Acclaimed director Martin Scorsese's latest opus is
The Departed, a gangster story set in Boston rather than his more typical New York. The movie tells the story of two moles, one a cop who has infiltrated Frank Costello's gang and gotten close to the man, and another a man close to Frank Costello who has infiltrated the police force and is working his way up the ranks. Leo DiCaprio plays Bill Costigan, the undercover cop. Matt Damon plays Colin Sullivan, the mole in the police force. Jack Nicholson plays Costello Both Costello and the police know they each have moles in their organizations and the movie plays out as a cat and mouse game with each increasingly desperate to avoid detection.
I have to be honest, I've never been a huge Scorsese fan. He's certainly made his share of great movies:
Taxi Driver,
Raging Bull, and the severely under appreciated
Age of Innocence, among others. But he's also made his share of duds and disappointments. Admittedly when he's good, he's awesome. Unfortunately there's too much inconsistency in his body of work for me to be a rabid fan.
I'm not really sure where I would rank this film. The acting is phenomenal. Scorsese pulls together a superb cast--DiCaprio, Damon, Nicholson are the leads, but in support are Martin Sheen, Alec Baldwin, Mark Wahlberg, and a solid list of character actors--and they all give top notch performances. There's not a slouch in there. The one knock I would give would be for Wahlberg (who, ironically, is the only actor in the cast to get an Oscar nomination), but it wouldn't be for his performance but rather the way his character was written, which just seemed a bit too much over the top.
One note, though, to both the cast of this film and any future film set in Boston. Not every person who lives in Boston speaks with a Boston accent. I lived there for six years. Granted some do, but why does just about every male actor with a significant speaking part attempt the accent? Unsurprisingly, Damon and Wahlberg--both from Boston--do the best. It's pretty annoying when everyone in the cast is trying to do it, not always consistently, and certainly not always successfully. I've definitely heard worse, but still.
While the acting is fantastic, the directing seems a bit unfocused. The film meanders around. The opening act is confused and kind of sloppy. There even seem to be scenes from the future. We meet and have a few scenes of Leo in the office of the undercover force as a clean faced kid where he gets his assignment and accepts it, but in the middle there's a scene of him visiting his dieing mother where he's got the beard and hard look that we will see later during his time with the gang. There is a token female in the cast, who happens to fall for both moles, but she is so poorly drawn it seems her only purpose is to be on the receiving end of a sex scene with DiCaprio.
The film is so sloppily assembled, they don't even wrap obvious things up. Near the end, DiCaprio and token woman have a scene where Costigan gives her a package that she is not to open unless something happens to him. This is a big scene. What's in the package? Who knows. The movie immediately forgets there ever was a package. I understand the idea of the MacGuffin, but this is ridiculous.
And the ending, while having a very good closing shot (the Massachusetts State House roof, suggesting Sullivan's ambitions, gleaming in the distance shown through an apartment window, with a rat walking across the balcony railing) comes out of nowhere.
The writing isn't too bad. Writing is the one area of film that I think has been consistently suffering for years. So many good actors, so many good directors, so many big budgets to allow film makers to indulge their visions, but writing consistently lets movies down. As I said, I thought the gruff character Wahlberg plays was too over the top. And the token female is, well, a token. But that happens
all the time. Other than that, the writing was good.
So, in the end, I can praise the film for the quality of acting. But not much else.
Labels: movies, reviews
