Martin Scorsese has crafted brilliant, galvanizing movies about everything from the Dalai Lama to upper-crust 19th century Manhattanites, but his unparalleled skill for creating vivid, extremely violent tales of organized crime has painted him into a corner of sorts. His new crime drama ""The Departed"" is his most vital, exhilarating work since ""GoodFellas."" To call it the best movie of the year would be faint praise—""The Departed"" is one of Scorsese's greatest films and, accordingly, one of the best films ever made.
Although it's set in the mean streets of Boston instead of New York, ""The Departed"" is vintage, visceral Scorsese. A remake of the 2002 Hong Kong thriller ""Infernal Affairs,"" the film stars Leonardo DiCaprio and Matt Damon as moles on opposite sides of the law. DiCaprio is Billy Costigan, a volatile young man assigned to infiltrate infamous Irish mobster Frank Costello's (Jack Nicholson) crew for the Boston State Police's Special Investigations Unit. Colin Sullivan (Damon), an ambitious, seemingly straight-laced cop, is Costello's protAcgAc, picked at an early age to keep the gangster one step ahead of Boston's finest. It becomes clear early on that both sides are aware of a mole's presence, and as the police steadily close in on Costello, a situation that starts out tense gets progressively riskier for all parties.
This is an incredibly ingenious plot, and Scorsese relishes tightening the screws and milking every hazardous complication and double-cross for all the suspense it's worth. The cast is large and absolutely fantastic—Ray Winstone is perfect as Costello's viciously efficient muscle, Martin Sheen and Mark Wahlberg make a hilariously foul-mouthed good cop/bad cop twosome and Alec Baldwin steals the movie's two funniest lines in a smaller cop role.
Vera Farmiga also shines as the police shrink who becomes romantically entangled with both Costigan and Sullivan, which is notable considering that her character could have easily come across as little more than an irritatingly coincidental plot device.
In fact, it's the scenes with Farmiga that allow the movie to catch its breath for a moment. Far from being the obligatory female point in an obligatory love triangle, Farmiga provides a useful checkpoint for each main character in this testosterone-driven, breakneck narrative. She represents the tempting pull of legitimacy for Damon, who she sees more, and serves as DiCaprio's lifeline to whatever shred of sanity he has left after being forced to do increasingly worse deeds for Costello. ""The Departed,"" for all of its messy violence and tantalizing moral ambiguity, is a neat study of duality. DiCaprio and Damon's double lives mirror each others' down to the asshole second-in-command they have to contend with, and Farmiga's character is the catalyst at the center of it.
As tempting as it is to compare this film to ""GoodFellas"" and ""Casino,"" ""The Departed"" is tonally and structurally its own beast. Yes, all the Scorsese hallmarks are present here—the pitch-perfect soundtrack (which includes his third use of the Rolling Stones' ""Gimme Shelter""), the outbursts of sudden brutality, elaborate camerawork—but it's in service of a more standard thriller storyline. Most of Scorsese's undisputed masterpieces, especially ""GoodFellas"" and ""Raging Bull,"" concern the rise of the protagonist in the energetic first half, and that protagonist's inevitable decline into drugs, madness, paranoia, etc. in the sobering, depressing second half. ""The Departed"" is one big decline, a riveting journey that careens toward an ending that will be bad for almost everyone, not just the conflicted principles. But it's also one of Scorsese's funniest pictures to date, thanks to the rich, hilarious script by William Monahan (which is even more surprising considering that his last screenplay was for ""Kingdom of Heaven""), which often consists of nonstop macho one-liners.
Nicholson is dynamic and outlandish as Costello, although he isn't as memorably cruel and charming a villain as Daniel Day-Lewis' Bill the Butcher in ""Gangs of New York."" Damon gives a wonderfully oily performance as Sullivan, a man who is so convincing as a suave ass-kisser that he barely seems like a bad guy. DiCaprio is even better as Costigan; although he's steadily been chipping away at his ""Titanic"" pretty-boy image for almost 10 years, his gritty, superb performance here promises to erase it entirely.
The highest, simplest praise a critic can give a film is the phrase, ""It reminds us why we love the movies,"" or something like that. Will Scorsese finally win that coveted Best Director Oscar this year? Maybe, maybe not, but to answer that question with a question, who really cares? If Scorsese never wins an Oscar, that's a blight on the Academy, not him. ""The Departed"" is a taut masterpiece that ranks alongside the best in the Scorsese canon. And, most importantly, it reminds us why we love the movies in the first place.
