Cops and Robbers

It’s one of the surefire plotlines of the past 30 years: A police officer goes undercover, only to find that he’s no longer simply pretending to be a criminal but is being drawn into criminality as a way of life. Dozens of movies and TV shows have been built around it, some of them exceptional (Donnie Brasco in particular). But director Martin Scorsese and screenwriter William Monahan have outdone them all in The Departed.

The plot is borrowed from a Hong Kong gangster flick called Infernal Affairs. An undercover cop is sent to get the goods on a Boston mob boss. The clever mob boss has his own undercover agent inside the investigation. The question becomes: Who’s going to be exposed first? Leonardo DiCaprio is the undercover cop, Matt Damon the undercover gangster, and Jack Nicholson the mob boss, and they’re all sensationally good.

So is the picture. The Departed has all the signature features of a Scorsese crime film. There’s the shocking violence of Goodfellas and Casino, the wildly profane dialogue of Mean Streets, the hyperbolic camera work of Cape Fear, and the refusal to glamorize or romanticize the conduct of lawbreaking psychopaths that is the moral hallmark of all Scorsese’s work.

But The Departed has something else as well, an essential quality Scorsese’s movies often lack: It’s great fun. Watching Nicholson chomp on the scenery as Boston’s most notorious crime boss is a kick. Watching DiCaprio out-argue a self-satisfied court-assigned psychiatrist is exhilarating. Watching Damon slither out of exposure time and time again is a gas, even though you want him to get caught. Watching Mark Wahlberg (in a truly remarkable performance) as the most cynical and abrasive police detective who has ever lived is among the most distinctive movie going pleasures of recent years. And watching that felonious scene-stealer Alec Baldwin do more with five words of dialogue than most actors can with a Shakespeare soliloquy is a wondrous spectacle in itself.

Aside from the acting, the real glory of The Departed isn’t Scorsese’s characteristically ostentatious directing style, but William Monahan’s ripe and original screenplay. Even though the movie seems to be begging for one of those clichéd scenes in which the crook says to the cop, “We’re a lot alike, you and me,” Monahan doesn’t succumb to the lure of that cheap parallel. Matt Damon’s character, Colin Sullivan, is an Irish kid from South Boston who falls under the sway of Nicholson’s Fagin-like Frank Costello. But it turns out DiCaprio’s Billy Costigan is merely a Southie wannabe who grew up in a tony suburb and scored 1400 on his SATs. He’s hungry for downscale authenticity because his father was a neighborhood boy who married up, lived to regret it, and spent his life toting baggage at Logan Airport and refusing to kowtow to his wife’s family, Costello, or anyone else.

We never see Costigan’s father. He’s only painted for us in a few word pictures, some by Wahlberg’s peerlessly nasty Detective Dignam, and some by an admiring Costello. But the time the movie takes to flesh out Billy Costigan’s background, character, and motivation gives it weight and heft, and makes Costigan’s trials and extreme sacrifices seem very real. The characters here act and react in unexpected and unanticipated ways. They are all intelligent, quick-witted, and capable of insight.

That’s Monahan’s work, as is the often-stunning dialogue. Just a few samples: Explaining why a decent student and choirboy became a gangster, Costello says at the movie’s outset, “I don’t want to be a product of my environment. I want my environment to be a product of me.” Later, Costello asks a guy at a bar how his mother is feeling. “She’s on her way out.” To which Costello responds, “We all are. Act accordingly.”

But the scenes in which The Departed really takes us places we’ve never been before are the ones inside the police investigation into Frank Costello. Dignam knows who the undercover agent is, but won’t tell anyone else because he’s trying to protect Costigan. Sullivan picks fights with Dignam in order to force Dignam to reveal the name, so that Sullivan can call his “dad” (Costello) and get Costigan killed. Sullivan’s goading then causes the other members of the joint task force, including the FBI, to start arguing among themselves. They joke and bicker and get nothing done. A sting at a warehouse to be monitored on hidden cameras goes awry when the crack technician leaves acres of dead spots where nothing can be seen.

The investigation we see goes on for a year. Evidently it has gone on for several years before the movie begins. Does Costello, who is nearing 70, possess mythic gifts for eluding capture? Or is Costello himself being protected?

There’s so much going on that it gets kind of messy. Plot lines are floated that go unresolved, perhaps because the final cut runs almost two-and-a-half hours and something had to give. The movie had a very troubled shoot in Boston and may have been revised and rethought on the fly before spending a full year in the editing room. That’s usually a sign of disaster–as it was in the case of the catastrophic new version of All the King’s Men, which, like many catastrophes, was produced in part by James Carville. But what’s on screen is so juicy that The Departed may be the rare movie worth seeing in a theater and then on DVD, cueing up all the deleted scenes.

John Podhoretz, a columnist for the New York Post, is THE WEEKLY STANDARD‘s movie critic.