THE DEPARTED
Kurt Vonnegut once said: “We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful what we pretend to be.” If you do it for long enough, sometimes you don’t even have to pretend any more. People tend to think of themselves as two people; there’s the façade we present to others and then there’s the true self, the person we are when alone. But what makes one more real than the other? It's a subjective world, where who we are is simply what others perceive us to be. We succeed when we are thought of as successful, fail when we are failures.
“Twenty years after an Irishman couldn’t get a job, we had the Presidency” says crime boss Frank Costello (Jack Nicholson) in Martin Scorsese’s intriguing gang world opus The Departed. Of course, Kennedy was fantastically rich, a blue-blood prince of American royalty; it didn’t prevent his brains from being smeared across the windshield of a convertible, either. “Man makes his own way. No one gives it to you. You have to take it.” Frank still believes in the American Dream, or at least a form that excuses his own windshield-smearing.
Like the other quintessential New York City filmmaker, it seems a change of scenery has done Scorsese some good. While Woody Allen set his tale of duplicitous class warfare/envy in London (Match Point), the third film into Scorsese’s DiCaprio Period relocates just up the coast to Boston, Massachusetts. Freud once claimed the Irish were the only people impervious to psychoanalysis; Scorsese goes about proving him wrong. The Departed consists of two parallel, frequently overlapping stories of two state police cadets recruited as moles: Billy Costigan (Leonardo DiCaprio) is assigned to infiltrate Costello’s Southie mob while ***** Sullivan (Matt Damon, phenomenal) is enlisted by Costello to infiltrate the organized crime unit of the police. Their paths cross as each try to root out the other (and bed the same woman) before their dual identities can be revealed.
So much of The Departed is compulsively watchable. Scorsese demonstrates a refreshing disregard for conventional pacing or structure; it’s fantastic and (protracted conclusion aside) it works. The film is the yin to the yang of United 93 - where the latter removes God from human tragedy, The Departed is Catholic to its rosary-clutching core. There is no moral authority in the cautionary world it creates where cop and criminal are separated by uniform but not much else. “I’ll always have a job,” Sullivan tells his girlfriend, Madolyn (Vera Farmiga). “I’ll just arrest innocent people.” It’s of particular relevance to the conflicts we currently find ourselves entangled (the film is a rather overt parable at times on the War on Terror, but one pleasingly short on didactism); just when we should distinguish ourselves from our enemies, we instead fashion ourselves in their cruel image. Even this lapsed Catholic knows: to be good you must do good things, even if it’s just pretend. We are all devils, except some of us are hypocritical devils who cloak their horns with halos.
Scorsese and The Departed ask that we take a good look in the mirror – at our fears, our paranoia, our windshields smeared. What we think is a mask just might be our own face.
Interesting footnote: The Departed is a remake of the 2002 Hong Kong thriller Infernal Affairs. That film did exceptional well at the Asian box office, ultimately garnering a sequel and a prequel. The director, Andrew Lau, had this to say about the remake: "Of course I think the version I made is better, but the Hollywood version is pretty good too. I have to admit that Martin Scorsese is very smart. He made the Hollywood version more attuned to American culture." Andy Lau, an actor in the film, said “The Departed was too long and it felt as if Hollywood had combined all three Infernal Affairs movies together." Asked to rate it, he gave it an 8/10.
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