Noir Project #2 - The Departed
Obviously, a new Martin Scorsese film is worth a review. But a new Martin Scorsese film that taps into what the man himself has referred to as "the history of film noir in America? Well, that's doubly worthwhile. But first, let's dig into his canon...
The Departed has been hailed as Scorsese's 'return' to gangster films, as if the gap in between this and his last work in the genre has been as long as the gap between Mean Streets (1973) and Goodfellas (1990). In fact, the gap between The Departed and Gangs of New York has been, erm, four years - hardly a lifetime in the wilderness. Even if we add the extra criterion that we're talking about gangster films set in recent history, we're only talking about eleven years since Casino, a film that few fans would rank in Scorsese's premier league.
The Departed was greeted by a wash of outrageously positive praise, a tone that the American blogger and film critic Jim Emerson characterised as having an air of "Good boy, Marty. You stick to your gangster movies..." It is dismaying to note that some reviews, such as Jonathan Romney's in the Independent on Sunday, end by noting that Scorsese's next project (Silence, penned in for release in 2008) centres on Jesuit priests in 17th-century Japan, intended to be read as a note of dismay that Scorsese is going back to such unmacho territory. For me, the idea of Martin Scorsese tackling Catholicism for the first time since The Last Temptation of Christ (1988) is a more dramatic event than him returning to the gangster genre, and despite the small ripples of controversy The Departed has caused over its strong language, bloody violence and use of racial and sexual slurs, exposing his worth to further criticism from the Religious Right after getting death threats for his previous Christian-themed film shows far greater courage and daring.
All of this is a lengthy preamble to the opinion that, while I do not want to erase the considerable achievements of Gangs of New York and The Aviator (2004), The Departed is probably Scorsese's best film since Goodfellas, and if it isn't quite up there with, say, Taxi Driver (1976), The King of Comedy (1983) and Raging Bull (1980) it does not fall far short of that standard.
Like his fellow American maverick David Lynch, Scorsese is interested in genre without being in thrall to it, so it would be a mistake to read The Departed as a straight noir tribute in the way that, say, Bound (1996) or Sin City (2005) invite that interpretation. Nevertheless, it is worth noting that early 2006 saw the DVD reissue in Britain of a small clutch of noirs on DVD, all of which Scorsese has praised in the past. Body and Soul (1947) has already been cited by the great man as a key influence on Raging Bull, but it's Call Northside 777 (1947) and Force of Evil (1948) that offer the keys to Scorsese's noir scolarship, and the key to understanding where The Departed falls in this genre.
Call Northside 777 is a documentary noir, which in this case does not mean a documentary with the feel of a noir (that would be, say, Nick Broomfield's Heidi Fleiss - Hollywood Madam [1995] or Biggie and Tupac [2002]), it means a film based on details of actual cases and set in some sort of public institution. The nearest contemporary equivalent, in terms of both setting and loose factual basis, would be Jerry Bruckheimer's CSI franchise.
The documentary noir genre is rarely mentioned in retrospectives of the wider film noir genre - perhaps its focus on crusading heroes and law and order is seen as being retrograde these days. Nevertheless, the best such pictures are both great entertainment and a great snapshot of their time, reflecting the state of play in the newspaper trade (Call Northside 777), the police (1954's Dragnet, later spun off into a long-running TV show), the FBI (The House on 42nd Street, 1946), even the mental health profession (Samuel Fuller's celebrated Shock Corridor, 1963).
Perhaps the documentary noir The Departed most closely resembles is the 1948 thriller T-Men, which tracked a treasury agent moving through the underworld. For the first time, the documentary noir's hero was not the honest, crusading figures Jimmy Stewart played in Call Northside 777 or The FBI Story (1958), but a more corruptible, troubled figure in line with the ground broken by Double Indemnity (1944) and Detour (1946).
Here, we have Leonardo DiCaprio and Matt Damon as two kids from the same neighbourhood, both looking to escape their pasts. In a way, they represent the tensions in the documentary noir genre, with each given their own contradictory past. DiCaprio can count himself as having come fully of age as an actor in the role of Billy Costigan, a man whose family is steeped in violence and corruption, and sees the Boston State Police as his best route out. Damon, meanwhile, gives a perfectly slippery and creepy performance as Colin Sullivan, entranced from an early age by the money and glamour of the gangland life, and voluntarily choosing the fate that so horrified Henry Hill in Goodfellas: he takes the side of the law, but this time he does so in order to subvert it from the inside.
Costigan is the more morally upright of the two heroes, and can stand as the audience surrogate. However, his determination to stay on the right side of the law is constantly tested, both by the cynicism of his commanding officer Dignam (Mark Wahlberg, a truly remarkable film-stealing performance) who sees him as another Irish hood looking to wash his hands clean, and the more direct temptations of the gang he goes undercover in. He is capable of sudden and horrifying bursts of violence - his attack on two people harrassing a corner-shop owner is as gruesome and disturbing as the opening murder in Goodfellas or the torture scene in Gangs of New York - yet he remains just about sympathetic, something which can't be said of Sullivan, who thinks he can wear and discard new moral standards like clothes, and slowly emerges as the most dangerous character in the story.
The two young men are trapped between competing father figures, just as Force of Evil sublimated nationwide fears into one relationship between ideologically opposed brothers. On the side of good, we have Martin Sheen's kindly, almost grandfatherly Police Chief Queenan, whose care for his charges is so great that he seems to invisibly flinch at every insult Dignam tosses their way. On the side of evil, we have Jack Nicholson as gangleader Frank Costello, and though his screentime cannot be more than twenty minutes in total, it is Jack's performance that defines the film.
It is - even for Nicholson - a big, big performance, and even if we didn't know that some of the grace notes were added by the actor, we would be able to guess. Would Scorsese, or his screenwriter William Monaghan, be likely to suggest that Costello jokingly threaten Sullivan with a ten-inch dildo? Would either man have come up with moments where, in the course of Costello venting his fears about the possibility of a rat in the organisation, the godfather quotes Henry IV, catches and eats a fly and sets fire to a table? Such a performance sounds like rank hammery on the page, and there is something decidedly excessive about it on screen. But it's excessive enough; both to match the violence Scorsese orchestrates, and to add a layer of the mythic and operatic to the film.
The mythic was sometimes a factor of noir (cf. Kiss Me Deadly, 1957), as was the psychoanalytic (Spellbound, 1945), and they're also key aspects of Scorsese's characters. Think of Travis Bickle, Jake LaMotta, Howard Hughes - men with dreams of great power and influence, brought low by their own psychological hangups. Both Costigan and Sullivan are classic Scorsese heroes in this way - after Sullivan spends his first night with his kindly girlfriend Maddy (Vera Farmiga, charming and charismatic), she reassures him that "all men have moments like that", while Costigan's is even more tantalizingly hinted at. At the beginning of the film he attends his mother's funeral, and sees a particularly lavish bouquet from Costello. Perhaps they were just friends, but Costigan's expression of instinctive revulsion suggests otherwise (and this plot theme will bite his rival Sullivan hard later on in the film, but I'm not saying how. Nuh-uh. You have to watch the film).
And the beginning, in its own write, is worth pencilling a full review of. When the eerie opening bars of 'Gimme Shelter' by the Rolling Stones break through onto the soundtrack, and we see Nicholson striding like a ghost through Boston's Irish districts intoning a horrible, offensive, funny and frightening monologue, the audience knows it's in the presence of a classic Scorsese moment, a match of music and moment to match 'Sunshine of Your Love' in Goodfellas or 'Be My Baby' in Mean Streets.
Actually, maybe this answers the question of why Scorsese's mafia movies are venerated above his equally good work in other genres. They're simply more energetic - the work of one of the world's most technically adept directors and the brilliant professionals he surrounds himself with (mention should be made of veteran editor Thelma Schoonmaker, turning in her usual mercurial work) suddenly opening his entire box of tricks on the audience. The Departed features iris-ins, iris-outs, jump cuts, whip pans, freeze-frames, changes of film stock, archive footage and POV shots - yet so does the average Guy Ritchie movie. The difference is Ritchie uses it to disguise the story, whereas Scorsese uses it to underline the story.
The Departed is full of Freudian doubling and identity crises. Most of its cast operate in some kind of a double act - despite having almost no screentime together, it's obvious that DiCaprio and Damon are meant as mirror images of each other, and likewise Nicholson forms a fruitful and very funny partnership with his number two Mr French (Ray Winstone, as good as ever). But kudos to whoever decided Mark Wahlberg and Alec Baldwin would make such a good paring - their delightfully rude and cranky cops bag most of the funny lines, and the sheer unlikeliness of the pairing etches a place in the memory on its own.
It should be clear now that the plot of The Departed is a tricky beast to unpick, and one major benefit of the starry casts Scorsese assembles these days is that they're very helpful in reminding you who's who. At the same time, it is responsibly complex, and Scorsese never leaves a loose end dangling without being aware of it. What, for example, are we to make of the ending? Is it happy or sad? The final shot comes with one smirky visual joke, yet is also a grim reminder of the price people in the underworld pay for their riches and lifestyles, and the final line - "Okay" - offers one last shrug of moral compromise in a film that, above all else, shows the terrible consequences of cutting out the moral dimension from success, and chasing materialism for its own sake. Maybe we should welcome that Jesuit movie with open arms after all?
(Will reply to comments later)
The Departed has been hailed as Scorsese's 'return' to gangster films, as if the gap in between this and his last work in the genre has been as long as the gap between Mean Streets (1973) and Goodfellas (1990). In fact, the gap between The Departed and Gangs of New York has been, erm, four years - hardly a lifetime in the wilderness. Even if we add the extra criterion that we're talking about gangster films set in recent history, we're only talking about eleven years since Casino, a film that few fans would rank in Scorsese's premier league.
The Departed was greeted by a wash of outrageously positive praise, a tone that the American blogger and film critic Jim Emerson characterised as having an air of "Good boy, Marty. You stick to your gangster movies..." It is dismaying to note that some reviews, such as Jonathan Romney's in the Independent on Sunday, end by noting that Scorsese's next project (Silence, penned in for release in 2008) centres on Jesuit priests in 17th-century Japan, intended to be read as a note of dismay that Scorsese is going back to such unmacho territory. For me, the idea of Martin Scorsese tackling Catholicism for the first time since The Last Temptation of Christ (1988) is a more dramatic event than him returning to the gangster genre, and despite the small ripples of controversy The Departed has caused over its strong language, bloody violence and use of racial and sexual slurs, exposing his worth to further criticism from the Religious Right after getting death threats for his previous Christian-themed film shows far greater courage and daring.
All of this is a lengthy preamble to the opinion that, while I do not want to erase the considerable achievements of Gangs of New York and The Aviator (2004), The Departed is probably Scorsese's best film since Goodfellas, and if it isn't quite up there with, say, Taxi Driver (1976), The King of Comedy (1983) and Raging Bull (1980) it does not fall far short of that standard.
Like his fellow American maverick David Lynch, Scorsese is interested in genre without being in thrall to it, so it would be a mistake to read The Departed as a straight noir tribute in the way that, say, Bound (1996) or Sin City (2005) invite that interpretation. Nevertheless, it is worth noting that early 2006 saw the DVD reissue in Britain of a small clutch of noirs on DVD, all of which Scorsese has praised in the past. Body and Soul (1947) has already been cited by the great man as a key influence on Raging Bull, but it's Call Northside 777 (1947) and Force of Evil (1948) that offer the keys to Scorsese's noir scolarship, and the key to understanding where The Departed falls in this genre.
Call Northside 777 is a documentary noir, which in this case does not mean a documentary with the feel of a noir (that would be, say, Nick Broomfield's Heidi Fleiss - Hollywood Madam [1995] or Biggie and Tupac [2002]), it means a film based on details of actual cases and set in some sort of public institution. The nearest contemporary equivalent, in terms of both setting and loose factual basis, would be Jerry Bruckheimer's CSI franchise.
The documentary noir genre is rarely mentioned in retrospectives of the wider film noir genre - perhaps its focus on crusading heroes and law and order is seen as being retrograde these days. Nevertheless, the best such pictures are both great entertainment and a great snapshot of their time, reflecting the state of play in the newspaper trade (Call Northside 777), the police (1954's Dragnet, later spun off into a long-running TV show), the FBI (The House on 42nd Street, 1946), even the mental health profession (Samuel Fuller's celebrated Shock Corridor, 1963).
Perhaps the documentary noir The Departed most closely resembles is the 1948 thriller T-Men, which tracked a treasury agent moving through the underworld. For the first time, the documentary noir's hero was not the honest, crusading figures Jimmy Stewart played in Call Northside 777 or The FBI Story (1958), but a more corruptible, troubled figure in line with the ground broken by Double Indemnity (1944) and Detour (1946).
Here, we have Leonardo DiCaprio and Matt Damon as two kids from the same neighbourhood, both looking to escape their pasts. In a way, they represent the tensions in the documentary noir genre, with each given their own contradictory past. DiCaprio can count himself as having come fully of age as an actor in the role of Billy Costigan, a man whose family is steeped in violence and corruption, and sees the Boston State Police as his best route out. Damon, meanwhile, gives a perfectly slippery and creepy performance as Colin Sullivan, entranced from an early age by the money and glamour of the gangland life, and voluntarily choosing the fate that so horrified Henry Hill in Goodfellas: he takes the side of the law, but this time he does so in order to subvert it from the inside.
Costigan is the more morally upright of the two heroes, and can stand as the audience surrogate. However, his determination to stay on the right side of the law is constantly tested, both by the cynicism of his commanding officer Dignam (Mark Wahlberg, a truly remarkable film-stealing performance) who sees him as another Irish hood looking to wash his hands clean, and the more direct temptations of the gang he goes undercover in. He is capable of sudden and horrifying bursts of violence - his attack on two people harrassing a corner-shop owner is as gruesome and disturbing as the opening murder in Goodfellas or the torture scene in Gangs of New York - yet he remains just about sympathetic, something which can't be said of Sullivan, who thinks he can wear and discard new moral standards like clothes, and slowly emerges as the most dangerous character in the story.
The two young men are trapped between competing father figures, just as Force of Evil sublimated nationwide fears into one relationship between ideologically opposed brothers. On the side of good, we have Martin Sheen's kindly, almost grandfatherly Police Chief Queenan, whose care for his charges is so great that he seems to invisibly flinch at every insult Dignam tosses their way. On the side of evil, we have Jack Nicholson as gangleader Frank Costello, and though his screentime cannot be more than twenty minutes in total, it is Jack's performance that defines the film.
It is - even for Nicholson - a big, big performance, and even if we didn't know that some of the grace notes were added by the actor, we would be able to guess. Would Scorsese, or his screenwriter William Monaghan, be likely to suggest that Costello jokingly threaten Sullivan with a ten-inch dildo? Would either man have come up with moments where, in the course of Costello venting his fears about the possibility of a rat in the organisation, the godfather quotes Henry IV, catches and eats a fly and sets fire to a table? Such a performance sounds like rank hammery on the page, and there is something decidedly excessive about it on screen. But it's excessive enough; both to match the violence Scorsese orchestrates, and to add a layer of the mythic and operatic to the film.
The mythic was sometimes a factor of noir (cf. Kiss Me Deadly, 1957), as was the psychoanalytic (Spellbound, 1945), and they're also key aspects of Scorsese's characters. Think of Travis Bickle, Jake LaMotta, Howard Hughes - men with dreams of great power and influence, brought low by their own psychological hangups. Both Costigan and Sullivan are classic Scorsese heroes in this way - after Sullivan spends his first night with his kindly girlfriend Maddy (Vera Farmiga, charming and charismatic), she reassures him that "all men have moments like that", while Costigan's is even more tantalizingly hinted at. At the beginning of the film he attends his mother's funeral, and sees a particularly lavish bouquet from Costello. Perhaps they were just friends, but Costigan's expression of instinctive revulsion suggests otherwise (and this plot theme will bite his rival Sullivan hard later on in the film, but I'm not saying how. Nuh-uh. You have to watch the film).
And the beginning, in its own write, is worth pencilling a full review of. When the eerie opening bars of 'Gimme Shelter' by the Rolling Stones break through onto the soundtrack, and we see Nicholson striding like a ghost through Boston's Irish districts intoning a horrible, offensive, funny and frightening monologue, the audience knows it's in the presence of a classic Scorsese moment, a match of music and moment to match 'Sunshine of Your Love' in Goodfellas or 'Be My Baby' in Mean Streets.
Actually, maybe this answers the question of why Scorsese's mafia movies are venerated above his equally good work in other genres. They're simply more energetic - the work of one of the world's most technically adept directors and the brilliant professionals he surrounds himself with (mention should be made of veteran editor Thelma Schoonmaker, turning in her usual mercurial work) suddenly opening his entire box of tricks on the audience. The Departed features iris-ins, iris-outs, jump cuts, whip pans, freeze-frames, changes of film stock, archive footage and POV shots - yet so does the average Guy Ritchie movie. The difference is Ritchie uses it to disguise the story, whereas Scorsese uses it to underline the story.
The Departed is full of Freudian doubling and identity crises. Most of its cast operate in some kind of a double act - despite having almost no screentime together, it's obvious that DiCaprio and Damon are meant as mirror images of each other, and likewise Nicholson forms a fruitful and very funny partnership with his number two Mr French (Ray Winstone, as good as ever). But kudos to whoever decided Mark Wahlberg and Alec Baldwin would make such a good paring - their delightfully rude and cranky cops bag most of the funny lines, and the sheer unlikeliness of the pairing etches a place in the memory on its own.
It should be clear now that the plot of The Departed is a tricky beast to unpick, and one major benefit of the starry casts Scorsese assembles these days is that they're very helpful in reminding you who's who. At the same time, it is responsibly complex, and Scorsese never leaves a loose end dangling without being aware of it. What, for example, are we to make of the ending? Is it happy or sad? The final shot comes with one smirky visual joke, yet is also a grim reminder of the price people in the underworld pay for their riches and lifestyles, and the final line - "Okay" - offers one last shrug of moral compromise in a film that, above all else, shows the terrible consequences of cutting out the moral dimension from success, and chasing materialism for its own sake. Maybe we should welcome that Jesuit movie with open arms after all?
(Will reply to comments later)