Rating: two stars (out of four)

It’s not hard to see why The Departed drew such strong acclaim.  It features a well-known cast of actors, even down to the nominal supporting roles, and is directed by a Hollywood favorite, Martin Scorsese.  Its plot concerns the well-mined territory of mobsters and cops facing off against each other, and the screenplay sparkles with some witty dialogue and clever insults.  Yet something feels terribly off here: though it’s intriguing and endlessly entertaining, it doesn’t feel like much of a movie in retrospect.  Repeated viewings reveal not just plot holes but plot impossibilities; and the movie, laced with flippancy and levity, doesn’t seem to take itself seriously enough for its subject matter.

A remake of the 2002 Hong Kong movie Infernal Affairs, the movie centers on the Massachusetts State Police Department’s Special Investigations Unit, headed by Captain Queenan (Martin Sheen), and its attempt to thwart a gang headed by Frank Costello (Jack Nicholson).  The set-up is loaded with promise: each group has infiltrated a mole into the other’s inner circle.  Billy Costigan (Leonardo DiCaprio) grew up around nothing but criminals.  Perhaps because of this, he wants to be a cop, but Queenan and his second-in-command Dignam (Mark Wahlberg) decide that his background makes him a perfect fit to be a mole inside Costello’s circle.

On the other hand, Colin Sullivan (Matt Damon) was raised a proper church-goer on the good side of town; perhaps because of this, he’s susceptible to Costello’s fatherly guidance during his youth.  Costello grooms Sullivan from youth to be his mole within the police unit (one of them, anyway).  The bulk of the movie follows DiCaprio and Damon trying to oust each other before they’re found.  In the meantime, Damon’s Sullivan is appointed as the internal affairs cop within the SUI, being asked to look for Costello’s mole—to find himself.  A psychiatrist named Madolyn (Vera Farmiga) gets involved with both men and further entangles the plot.

The potential for a great movie is here, but The Departed doesn’t deliver on its promises.  Its weak script is manifest in an overly flippant tone and terrible plot holes.  The film is far too slick for it’s own good, failing to achieve any level of gravitas.  It’s more concerned with telling us how funny Mark Wahlberg is, or how outrageous Nicholson’s props are, and it’s impossible to take The Departed seriously when it is so amused with itself.  It’s no coincidence that it couldn’t have taken place without present day technology (such as text messaging), because it reflects present culture’s fascination with overly-stylized, soulless, superficial products, ranging from TV shows to music to movies.  Yet everyone, from critics to the general public, mixed up the slickness and the comedy and the violence into a blender and assumed something pure came out.  Oh, look, Captain Queenan just fell hundreds of feet to his death, aren’t Martin Scorsese films just so gritty!

We live in an age when a movie can succeed with a few demonstrative moments even when it does very little thinking, because apparently audiences don’t care if a stiff breeze would collapse the plot.  Why, for example, does Sullivan make secret calls to Costello while walking through the halls of the police headquarters; and why does Costigan make secret calls to Queenan just a few feet out of range of his comrades?  How does nobody hear the numerous gunshots occurring in the showdown between Sullivan and  Costello until the former announces their whereabouts, and why was he even allowed to go after Costello alone?  I couldn’t really buy Costigan’s first defiance of Costello (leading up to his tryst with Madolyn), or the fact that the Chinese would have let Costello get away with his swindling.  But I was probably the most annoyed by the potentially fascinating street chase between Costigan and Sullivan fizzling into nothingness because the former’s phone rang to announce an incoming text—when he had just minutes before been receiving texts that caused the phone to vibrate.

Scorsese pumps the movie full of energy and color, which at times works to its advantage, as it’s endlessly watchable and full of some riveting scenes, such as the sequence leading up to Queenan’s death and the ultimate rooftop confrontation between Costigan and Sullivan.  Other times he tries too hard, as evidenced in the overly frequent use of music that likes to cut off sharply to make a point.  But it’s William Monahan’s script that truly sinks the film and makes it leave a bad taste in your mouth afterwards.

The script lays things out nicely enough at the outset, but it does take a while for the energy level to really rise, and the character development throughout leaves a lot to be desired.  Madolyn’s relationships with the two men don’t ever boil over into anything substantive, which is a shame, because, if nothing else, she represented a solid opportunity to flesh out their characters.  The film has to ascribe impotence to Sullivan to enable her to become interested in Costigan—an unlikely story, to be sure—and when she walks away from Sullivan in anger at a funeral, the film misses the obvious chance for her to deliver a devastating line.  And when Sullivan tells Costello that he’ll succeed at a task because “it involves lying, and I’m pretty good at that,” the line sounds so off that one suspects that its inclusion must only predict Madolyn later hearing it.

Elsewhere, as the film accelerates towards its climax, it is indeed intriguing to watch Sullivan try to make legitimate attempts to find the mole hidden within SUI.  But, too often, the film has to resort to its characters acting stupidly for things to fall into place.  Costello, for example, is way too naïve in his attempts to figure out Costigan’s loyalties: he foolishly assumes that if Sullivan hasn’t heard something in the office, Costigan couldn’t have given away his secrets, a particularly narrow-minded attitude especially considering that Sullivan knows that Queenan refuses to divulge any information about his undercovers.

On and on the contradictions go, particularly in one titillating but frustrating sequence wherein Costigan has his therapy session and flashes back to a meeting with Queenan and Dignam under a bridge.  You want to revel in DiCaprio’s acting and the sharpness of his words (“Two pills?  Great…why don’t you just give me a bottle of Scotch and a handgun to blow my fucking brains out!  Are we done with this psychiatry bullshit?”) but Farmiga’s struggles to find realism throw some cold water over the dream state.  And you can’t enjoy the encounter with Queenan and Dignam because of Dignam’s idiotic threat to erase the only proof remaining that Costigan’s a cop—as though you would say something like that to someone whose dangerous undercover service you wanted to continue.

DiCaprio and Damon clash in the film's best scene.

The film’s acting garnered the same effusive praise that the whole film did, but it’s uneven.  Farmiga looks awkward and out of her league as Madolyn, but a lot of the supporting characters do fine work, namely Alec Baldwin, Sheen, and Ray Winstone (as Costello’s number one).  However, two pivotal characters grate.  Wahlberg’s Dignam delivers a few amusing insults (“I’m the guy who does his job—you must be the other guy.”) but by the end, both the character and the performance remain so one-dimensional it almost becomes caricature.  There’s an irritating scene where Costigan is trying to talk to him from an airport about something constructive, and he can’t do anything but blow him off.

And Jack  Nicholson, though he looks the part, is so over-the-top that he’s wholly unbelievable.  Nearly every line and ridiculous facial expression (note the mimicking of a rat) Nicholson delivers with Oscar-seeking relish—he’s far more Nicholson, with all of his patented showiness and egotism, than Frank Costello.

Amidst all this, there is one redeeming aspect: Leonardo DiCaprio, who bumps it up a half-star or so.  Costello may be the brain of the movie, but DiCaprio is the heart.  DiCaprio’s Costigan slowly unravels over the anxiety his double life causes him, and he is so fantastic that you don’t stop to wonder how good he could have been if Nicholson (or Farmiga) had shown up.  Costigan’s tough on the outside, and he’s tougher on the inside than you might expect shortly into the movie.

DiCaprio unearths all the subtlety in a startlingly loaded, blistering performance.  In my review of The Basketball Diaries, I wrote that DiCaprio was “so good, it’s frankly a little scary,” and it’s the mark of a great actor that with each role he expands his repertoire and just gets better and better.  DiCaprio is so riveting here that he tops everything he’s done before, even his outstanding turn in Blood Diamond.  He officially grew up in 2006; no longer the impossibly young-looking teenage boy who melted girls’ hearts in Titanic or felt Robert De Niro’s wrath in This Boy’s Life, he’s now a man.

Sadly, Colin doesn’t measure up to Costigan, for various reasons.  He’s not nearly as interesting or well fleshed-out as Billy is.  Often, indeed, the motivations for his actions are unclear.  Is he, for example, truly evil, or has he just been brainwashed since a young age to protect Costello from getting caught?  The film doesn’t bother to investigate.

Damon, for his part, is effortlessly natural in his scenes with Madolyn, but too often something felt a little off with him—his mannerisms a little too histrionic, even a little feminine.  When pressed into fierceness–as in the rooftop scene–he knows what to do; but on the whole this has to rank as a disappointing turn from one of my favorite actors.

The Departed, as a whole, has lots of style and little substance—and the truly disappointing fact is that the movie doesn’t aim for any more than that.  DiCaprio brings the necessary gravitas, but most of the film doesn’t.  It’s just the kind of movie Hollywood loves these days, but in the end it’s just full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.