The Departed Review

Click here to read my previous review of the Great Dictator

Number 53 on the top greatest 1000 films of all time is Martin Scorsese's 2006 crime thriller: the Departed.

Set in Boston, the Departed focuses on the lives of two different characters: Billy Costigan (Leonardo Dicaprio) a rookie crop sent deep undercover to infiltrate Frank Costello's (Jack Nicholson) criminal organisation.  However, unknown to the polie, Costello has his own mole in the police force: Colin Sullivan (Matt Damon) a rising star whom Costello has groomed from a young age.  When each side discovers that they have a traitor in their midst, both Costigan and Sullivan seek to unmask each other before they are killed.

The Departed provides a raw and brutal perspective into Irish organised crime.  I am writing my dissertation on the Godfather, which I would count as my favourite book/film, so I have a strong interest in Italian American organised crime.  I found it refreshing to watch a film about a different sort of crime.  Similarly, to Goodfellas, Scorsese is unrelenting in his depiction of the viciousness of crime and what this can do to a person.

Nowhere is this more evident than in Leonardo Dicaprio's character, Billy Costigan.  Dicaprio is great in this role.  He portrays the terror that Billy feels upon the stresses of working undercover.  If Billy is discovered, then he will be killed.  The pressures of his role really begin to take their toll, as Billy slowly begins to break down under the strain.

Like any good crime film, the Departed blurs the distinction between hero and villain.  Billy Costigan's superiors Captain Queenan (Martin Sheen) and Staff Sergeant Dignam (Mark Wahlburg) effectively blackmail him into going undercover.  In how Colin Sullivan's character is a mole for Costello, he becomes a hero of sorts having to balance his real and fake identities.

Jack Nicholson is terriying as the psychotic mob boss Frank Costllo.  A very far cry from the sage and collected Vito Corleone, Costllo is volent, unrpedictable and despicable.   This is partly due to Nicholson's great portrayal of the character.   Nicholson reportedly made many bizarre suggestions to develop Costello's character.  One of these was showering hookers with cocaine and another is arranging to meet Sullivan in a porn theatre and surprising him with a strap-on.  Nicholson made these suggestions to add to the unpredictability of Costello's character.  This unpredictability made Costello all the more scarier of a villain.  I would argue that Nicholson is better in this villainous role than as Jack Torrence in the Shining or as the Joker in Batman.

One thing I really didn't like were Queenan and Dignam's characters.  For me, they bordered too closely on the good cop/ bad cop stereotype and they didn't seem very well-developed.  I really hated Dignam.  Granted, he is supposed to be an arsehole, but I think that Whalberg overplayed it to the extant that Dignam became a caricature of himself.

The film also isn't the easiest to follow and you do have to pay close attention to it.  This isn't really a problem until the end where four characters die in quick succession.  To quickly summarise, when Costigan finds out that Sullivan is the rat, he lures him to an empty apartment to arrest him, with another cop as backup.  However, before Billy can make the arrest, he and the other detective are shot dead by another police officer who is also one of Costello's moles.  Sullivan rewards this cop for preventing his arrest by killing him.  Upon returning home, Sullivan is then shot dead by Dignam, who has figured out that he was the rat.  Whilst Billy's death was an unexpected and good plot twist, it was slighly undone by how he was killed by such a minor character.  When the other police officer (whose name I still can't remember) walked onto screen, I was left scratching my head over who this character was and why he was so important.  This isn't helped by how he is killed immediately afterwards.

Rating: Awesome.

These shortcomings notwithstanding, the Departed is a powerful film that focuses on the darkest aspects of organised crime.  Similarly, to Goodfellas, the Departed is a crime film of Jurassic proportions.