem born of plain desperation.
It's an ugly thing, this film. Make no mistake. But its ugliness is rendered with such authority and humor — such zest — that it begins to seem like beauty.
Nicholson's character alone is a monstrosity of appalling dimension and charm; I'm not sure he has ever seemed less human or more beguiling, and I'm not sure any other actor could persuade us so well on either count. In one of the film's most memorable touches, Frank asks a guy in a bar about his mother. "She's on her way out," says the barfly. "So are we all," Frank zings back. "Act accordingly."
For all its bloodletting,
The Departed is an intoxicating film. It's a film that'll have your hands over your face with one eye peeking: The violence sickens, but the movie seduces. After the self-conscious period fetishism of
Gangs of New York and
The Aviator, Scorsese has at last rediscovered the addictive buzz of filmmaking — the death grip of virtuoso storytelling that grabs and shakes and startles.
Long live the king, with a vengeance.
amy.biancolli@chron.com
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