The Departed

Preface: I apologize in advance for the length of this post, I had no intention of writing so much, but since I have, I don't see where I can pare it down and still say it all. And as usual, spoilers lie ahead, for this film and one other, so be forewarned.
So without further adieu...

The Departed

To see it, or not to see it that is the question. I know plenty of people I can recommend this for, because I know they will enjoy it, like most of the guys at work. I know that my parents would walk out 15 minutes into the movie. Both reactions are perfectly valid given the material, but it makes it difficult when people ask should I see it or not. I would not recommend it for Ma & Pa, Grandma or anyone with a weak stomach because it is incredibly vulgar and incredibly violent. So anyone turned off by those things should stay away. Far, far away. Go see Open Season.

As for the film itself, I didn't particularly care for it, though I'll start with the aspects of the film I enjoyed, so that you don't have to go in search of the niceties once I start ranting about things that bothered me, and you can get out once you've had your fill.

The Good:
I was wrong in my assumption about the length of the film. About 2 weeks back I said I thought the running time of just over 2.5 hours was going to be too long, but it was not. The story stayed interesting for almost the entire time with virtually no parts dragging, an impressive feat of screenwriting story structure by William Monahan.

The performances of Leonardo DiCaprio, Alec Baldwin, and Mark Wahlberg are all great, the standout performances in the film, especially Leo. He gets a bad rap, inanely, because he was in Titanic, but he is a very talented actor who's still improving, and he's riding on Scorsese now the way DeNiro did in the 70's (and we know how that turned out for him). Jack Nicholson starts out with the makings a great performance for the first 45 minutes or so...then there's the opera/cocaine scene. If you've seen it you know the one I'm talking about. From that point on, his performance just seems rather affected. (The fly: need I say more?)

Well, it seems I've exhausted my praise of the film, and have jumped into the rant, so here we go:
Continuing on about the performances, Matt Damon, Martin Sheen, Ray Winstone (as Mr. French), and the female cop shrink are all given too little to work with, so try as they might, their characters never reach the level of the aforementioned characters. The female cop shrink is an interesting idea for a character, a psychologist who is subconsciously drawn to violent men with identity issues, but she is too unimportant to the plot to explore this in much depth, which is unfortunate. While I'm on the characters, can anyone, please, name me a Scorsese film where the main character isn't a paranoid, sociopathic loner and the script isn't littered with jokes that are either racist (niggers, chinks, guineas...must we, again?) or misogynistic ("period" jokes are pretty much never funny). Rehash. I know, it's supposed to be a device to infuse his film with narrative fidelity, but then again, Henry Beecher, early American abolitionist, said, "Every artist dips his brush in his own soul, and paints his own nature into his pictures."

About midway through the film I said to myself, "This film has far too much music." (And yes, I said it out loud..good thing there were only 2 other people 10 rows back, they might've shushed me). It just seemed like Scorsese was doing his best Cameron Crowe/Tarantino impression, saying "Look how wide-ranging my music tastes are; I have The Rolling Stones, Patsy Cline, and Nas on the same soundtrack!" There is nothing wrong with using that music, but it seems to be put in in a slapdash manner and feels incessant. There is never a reprieve from the cacophony of music, dialogue, and gunshots, and maybe that's a stylistic choice, designed to give the viewer the feel of being trapped in this movie, the way the characters are trapped in their world, with no room to breath. If it is done for that reason, I think it's the wrong choice. Hitchcock said the viewer needs room to breath, even if the characters don't get to, and I agree with that. The audience can't stay on edge the entire time, you get sensitized and that's when you fall into sloppy shoot-em-up endings to shock the audience, because they are too exhausted to be carried with suspense any longer. Before I leave the discussion of sound design/editing though, there were some edits where the dialogue or music of one scene bleeds into the next scene (bleeding motif perhaps?) and while this technique can work, here it just seems choppy.

Speaking of choppy, that brings me to the editing. The first 30 minutes of the film are so stylistically indulgent (2 iris wipes, zoom out from high-above angle, choppy cross-cut training montage sequences, the "title" card 10-15 minutes in, etc) that the viewer can't help but feel disjointed, and maybe that's intentional (Scorsese is the most knowledgeable filmmaker, in terms of craft, working, so I don't believe there are too many accidents in his films) but I was certainly taken out of the film experience by the style early on. He is clearly trying to emulate the style of the Hong-Kong action film on which this film was based, but he just doesn't have that in him, so the entire stylistic approach is a misfire. It never feels connected.

David Bordwell points to a technique he calls "intense continuity", wherein so much of the film, particularly dialogue exchanges between characters sitting down, is "close-upped" that the performances exist almost entirely in the facial expressions and line readings, and almost completely takes away the physical performance, use of props, gesture, relative positioning, staging, etc. These things are minimized so that the director doesn't have to account for the constant position of limbs, props, extras, etc on screen (continuity). The characters are forced to sit in relative stillness, forcing the camera and editing to add kinetic energy to the scene, rather than the actors. Scorsese is known to shoot dozens of takes and piece together the best performances of the lines, disregarding visual continuity, likely in a nod to his appreciation of Antonioni and French New Wave films. This approach is certainly one he and Thelma (his editor) have down to a science (see Cate Blanchett in The Aviator), but it doesn't always work (Jack's uneven performance in this serves as evidence of that).

The characters don't seem to have any qualms about their actions. No one seems to have any concern for human life, no one seems concerned about law, civility, or morality. It's so nihilistic. There are no such things as consequences. Events are not connected, things just happen, and if we happen to think some occurrences are unfair, it's our own fault for believing in foolish ideas like fairness, rationality, and morality. Think of the death of Anthony Anderson's character. What purpose does it serve? To show us that sometimes people die irrationally and that life is pure absurdity?

It is well within the rights of the filmmakers to make a film about a situation of such utter hopelessness, but aren't there enough films out there doing this? Where are the films pointing us toward something better, showing us what's wrong and then a way toward a better life, society, world? Or is the world so far gone that is past the point of redemption, and our artists can only reflect that to us? In his Oscar acceptance speech this past year, Paul Haggis quoted legendary playwright Bertold Brecht, saying, "Art is not a mirror held up to reality, but a hammer with which to shape it." The difference between a cynic and a nihilist is the ultimate belief in the possibility of goodness in man, even if it's buried somewhere deep inside, and a hope that it can (and ideally will) come out and make a difference for the better.

The ending aims to make the film a tragedy. The one comparison that came to mind when I saw it was Ran, Kurosawa's 1985 epic re-tooling of King Lear (you should see it if you haven't, it is one of the most beautiful films ever made). In both films all of the principle characters die, except one (Tango in Ran, Mark Wahlberg in this film). The difference being in Ran, the stakes are clear; now that everyone is dead, the kingdom is headed to a state of instability because the king and all of his sons are dead. It is every bit as nihilistic as this film, the never-ending cycle of violence and absurdity of life/death are on full display, but is delivered with a helping of pathos missing here. In The Departed, Costello and all of his 'sons' are dead, but this seems to have little overall impact to anyone else. They stayed mostly amongst their own underworld and the only real outside contact they had was with the police, who were also their men (and his gang was infested with cops). So you had cops as gangsters shooting at gangsters as cops, but as Leo says, ultimately, what's the difference? Essentially, that's the way I felt about the film. I saw it, but I could have just as easily not seen it, but what's the difference?