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Repent, for the Oscar is near... · by Sach O
Lucifer and son
No, I don’t actually think that Martin Scorsese will win an Oscar for The Departed and if he does, it’ll be for purely political reasons putting into account his entire oeuvre rather than this specific film. This isn’t to say that The Departed is anything less than a jaw-dropping masterpiece, but it’s also a violent, macho, ugly, intense Fuck you to the prissy white haired academy voters that have repeatedly snubbed America’s greatest living director. It’s the kind of film that your mother will hate, that your date will try to weasel out of and that your friends will be quoting for days. It’s the kind of film that’s usually dismissed as “cool” due to clever but limited direction but that’s now elevated by a masterful filmmaker and an incredible cast. It’s a pot-boiling thriller threatening to explode any second. In short, it’s Martin Scorsese’s best film in years and a film that will go down as an undeniable classic.
The plot is essentially a straightforward translation of the Hong Kong classic Infernal Affairs, displacing the action from Triad Territory to Irish South Boston. A cat and mouse game following two snitches as they try to make it out of their respective predicaments alive, it’s one of the smartest cop stories devised in recent memory and an excellent framework for Scorsese’s gallows humor. Where Infernal Affairs was an ultra-stylized, emotionally restrained piece of Hong Kong cool, The Departed is a story of living, breathing, fleshed out men whose emotions threaten to spill out over the screen’s edges at any moment. John Woo (and consequently all of Hong Kong) was greatly influenced by Mean Streets and other Scorsese classics: The Departed sees the cultural exchange continue as the fast-paced Asian genre film merges with the intense realistic characters perfected in Goodfellas.
And What Characters! Leonardo DiCaprio, finally escaping his pretty boy pigeonhole, threatens to derail at any second as the paranoid police informer lost in the mob. Damon oozes calm and confidence as his counterpart on the other side. Marc Walberg and Alec Baldwin use language in such colorful ways that even fans of the cult-classic Irish Mob movie The Boondocks Saints will have to defer. Martin Sheen and Vera Farmiga enliven both their characters with the kind of emotional depth unseen in most supporting roles.
And then there’s the film’s nuclear option: Nicholson. Jack Nicholson’s performance as the diabolical Frank Costello will go down as one of the greatest portrayals of villainy in the history of film. Like Travis Bickle, Jack LaMotta, Tommy DeVito and Bill the Butcher before him, Nicholson has been given a character with so much evil and pathos and inhabits it so completely that the results are almost terrifying. The Devil incarnate, Costello is the film’s painful, black heart reveling in his own anti-social evil. He doesn’t commit crime for the money, he commits crime because he can and out of pure contempt for the laws and morals of society. There lies the film’s crux: this is Scorcese taking back genre and twisting it into a portrait of society’s ugliest, most depraved and ultimately most lost souls. Far from his attempt at restraint in The Aviator, this is the master at his most extreme, terrifying the faint of heart and the bastions of morality with aspects of the human condition they simply won’t want to see. Seemingly unconcerned with what his critics have to say, Martin Scorsese has made exactly the film he wanted to make, detractors be damned.
I could go on for hours about Michael Ballhaus’ excellent cinematography, Thelma Schoonmaker’s precise editing and the myriad of other details which makes The Departed so great but I’d be wasting my time. I’d rather simply state that this is the gulliest film in years and perhaps one of the best. Martin Scorcese may never get his Oscar but like Hitchcock before him, he can rest comfortably knowing that his work stands above the establishment’s dignified, milktoast tastes. And movie lovers can thank god for that.
Comments for "Repent, for the Oscar is near..."
Ha! “The gulliest film in years.” I never go to the theater anymore, but I’ll be making an exception for this.
— Floodwatch Oct 7, 06:28 PM
Although it’s been almost five years since I actually sat in a cinema, a gully new Scorscese flick might be the one to break the drought.
— Robbie Oct 7, 06:34 PM
Dope review Sacha…I think I’ll be peeping the midnight show this eve.
— *midnightheory* Oct 7, 08:33 PM
Just came back from the theater and have to agree – it’s a GREAT flick. This review is spot on.
— ian Oct 8, 02:33 AM
Great review!
One more thing: I think this movie’s moments of comic relief were funnier than anything in the Employee of the Month trailer
— Mo! Oct 8, 07:11 PM
I’m going to need some bookend Buddah quotes on this film since you mentioned Infernal Affairs.
Great piece, I always look for OhWord updates.
— SJ Oct 9, 04:09 PM