Scorsese on Autopilot

While fitfully entertaining, The Departed is retrenchment Scorsese at both his technical best and on autopilot, while the things that make his films instantly identifiable—editor Thelma Schoonmaker's smartly jumpy cutting, cinematographer Michael Ballhaus' swoop-dolly camera work and Scorsese stuffing the soundtrack with favorites from his classic-rock collection—here veer dangerously close to self-parody. With William Monahan's neo-Mamet dialogue the best thing on display, the truth is, anyone with decent chops could have made this. And without that sinking feeling we're getting too used to after seeing Marty's movies.

Based on Alan Mak and Andrew Lau's Hong Kong policier, Infernal Affairs, it spares some initially promising backstory on its protagonist, Billy Costigan (Leonardo DiCaprio), an honest Boston cop internally conflicted over his both lower- and upper- class Boston roots.

Costigan is recruited by secret-investigations cops played by Martin Sheen and Mark Wahlberg to go deep-cover and infiltrate an Irish mob led by Frank Costello (Jack Nicholson). Meanwhile, careerist cop Colin Sullivan (Matt Damon) is also working the Costello case—except as a snitch for Costello, whom he's idolized since he was a kid.

What follows is a series of moderately interesting cat-and-mouse games as Costigan tries not to have his cover blown while Sullivan—not even aware Costigan exists—foils his every effort by keeping Costello informed.

There are some typically gruesome Scorsese bits here—a funny/grisly scene in which Costello absently handles a severed hand in a Baggie during a meeting comes to mind—but the real pleasures come courtesy of Alec Baldwin, who walks off with the movie, Glengarry Glen Ross-ing his way through some chewy bits of racially scabrous misanthropy.

Wahlberg gives terrific loose canon, and Ray Winstone exudes superb menace as Costello's casually homicidal right-hand man. DiCaprio, meanwhile, does what he can with what becomes a single-note character defined by variations on pop-eyed panic; the same with Damon in his given register. Meanwhile, a soapy subplot involving a cop therapist (Vera Farmiga) that both men sleep with just underlines Scorsese' intermittent mystification about what to do with women in his films.

But it's the lack of nuance or even basic information about Costello—Nicholson in glower-and-shout mode—that makes the film really sag. There's an indication Scorsese realized something was missing with his featured mobster, and hence, perhaps, Costello's one-time voice-over about not wanting his environment to shape him. But that bit of character telegraphy aside, there's no sense that Scorsese understands what drives Costello, unlike his profound understanding of what drove everyone in Goodfellas.

This leads us to another essential flaw. While the accents are right—no surprise considering that Damon and Wahlberg are Boston natives—Scorsese has no feel for how this particular city shapes its occupants, and this from a guy who's a past master at such things. And while there's much talk of allegiance to family or some-such, we never actually see said family in motion. Similarly, the Irish mob here is tantalizingly limned as entering the 21st century via sales of missile-guidance microprocessor chips, which sometimes verges on a meta-commentary on amoral globalism but ultimately comes off as a lip-service contempo update on the verge of making that point. But maybe that's the biggest problem with The Departed—it seems constantly on the verge of going somewhere but never arrives. When Scorsese indulges his usual crescendo of violence, the effect is more like someone abruptly slamming shut a novel on you just when things were starting to get interesting.