That's An Entertainment
Last night I wateched Scorsese's The Departed. Whether film or play or novel, telling a story is a matter of craft. Careful control of pace, character development, suspense, and perspective are components of narrative that require high levels of skill. This craft has been anatomized so thoroughly since classical times that there is a clear tradition of the "good story".
Surely, Scorsese is a master of the good story, and The Departed, to me, is a wonderful example. I was tensed in every corner of my futon for the length of the movie. The screenplay was unbelievably tight, despite the excusable strains on coincidence. The camera angles and use of soundtrack propelled the film along at all the right spots, making it seem far shorter than its two and a half hours. Scorsese, as usual, grounds his masculinized, violent mythology with enough everyday reality to give it that sense of everyday-ness and extraordinary import, relevance as well as wisdom. And the acting ... . Nicholson, Damon, DiCaprio, and Wahlberg fill their roles to every stitch of the clothing, to every pitch of emotion; they are mesmerizing to watch.
The film just shines.
After the movie let go of my shirtfronts, though, and I was given space to review what I had just undergone, I had trouble recalling the value of the film in detail.
Do any of these actors really stretch in these roles? Isn't Nicholson almost always just a variation on this man, all devilishly raised eyebrows and full-bodied menace? Doesn't Wahlberg (who I admired most) always do comic streetwise bluster exceptionally well? Damon (*yawn*) the over-cocky Wunderkind? I'm not sure I've seen DiCaprio like this, but then I didn't see Gangs of New York either. And what about this everyday import? Where the movie swells to the import of theme, I found it offered very little. Or very little new. The mirroring of organized crime and government is a gangster genre mainstay, and for me, between the highly glossed, echo-like chess moves of DiCaprio and Damon, Nicholson and Sheen, that's very nearly all the movie has to offer.
I kept wanting to pin so much meaning on the unsung fulcrum of the movie, the single central female character, the psychologist (not a conventional "muscle"), the penultimate and invisible cause of the final plot twist, Vera Farmiga's character. But, to my eyes, she was kept (like many of the characters) more vehicle than agent, and I had a hard time hanging much meaning on her shoulders.
I read several instances where The Departed was described as an "entertainment". I guess that's how it strikes me. Not that it's without value. Not at all. But that, for me, it has the value of a highly amusing exercise, a complex toy. It does the intricate and accomplished work of engaging us without extending that engagement into lasting inspiration or purpose.
Even so, Scorsese's tools form the fundamentals that too many of our more idealist film-makers are poorly schooled in.