Remaking a 2002 Hong Kong hit and setting the story in Irish-Catholic Boston, Martin Scorsese seemed to be out of his element with The Departed—if not, that is, for the fact that the film marked a return to the director’s bread-and-butter mean streets, and that his source material, Wai Keung Lau and Siu Fai Mak’s Infernal Affairs, was itself heavily influenced by his iconic gangster films. Something of a genre homecoming after recent detours into the arenas of the historical epic (Gangs of New York) and the period biopic (The Aviator), The Departed again found him trawling a gritty, brutal urban underbelly where racial epithets spit from roughnecks’ mouths, class divisions are as sharp as a switchblade, and allegiances to others and one’s self are always tenuous at best.
The Rolling Stones’s “Gimme Shelter” plays over a blistering opening sequence edited by Thelma Schoonmaker with gunshot-punctuated bursts that beautifully condense a wealth of introductory information. But there’s no safe haven to be found in this gray New England hellhole, a fact confirmed by the ensuing portrait of encompassing duplicity and paranoia, and vividly conveyed by Scorsese’s electrified direction, which initially proves as vicious, nasty, and deceptively sly as his saga’s larger-than-life Irish mob kingpin Frank Costello (Jack Nicholson).
With the constantly roving cinematography bringing a measure of unease to the underworld action, The Departed jumps out of the gate like a caged lion freed into the wild. The film delivers a rapid-fire primer on the congruent paths of state police academy trainees Billy Costigan (Leonardo DiCaprio), an intelligent recruit desperate to reject his family’s criminal past, and Colin Sullivan (Matt Damon), a careerist with political dreams and deep-seated ties to Costello. Sullivan is Costello’s mole in the police department and Costigan is the cop infiltrating Costello’s crew, and both are soon ordered to discover the other’s identity, a conceit that William Monahan’s script embellishes with trademark Scorsese preoccupations: Catholicism, double lives, issues of honor, honesty, and deceit, and the bond shared between fathers and sons.
Faithful to Infernal Affairs, this adaptation nonetheless substitutes the original’s sleek, cool demeanor with a feverish, foul, funky energy that’s layered with a thin coating of sexual deviance (epitomized by Nicholson’s porn-theater dildo antics) and dysfunction (with Sullivan cast as the impotent son to Costello’s seriously virile papa). Deftly employing classic rock for clever commentary—never more so than with adjacent Nicholson and DiCaprio love scenes subtly linked by Pink Floyd’s “Comfortably Numb”—and swiftly crosscutting between multiple subplots, Scorsese’s film, for much of its 150 minutes, rocks violently, passionately, urgently.
As the story’s thematic backbone consists of Costigan and Sullivan’s parallel struggles to maintain identity and sanity, it’s DiCaprio and Damon who are asked to carry the brunt of the story’s emotional and psychological baggage. DiCaprio radiates wounded-child scars beneath his exaggerated tough-guy exterior, while Damon expresses, during moments of silent contemplation, a sense of constant analysis and reconsideration.
Much of their thunder, though, is stolen by the supporting players, namely Mark Wahlberg as Staff Sergeant Sean Dignam, a hardass and insult maestro whose lower-class “Southie” ancestry manifests itself in hilariously no-nonsense appraisals of—and vulgar invectives aimed at—Costigan. Wahlberg and Alec Baldwin, as Captain George Ellerby, share a vibrantly bawdy, rat-a-tat-tat rapport that’s Mamet-ese minus the pretension, and their humorous scenes together are smoothly balanced out by the stern, sturdy performances of Martin Sheen (as Costigan’s boss Captain Queenan) and Ray Winstone (as Costello’s viciously loyal right-hand man).
On the other hand, the script’s conspicuous attempt to achieve something resembling gender parity, along with a bit of romantic tension, via the introduction of Dr. Madolyn Madden (Vera Farmiga), who finds herself dating both Costigan and Sullivan, is a DOA endeavor. The character is such a contrived, under-dramatized device that even Farmiga’s impressively fierce turn can’t prevent the character from coming off as a pesky, phony annoyance.
Regrettably, Madolyn’s perfunctory role in The Departed’s cloak-and-dagger intrigue is symptomatic of the film’s eventual, aggravating plotting missteps, with its elongated twists and turns and multiple false endings interfering with, and finally diffusing much of, the first half’s high-wire ferocity and anxious tension. Worse than its narrative bloat, though, is Scorsese’s abandonment of his initial fast-and-hard approach to the material in favor of a grander operatic line of attack. What begins as a breakneck descent into blunt cruelty and moral turmoil soon morphs into a cat-and-mouse game encumbered by self-consciously overcooked extravagance.
That’s a tonal and stylistic shift that not only doesn’t quite suit the seemingly tongue-in-cheek Boston Massacre finale, but is compounded by Nicholson’s lurid shtick. Quoting James Joyce, cursing with racist glee, enjoying cocaine-fueled threesomes, and licking squashed bugs off the palm of his hand, his is a routine of typically outsized Jack-ness that’s chillingly fearsome and daunting in spurts—that is, when his gaze remains stern and his arching eyebrows remain lowered—but flamboyantly cartoonish in its entirety. It’s a descriptor that too often also accurately applies to the alternately scintillating, silly, and distended The Departed.
Image/Sound
Warner’s 4K disc comes from a new remaster supervised by Thelma Schoonmaker, and the results are a refinement of the earlier Blu-ray without being revelatory. Black levels are deeper and lighting generally looks cooler while revealing more detail than the 2K release. Detail is fine enough to differentiate individual strands of hair on Jack Nicholson’s thinned top or the scuffs of age in the Irish pubs and neighborhood shops where so many scenes take place.
The PCM surround track from the 2K disc has been replaced with a 5.1 DTS-HD track, though differences between the two are negligible. Both are crystal-clear and handle the crescendos of needle-drop rock songs or gunfire without passing into distorted or compressed noise.
Extras
Warner ports over the extras from their earlier Blu-ray: a handful of dispensible deleted scenes, a featurette on the film’s use of gangster Whitey Bulger as a source of inspiration, as well as one on Martin Scorsese’s mini-canon of gangster films. New to this disc is a 15-minute interview with Scorsese, who looks back on the film and its development cycle, as well as shouts out to classic gangster movies like The Public Enemy that he homages in the film.
Overall
Martin Scorsese’s manic best picture winner looks sharper than ever on Warner’s UHD disc.
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