REVIEW: The Departed

I saw Martin Scorsese's The Departed in mid-December at the second-run Regency Academy Theaters in Pasadena.

The first thing I noticed about this film is how overwhelmingly white (some would say aggressively racist) it is. The very first lines of voice-over dialogue by 3-time Academy Award winner Jack Nicholson casually includes the word "n-gg-r" and other racially derogatory epithets (I think "sp-c" and "w-p" were also included). It's difficult to recall a single Black face in the entire movie.

One of the central themes of William Monahan's Oscar-nominated adaptation of the Hong Kong action thriller Infernal Affairs (2002) is tribalism. This theme manifests itself in a variety of incarnations. Just some of the examples which leap to mind are cops versus robbers, "good guys" versus "bad guys," crooked cops versus decent cops, college-educated versus street smart, Irish versus non-Irish, "us" versus "them."

The story follows Billy Costigan (Leonardo Dicaprio) and Colin Sullivan (Matt Damon) as two South Boston boys who join the Massachusetts State Police and follow parallel but divergent career paths. Damon's character becomes a rapidly rising star of the department and joins an elite Special Investigations Unit led by Alec Baldwin while secretly reporting to Jack Nicholson's Frank Costello, the all-powerful neighborhood mob boss. Dicaprio's character takes on a special deep undercover assignment in Costello's crime syndicate under the aegis of two decent cops, Queenan (Martin Sheen) and Dignan (Mark Wahlberg). Queenan and Dignan are the only people on the Massachusetts State Police Force who know Costigan's true identity as a police informant.

The symmetric nature of the two main characters, a cop who is undercover with the mob (Dicaprio) and a cop who is undercover for the mob (Damon) is fascinating to watch. Of course the two characters are connected via common acquaintances: mob boss Frank Costello, and police psychiatrist (and love interest) played by Vera Farmigia. Farmigia's role is particularly shallowly written. As the other half put it, her character is not really a person, she is a trope for the notion that "women can see through into the core of a man's soul." Farmigia's character's understanding of the nature of her boyfriend's character is a barometer of the film's choice between the Costigan (Dicaprio) and Sullivan (Damon) characters.

The acting is excellent throughout with particularly outstanding performances by Wahlberg (he actually grew up in South Boston and has the most authentic accent in the entire large cast, because it's absolutely real), Damon, Dicaprio and Nicholson.

GRADE: A-.