The Departed (Martin Scorsese, 2006)

Evolution in action

I believe the worst charge one can level at Martin Scorsese for what he's done in The Departed (2006) is that he's made a mere genre flick-- albeit one tainted (if you like) with his obsessions on guilt, remorse, the need for redemption.

Not his first time; Taxi Driver has the look and sound (thanks to Bernard Hermann) of noir, but manages to transcend it by channeling Dostoevsky's Orthodox angst and Schrader's Calvinist spiritualism through Scorsese's Catholic sensibilities (it's one of the bloodiest films about spiritual crisis ever made); Raging Bull is the melodrama of the boxing picture deconstructed, scored and shot like a war film; the much underrated The Last Temptation of Christ is a Jesus film shot and acted as if it took place in the streets of New York (the motley collection of accents should have been a dead giveaway), with an ending right out of one of the more outré episodes of The Twilight Zone.

Given Scorsese's frequent dipping into genre, doing The Departed shouldn't be a surprise; it's Scorsese returning the favor of borrowing from a film and filmmaking tradition that borrowed heavily from his own crime dramas of the '70s and '80s--the male bonding, the macho posturing, the exuberantly shot and edited action sequences usually involving men with guns. Granted this is a genre exercise that largely remains an exercise, unlike his best or at least most interesting works; The Departed shows Scorsese can still do crime drama like few others can.

Let me get to the nitty gritty: I don't buy the argument that this remake is necessarily inferior to its Hong Kong original. What, in my opinion, made Andrew Lau and Alan Mak's 2002 Infernal Affairs so memorable was Alan Mak and Felix Chong's script-- a rarity in Hong Kong cinema, where plot is often structured according to reels (an ascending series of climaxes ending each reel), and finales with epilogues designed to please everyone (not only does the hero win but his dead sister and lost dog are found alive and safe). Infernal Affairs stands in stark contrast; it begins with a brilliant premise (a triad mole in the police department and a police mole in the triad gang are ordered to uncover each other), and sustains the premise with an ingeniously worked out series of reversals and ironic plot twists (at one point the triad mole is charged with uncovering himself). There's very little fat in between the spiraling, ever-narrowing narratives, and the characters have little time to register as characters beyond their various names and physiognomies (outside of soulfully charismatic Tony Leung Chiu Wai as the police mole and  deviously baby-faced Eric Tsang as triad boss). Lau and Mak's visual style is no-nonsense lean, with little color or pyrotechnics; their goal is to tell the story as quickly and coherently as possible (something not always possible with the often less-than-perfect subtitles).

What Scorsese brings to the party is a carefully imagined world of Irish mobsters and police machismo, where men rib each other about taking it up the ass in so many varied and inventive ways the verbal abuse becomes a freewheeling art form, and sudden bursts of violence-- between police and criminal, between each other-- are a given. The impression I got (only managed to see it once, found it a bewilderingly rich stew) was of a glossier, more facilely entertaining Mean Streets, the Boston milieu pulled like a latex mask over the complex if implausible structure of the Hong Kong original, no more, no less.

Leonardo DiCaprio is no Tony Leung--he has yet to make an In the Mood for Love / 2046 (I consider them one film), much less a Happy Together (my favorite of Leung's performances, and in my book Wong Kar Wai's best claim to greatness), though there are times when you can imagine Scorsese superimposing the Hong Kong actor's lean frame against DiCaprio's younger, slightly stockier one. The face fuzz on DiCaprio's lower jaw isn't any more successful than Leung's at denoting conventional masculinity, but what Leung has in spades over DiCaprio is this wild glare that can evoke a range of emotions, from bewilderment to ferocity to despair, in a matter of seconds. Eric Tsang, who plays the triad boss-- Jack Nicholson replaces him in the remake-- perhaps doesn't have as illustrious a portfolio but gets much more mileage with less effort.

What Scorsese does improve on are the supporting performances and their dynamics-- you've got Martin Sheen and a wonderfully foulmouthed Mark Wahlberg (who contributes significantly to the sulfuric atmosphere), warily protecting their undercover operation from what they see as a compromised police force (the demarcation between departmental factions was less vividly drawn in the original); you've got a sharply comic Alec Baldwin as a police officer a beat slow on the uptake. Andrew Lau is a better actor than Matt Damon but Scorsese uses Damon's callowness in an interesting way, his wholesome, handsome looks in chilling contrast with his quiet sabotage-- sometimes at the expense of lives-- of his fellow officers' carefully laid plans. As Madolyn, a conflation of two characters from the original script (she beds the film's two leads where in the original they had their own respective women), Vera Farmiga doesn't have much to do but does act as a moral thermometer against which we can measure her lovers, and I think acquits herself honorably.

The real star of the film and best reason to welcome this remake though is Scorsese's compulsively watchable storytelling style. With editor Thelma Schoonmaker he fashions a breathtaking montage of parallel narratives, following the careers of both Damon and DiCaprio as they develop from children to cadets to fellow moles. He peppers the film with generous helpings of profane humor (something the original-- or its subtitles, anyway-- lacked, outside of Tsang's performance). Where Lau and Mak emphasize the glossiness of Hong Kong architecture, all white concrete and shining glass, Scorsese fills his screen with the distinct stonework of Boston, floods the interiors with stylized reds and blues (assembling along the way some choice cuts to accompany scenes--The Rolling Stones' "Gimme Shelter;" Van Morrison's cover of Pink Floyd's "Comfortably Numb").

Scorsese lends the clever storyline what the original sorely needed: a distinct visual sensibility (Lau and Mak do well but can you imagine what Johnny To, Ringo Lam, John Woo (who had already directed Leung in Hard Boiled) could have done with this?). Scorsese seems to be telling an elaborately long joke of two competing organizations--mobsters and police officers--fighting the other for survival. Given similar resources, similarly tainted moral standings, similarly flawed yet passionate members, the script shows us that the best each organization can do is mirror the other's moves; Scorsese takes that a step further and shows the whole as an evolutionary process, where mobsters and police officers are competing species with their separate cultures and social structures, where the youngest are taken in and nurtured by their respective father figures (the powerful sociopath with his polite social climber, the pepperhaired grandfather with his hot-tempered wolf cub) to be pitted against each other. Nicholson, intriguingly, represents an evolutionary dead end-- a monstrous sport (he screws around endlessly, insatiably, but creates no progeny) who relies on his innate savagery and cunning to stay dominant. It's in that spirit, anyway, that I took the final shot-- not just a jokey reference to what the whole thing was all about, but a thematically summarizing image that suggests who, ultimately, will be left to inherit the earth.

(10/9/06)