This will come as a surprise to many: I am not a Martin Scorsese fan; not because I don’t like his work, but because I don’t know his work. Gangs of New York, Mean Streets, Raging Bull, Taxi Driver (which I’ve always wanted to see), The Aviator; when everyone talks about them, I listen. I have seen Casino.
Anyway, today I saw his latest offering, The Departed. There’s a lot of talk about how his time has come for an Oscar, and I clearly could neither agree nor disagree. I did hear that The Departed is based on an earlier film called Infernal Affairs, which sounds like an affair that goes on and on, and that gets more complicated the longer it drags.
Why is The Departed so titled. Is it a reference to Leonardo de Cappuccino’s character’s departed family? Or is it because … dare I give the film away? Both references seem equally plausible to me, but I will not discuss the latter, lest any of you have not yet seen the film. It’s Cappuccino’s departed family, the males really, whose cross he now bears, whose reputations precede him and determine the job he is assigned as a new policeman, who has actually failed the academy.
The Departed is extremely well-told; I know this because the 150 minutes seemed to go by quite quickly, despite the urgency of my pressing bladder. I was extremely tense throughout the film, firstly because the air-conditioner was set to somewhere around 17˚ Celsius and I tensed my muscles to conserve as much heat as possible, and secondly because there was a lot of point blank shooting in the forehead going on. Cappuccino was taking many pills to deal with this in-the-face violence, and I started to wonder whether viewers needed to go for post traumatic stress counselling, too. I guess loads of up close and personal shooting is a sure-fire (!) way to create tension and keep your audience on the edge of their seats, so I will not condemn Scorsese for using a sure fire technique. Tried and tested …
I warmed to Cappuccino’s character. Not just because he’s the good guy, but his character was real. Reviewers have mentioned his growth, but I can’t get past What’s Eating Gilbert Grape. That’s not necessarily a bad thing, it’s just that that was the first time I saw him, and I was impressed. And after that he seemed to only play standard heroes, which was really boring. His character has more depth here than in Titanic, which I put myself through one night when it was on tv. (an aside: I don’t think Cappuccino will age well.)
Matt Damon on the other hand, wasn’t convincing. He was so obviously the bad guy, I felt like he was acting. He was so obviously duplicitous, I couldn’t understand how no-one else around him couldn’t see that. I think his characterisation should have been more subtle, based purely on the storyline.
Mark Wahlberg, Alec Baldwin and the script were fun. Martin Sheen was warm and I was sorry his character didn’t go all the way. The gaping hole at the end of the story was: how did Marky Mark, in his plastic slippers, know???? And what was in the envelope? It felt like the director ran out of steam and thought, it’s a movie; they’ll know it’s just a movie, everything doesn’t have to make sense in the end. That’s okay when it’s a movie about ideas and about being clever, but this wasn’t one of those, so it truly felt like Scorsese was no longer interested in telling the story, nor in telling a good story. He must’ve been tired, and saying to himself, “If only this infernal affair would end.”
