Movie Review: The Departed - Oscar's Best and Scorsese's Weakest

In view of its Oscar win, taking re-look at The Departed might be appropriate. I don’t think this is Martin Scorsese’s greatest work, but this will go down in history as the movie that made the Academy kiss and make up with one of the premier movie directors working in Hollywood. Apart from Best Director and Best Picture, William Monahan won for his adapted screenplay and Thelma Schoonmaker, a lifelong colleague of Scorsese, won for best editing.

I saw the movie on DVD a few weeks back. It just got released in Chennai, theatres obviously hoping to exploit the Oscar spoils.

Long after the movie was over, I keep hearing Jack Nicholson. "In this country, we don't come to a business meeting with automatic weapons, because in this country that don't add inches to your dick. It gets you in jail," he tells Chinese businessmen trying to buy stolen microprocessors from him.

Jack is playing Frank Costello, a mafia head based in Boston. But he is really playing himself or the screen persona that he has developed over the years. Not even Martin Scorsese, who has finally made a movie that audiences and critics alike have come to expect of him, can rein Jack in. Sometimes the swagger in Jack's tone is delicious, but in a couple of scenes it does grate a bit. Especially when he and DiCaprio are discussing the rat in their gang.

Scorsese has based his movie on the script of Infernal Affairs, a wildly popular Hong Kong film. Which is to say that screenwriter William Monahan said that he didn't see the original, instead choosing to just write his script based on the script of Infernal Affairs.

Jack gets the best of Monahan's lines; some of them will no doubt go on to become as famous as Travis's (Robert De Niro) monologues in Taxi Driver. The story revolves around Bill Costigan and Collin Sullivan played by Leonardo DiCaprio and Matt Damon. Collin is groomed from his early teens by Costello and he becomes the gang's man inside the Boston police department. Costigan, whose uncle is a don, wants to join the police department but is forced to go undercover within the Costello gang.

In his speech at the Oscars, Scorsese said this was the first movie he made with a plot and that might be true. It is impossible to write the plot for a movie like Goodfellas.

Scorsese, much more than Coppola, is the granddaddy of mafia movies. Much like Goodfellas, The Departed is not romantic. There is no glorification of violence. Rather, the end that most characters meet in the movie is a sort of moral lecture Scorsese is making; for instance, violence begets violence. But it is incredibly interesting anyway.