Cods and Robbers: Some Thoughts on The Departed.

[uvula_fr_b4]

In honor of the fifth movie I've seen in a theatre this year (the others being The Inside Man, District B13, A Scanner Darkly, and Miami Vice), I thought I'd give some disjointed thoughts on/reactions to it, behind the cut.

Ladies and gentlemen, let us now pause for a moment to consider --- The Departed.

• The Departed is a remake of a surprisingly low-key 2002 Hong Kong action thriller, Infernal Affairs, which proved to be so popular over there that it inspired a sequel and a prequel. Is The Departed as good as Infernal Affairs? Mmmaybe; but I didn't see Infernal Affairs as much more than a mood piece anyway (albeit one with damn fine camerawork), and if all you're looking for in a cops-'n'-robbers movie is mood, The Departed, for all the attention that Scorsese devoted to selecting pop tunes to accentuate the score by Howard Shore, is less effective than the Miami Vice movie. Despite what some reviewers have said, the characterization in The Departed isn't any deeper than that in Infernal Affairs.
  
  
• Come to that, I fail to understand why so many reviewers are gushing that The Departed is the best (or at least, the "most fun") Martin Scorsese picture since Goodfellas. Obviously I'm in the minority on two fronts here: first, in my love for Gangs of New York (which I thought was way more "fun" than The Departed), which came out in 2002; second, in that I don't think that Goodfellas was all that and a bag of chips. Did I like it? Yes. Did I like it a helluva lot? Yes. Do I think that it's one of the greatest mob/Mafia movies ever made? Mmmaybe. Do I think that it's Scorsese's best mob movie? No; I have to give the nod to Mean Streets which, by virtue of its smaller scale, is able to bring its characters and their lives into a much sharper -- more biting and more bleak -- focus.
  
  
• Speaking of Gangs of New York, while it was fun watching Jack Nicholson play the heavy (Frank Costello, reportedly loosely based on real-life Boston Irish mob boss James "Whitey" Bulger, still a fugitive as of this writing) again, it was also a bit old hat; Nicholson has become a caricature of himself, and unless he really exerts himself -- as he did in Prizzi's Honor (a movie at least as good as Goodfellas and much better than The Departed) -- he can't really show us anything new. Daniel Day-Lewis' Bill the Butcher in Gangs of New York was much scarier and much more compelling than Nicholson's Frank.
  
  
• While Leonardo DiCaprio's Bill Costigan is essentially a reprise of his role in Gangs, he manages to effectively convey the downside of being a cop in deep undercover, enough to let you acknowledge, "Man, no way in hell would I want to do that." In that sense, The Departed does manage to rise above its simple thriller roots, but only just.
  
  
• This movie has made me realize that I've gone from being a DiCaprio basher to a DiCaprio supporter: for one thing, the media have stopped ramming him down our collective throats so energetically; and for another, he can act. Is he the greatest actor of his generation? Doubtful. But he can act, not merely strike a pose, which is what acting has degenerated to in too many movies. I didn't even mind seeing him in the trailer to the latest heart-in-the-right-place, dull-as-ditchwater Edward Zwick picture, Blood Diamond (with Jennifer Connelly and Djimon Hounsou), before The Departed started.
  
  
• Last comparison to Gangs, I promise: just as Scorsese cast an excellent British actor, equally capable in character or leading parts, in Gangs (the Irish actor Brendan Gleeson as political boss/gangleader "Monk" McGinn), so has he done in The Departed (the English actor Ray Winstone as Mr. French). While it's nice to see such actors continue to get work, and work in a movie that will likely raise their profile in the U.S., I could certainly wish that they had been given bigger parts in said high-profile movies.
  
  
• Vera Farmiga is definitely an actress to watch out for; she does about all that she possibly could with her part here. It helps that she embodies a Bruce Springsteen lyric: "You ain't a beauty, but hey, you're alright."
  
  
• The Departed is all about the dick. Well, the dick and the homosexual anxiety that goes with it. From the scenes of the two leads in their respective police academies, where Matt Damon's Colin Sullivan continually calls the firefighter cadets whom he and his fellow trainees play against in a football match "homos," to Nicholson's Frank's obsession with cock (for all his professed heterosexuality, he makes vulgar reference to the penis much more often than he does to any portion of the female anatomy), to Alec Baldwin's police commander Capt. Ellerby openly adjusting himself in front of his squad after saying that they would get Frank this time (and the entire squad, men and women, not batting an eye), to Baldwin's pep talk about marriage that he gives to Damon (the gist of which is that a wedding ring lets men see that "somebody can stand the sonofabitch," while women can see that "you've got some cash and your cock works;" be sure to listen to what part of Baldwin's spiel Damon responds to, and compare that to the "morning after" talk between Damon and Farmiga), to niggling little questions about male fertility, openly raised in the end about Frank and quietly raised about Colin, the penis and the male anxiety about what to do with it, is the major motif of The Departed. The secondary theme would be "Who's your daddy?," which is expressed in several different ways. (Tied in with this is the tertiary theme of paedophilia: Frank's paedophilia is good, or at least excusable, since he's interested in slipping it to little girls, while the paedophilia of the priests whom Frank twits is bad because they prey on little boys.) I suppose that Scorsese, his producers and the studio marketers didn't feel that calling the movie, say, "John Thomas" or "The Tallywhacker," would've been distinguished enough or saleable enough. But it sure as hell would've been more appropriate.
  
  
• Back to that Scorsese-supervised soundtrack: I have got to get a Dropkick Murphys album, I have just got to. I mean, goddamn.
  
  
• Last but not least: Mark Wahlberg's Sgt. Dignam has a last name almost the same as mine. Woo-hoo! Another triumph for the bog-cutters!