Best Picture: #79
Original Release Date: October 6, 2006
Rating: R
Runtime: 2 hours 31 minutes
Director: Martin Scorsese
Quick Impressions:
After watching The Departed, my daughter and I made an exciting discovery. Now there remain only ten Best Picture winners she hasn’t seen. (You could reasonably reduce that estimate to 9 ½ since she has vague memories of watching Birdman on TV in elementary school while my sister was visiting.) Once we watch No Country for Old Men, Slumdog Millionaire, The King’s Speech, The Hurt Locker, The Artist, Argo, 12 Years a Slave, Birdman, Spotlight, and Moonlight, she’ll have seen everything through the present day because she began following the Oscars herself in 2018. Meanwhile, I started writing this movie review blog in 2011, so beginning with The Artist, expect some overlap I’m not sure how to handle yet. (Most likely, I’ll end up writing about some films twice because I always gain new insights while watching with her.)
We had taken an embarrassingly long hiatus from our Best Picture project because she’s been so busy with school, and The Departed is hard to watch with a curious younger sibling in the room. (I think Scorsese and I are likeminded about what percentage of dialogue should be profanity, but, for me, the real concern is the over-the-top, casual racism of Jack Nicholson’s character. My eight-year-old has the perfect temperament to be a future crime boss himself, so I’d like to minimize his exposure to horrible racial slurs, especially coming from a character with the charisma of Jack Nicholson.)
“You know Jack Nicholson, right?” I asked my daughter, suddenly afraid she might not. “From The Shining?” She reacted like I had lost my mind as she replied patiently, “Yeah, and from One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. And from Terms of Endearment.”
I forgot she’d seen all those. We’ve taken such a long break! It’s been driving me crazy, too, because I love The Departed. Back in 2007, I was absolutely delirious with joy when it won Best Picture. “I can’t believe it!” I kept saying to my then-fiancé. “The movie I like best never wins!” (I remember watching the ceremony and gasping so dramatically when Thelma Schoonmaker won for Editing. These days, I don’t know how tantalizing a portent that would be since Editing and Picture no longer seem as definitively linked as they were in the past.)
At the time, I was obsessed with this movie. We were deeply into planning our July wedding, but I remember telling my husband feverishly, “If Leonardo DiCaprio wins Best Actor, we should run off and elope tonight.” If I’d been an Academy member, I might have voted for him even though he was nominated for Blood Diamond. Ordinarily I consider such voting shenanigans a little sketchy, but I felt so strongly about the performance. In The Departed, DiCaprio gives one of my favorite screen performances ever. At the time, I couldn’t believe how moving I found his work. Matt Damon is fantastic in his role, too.
I know back when The Departed released some people argued that it was overhyped, lesser Scorsese and shouldn’t have been the film for which he finally won Best Director. All I can say is I don’t see the value of ranking a director’s films. Why not watch and appreciate them all? I’m not an authority on Scorsese by any means (though I do feel terrible about an offhand comment about him I made on a message board months ago. When noting I prefer profanity to euphemisms (unlike my mother), I joked, “Martin Scorsese must have come over to babysit me.” Sometimes I imagine Scorsese happening upon that stray comment and sighing in dismay, “Didn’t she see Hugo? Didn’t she like the train?” I did see Hugo, and I know that if Scorsese actually babysat me, he would have used the time to introduce me to silent film not profanity.) Anyway, I love The Departed. Sure, maybe he’s made better movies. I don’t want to argue. My point is, I couldn’t possibly like this one any better than I do. I think it’s great, highly watchable (though I rarely get to watch it) and full of themes I find genuinely engaging.
This is the movie that once made me exclaim in desperation, “But it’s true in the lie!” Thematically, the story reminds me of Kurt Vonnegut’s Mother Night (my favorite of his books). If you participate in violent crimes every day, how much does it matter that you’re only pretending? Aren’t the actions you perform (at least part of) who you are? How can they not be?
I’ve always been fascinated by fictive identities, the cognitive dissonance that arises from fragmented self-presentation, including code-switching. When I was a child, I’d get drawn into the predicaments of characters caught in elaborate lies and think, “If only it could all turn out to be true somehow!” (I mean, it never fails in fiction. You construct an absolutely false identity as part of an elaborate lie, and then, bam!, someone falls in love with you. And then you start to fall in love with them, but they don’t know the real you…But also, through the vehicle of the fake person, you are being the real you in a way you’ve never been able to be real before! This is a really common plot, especially in comedy.)
I also have a deeply ingrained horror of imposters, of not knowing the people I think I know. As a young child (about three), I saw a snippet of a TV movie in which a heavily bandaged man lay in a bed. His breathing was labored, his face completely concealed. Unbeknownst to the family in the house, this wasn’t their father. It was his wife’s lover. Together they had murdered the real husband and staged a car accident, so the lover could assume his identity. It was so insidious! At the same age, I remember asking my mother, “But how do my friends in Sunday School recognize me when every week I wear a different dress?” Sometimes I have trouble accurately interpreting people’s facial expressions (especially in the moment) which only feeds this primal terror. And what if there’s not a bandaged villain in a bed? What if it’s your own identity that has become unclear to you?
I’ve still never seen Infernal Affairs. (Somehow I’ve been meaning to watch it since 2006.) But I love the characters in this film, and the compelling structure that seems to suggest that on some level, Colin (Damon) and Billy (DiCaprio) are inexorably linked. If you haven’t seen the movie, here’s the basic plot. In Boston, Colin is a crooked police officer on the payroll of crime kingpin Frank Costello (Nicholson). Meanwhile, Billy is an undercover police officer who has infiltrated Costello’s organization. So, essentially, there are two rats, a criminal posing as a cop, and a cop posing as a criminal. This is somewhat complicated by the fact that besides working for Costello, Colin actually is a state police detective. And besides secretly being a police informant, Billy actually does participate in violent crimes orchestrated by Costello. And, of course, they’re both in love with the same woman, a chronically indecisive police psychiatrist who really shouldn’t be having a relationship with either of them but is somehow sleeping with them both. Too bad the movie doesn’t develop Vera Farmiga’s character a bit more. In so many ways, Madolyn is unrealistic as a police psychiatrist. And yet, she’s the perfect love interest in this particular story.
What I find particularly compelling is that in the end, even though he’s the rat, Billy serves Costello better than Colin. (No one could serve him worse than Colin, the way things play out.) Also, of course, there’s the brilliant twist that although Frank is fixated on the idea of a rat in his organization, he himself turns out to be a rat of sorts, too.
Meanwhile, both Billy and Colin slowly (or, actually, rather quickly) begin to feel the pressure of so much deception. In the beginning of the film, we are told explicitly that Billy Costigan is chosen for this assignment in part because of his code-switching abilities. Growing up, he’s assumed one self-presentation style around his mother’s affluent family, another around his father’s working-class family. When you code-switch long term out of necessity, you’re never entirely pretending. Both of your identities are real. It’s beautifully symbolic that Billy’s mother has died, so now he can’t escape from the world of his father, a working-class criminal. Of course, he manages to hold onto some scrap of sanity by meeting occasionally with Captain Queenan (Martin Sheen) who knows his “real” identity (i.e. not a violent criminal) just as his mother once did. Hopefully nothing will happen to Captain Queenan!
The Good:
If you haven’t seen The Departed, you should watch it immediately. It’s so entertaining, and the cast is stacked. Besides DiCaprio, Damon, Nicholson, and Farmiga, we get the film’s only acting nominee (since everyone ran in supporting) Mark Wahlberg, who gets some of the most crowd-pleasing moments. (I’ve always loved his line, “I’m the guy who does his job. You must be the other guy.” It’s delightful that he went on to star in the police buddy comedy The Other Guys.) Martin Sheen makes Captain Queenan so sympathetic and wholesome for a police detective that even on a first watch, you think, “This guy is going to die for sure!” Alec Baldwin is in the movie, too, plus Ray Winstone and Anthony Anderson. There’s no shortage of star power.
On this watch, I noticed something about my own relationship with the film that never jumped out at me before. I’m a forty-four-year-old woman. When this came out, I was a twenty-seven-year-old woman. Yet somehow, I watch and think of Matt Damon’s character as somebody I might date (if I lost my mind), while I think of Leonardo DiCaprio’s character as me. I completely identify with DiCaprio’s Billy Costigan. I’ve always watched the film this way. I’ve just never noticed the oddness of that before. Why in the world should I identify with DiCaprio and imagine Damon as a potential love interest? Maybe it’s because DiCaprio is the hero (who definitely should have run in lead and not supporting). Maybe it’s because Damon’s character reminds me of an ex-boyfriend. The only other character I can imagine myself as is the police psychiatrist dating them both. (But I wouldn’t get far as her. I’d eat all of that improbably tall dessert, stab Colin with a fork, and run away with Billy Costigan!)
I like Colin. I pity him. It’s a great role for Matt Damon, and he plays it perfectly.
“I didn’t like the Matt Damon character,” my daughter noted. “He was always yelling, and then he was always smiling. It was like, ‘Why does your girlfriend stay with you? Are you a study she’s doing?’”
Yes, I think so. It’s clearly his dysfunction that keeps her around. We both find Farmiga’s character Madolyn inadequately developed but so fascinating. Right after the movie, I read this tantalizing tidbit on IMDB trivia. “Vera Farmiga met with a real LAPD psychiatrist to prepare for her role. The psychiatrist read the script and told Farmiga that Madolyn did pretty much everything wrong.” That made me laugh so hard. I thought, “Well, that’s easy to believe!”
“She doesn’t seem like a very good psychiatrist,” my daughter noted grimly.
“She’s a terrible psychiatrist!” I agreed. “She makes terrible decisions!”
“I haven’t seen her do any psychiatry,” she added. (That’s not true. She writes a prescription for Billy after he accuses her of being a bad psychiatrist when she initially dismisses him as drug seeking. And she makes sure she peels a giant banana and just stands there holding it when discussing Colin’s sexual dysfunction. If that’s not psychiatry, it’s extremely Freudian prop comedy!)
I speculated, “I wonder if she’s so attracted to Colin because he’s so pushy, and she can’t make decisions. I mean, it’s funny she thinks Billy is drug seeking, and then he starts yelling at her, and she’s like, ‘Well, okay, I’ll write you a prescription. In fact, I’ll get coffee with you. Actually, I’ll sleep with you.’ And then she’s like, ‘I can’t be a friend to you.’ No kidding! I’ll bet if when she said, ‘I can’t be a friend to you,’ he pushed back, she’d be like, ‘Okay! Let’s get married. Don’t tell my boyfriend.’”
“We don’t even know what happened to her,” my daughter pointed out.
I noted that her continued survival illustrates why Colin will never be Frank (try as he might).
“I think it’s interesting that she has to be with both of them,” I said.
“I like that she doesn’t even feel that bad about it,” noted my daughter.
“I like how she says, ‘I thought I was the liar,’” I chimed in. “You are a liar! His lies don’t negate your lies! She’s a liar in a relationship with another liar. For a psychiatrist, she’s so easily influenced.”
“How did she get this psychiatric degree?” my daughter joked.
“We need a spin-off about her,” I decided.
“She’s undercover,” my daughter teased.
The first time I watched the film, I considered Farmiga’s character one of its weakest points. I have nothing against her performance. I just thought the character was thinly (not to mention rather implausibly) written. And, of course, I couldn’t help noticing, “With such an outstanding cast of men, why is there only one woman with a substantial role?” I used to find it a bit lazy that Madolyn is (sort of) dating both of them.
Now, though, I’m fairly sure that makes her the perfect love interest for this film. Ever indecisive and full of doubt, Madolyn can’t figure out if she’s looking for a police officer who’s a criminal, or a criminal who’s a police officer. She also seems to be seeking help understanding her own past. Both Billy and Colin ask her pointed, insightful questions. She never wants to answer those. I think she’s caught between them because she wants those answers about herself, but she’s afraid to find them. What’s most odd is that we never see a single example of her relationship with Colin working, and yet she keeps moving forward in it as if his red flags are precisely what draw her.
I love, too, that she’s named Madolyn (a homophone of Madeleine). In a film about police detectives and dual identities, how can that not be a Vertigo reference? I mean, it is, right? (I could be imagining it. We’ve been watching a lot of Hitchcock lately. Over the past few weeks, we’ve watched Under Capricorn, Saboteur, Mr. and Mrs. Smith, and Sabotage (truly outstanding). Maybe I just have Hitchcock on the brain. In fact, my daughter and I were jokingly comparing Dignam to the housekeeper in Under Capricorn for reasons that would be perhaps too spoilery to mention.) I do think her name suggests Vertigo deliberately since The Departed seems to enjoy references to other classic films. We get a spoken reference to Going My Way. Then some of the flim’s most significant action takes place in a building “on the waterfront” (which looks so much like the rooftop in On the Waterfront, a film that (in addition to its themes of working for criminals and wanting to be a contender) features such pointed Christ allusions. (At least one of the key deaths that happens here is pretty heavily laden with Christ allusions, too.)
At any rate, I watched Farmiga with different eyes on this viewing and got more from the character than I did when I was twenty-seven.
Still the outstanding performance of the talented ensemble belongs to DiCaprio. He’s so emotive, and in one scene when Farmiga calls out his vulnerability, the audience feels this vulnerability palpably, as if we’re in the room with him. This remains my favorite DiCaprio performance. I enjoy his work in general. In fact, he’s one of my favorite actors. But this performance seems more natural than some, as if it’s just happening. (He always throws himself into his characters, but some of them are so big and strange that we’re more aware he’s acting.) Billy is the character the audience roots for in this film, so even though Damon gets an equally juicy part, DiCaprio is the lead actor, and it’s too bad he didn’t win an Oscar (though Forest Whitaker was undeniably fantastic in The Last King of Scotland).
Damon is good, too. He usually doesn’t play such a cocky, alpha-male jackass, and he does it well here. Underneath his swagger, Colin is always the confused child needing guidance we see in the opening scenes of the film. I love the way Damon shows us both his driven swagger and his forlorn insecurities just below the surface.
“Do you want to be a cop, or do you want to appear to be a cop?” Queenan asks in an early scene. Initially it seems that Billy wants to be a cop, while Colin wants to appear to be a cop. In fact, by the end, neither wants either choice. Billy just wants out, and Colin wants to be a lawyer. So maybe the initial question is a bit deceptive, presenting a false dilemma that shapes the thoughts of the audience. There are more choices in the world than being a cop or appearing to be a cop. After living with the strain of assumed identities for just a short time, what both Billy and Colin want is to escape.
One thing I’ve always wondered is precisely how crazy Frank Costello is at the end of the film. Initially, I assumed he was pretending to be crazy as an intimidation tactic. On this watch, I reflected, “Maybe he is going a little crazy, though.” (It’s kind of hard to tell when the character is being played by Jack Nicholson.) After the movie my husband pointed out, “Well, he’s been performing the role of the ‘crazy’ crime boss to intimidate people for so long that now its hard for him to distinguish between the crime boss act and his authentic self.” (I think I’m paraphrasing him, especially toward the end of the sentence, but he made a good point.) Costello is an interesting character because he knows right away what’s going on with Billy. He figures it out before he even brings him on. But he can’t be sure. (If you had any doubt, wouldn’t you just leave the guy alone? But Frank’s doubts seem to make Billy even more irresistible to him. That’s pretty fascinating psychologically. I wish that psychiatrist would date him, too, so we could get a closer look at what’s going on with him.)
The film’s editing is exceptionally good. (What I’m saying is, watching the Oscars for years, I used to think of that award as an indicator of what would win Best Picture, but it’s an award in its own right.) So much is going on with so many characters, but the story is easy to follow with a pace that keeps us moving forward. The movie feels much shorter than its two-and-a-half hour runtime, and we get the illusion of action as we move fluidly from scene to scene. I also love the soundtrack of the film. Any time I think of The Departed, both “I’m Shipping Up to Boston” and “Comfortably Numb” get stuck in my head for days.
Best Scene:
My daughter loves the moment when “they breathe back and forth on the phone.” That is exciting on a first watch, especially because the whole time, we have the weird feeling that they’re antithetical, that if they actually meet, it will destroy the space-time continuum or something (not literally). This scene feels a little bit like the old horror conjecture, “What if you call yourself, and you pick up?”
For some indefensible reason, I love the “cranberry juice” scene. Perhaps it’s because as a kid I had a terrible temper, so I find displays of this sort of hair-trigger violence on screen satisfying on some level. Obviously in real life, you can’t go around beating up anyone who makes you mad. But what’s particularly satisfying is that Billy is behaving this way to convince everyone that his cover-identity is authentic. (See? I find that delightful because Billy Costigan really does have a temper. And he has such anger about his mother’s death. He gets a free pass to unleash it all because he’s being forced to play an angry, loose-cannon character. He’s doing that to serve the state police and be a hero. But he still gets to unleash his temper for real. It’s a real outlet for his rage.)
(Also, I remember watching this the first time and thinking, “I never drink cranberry juice on my period. Should I be drinking cranberry juice on my period?”)
Best Scene Visually:
There are some ham-fisted moments of visual symbolism in this film, such as the time Madolyn hints that Colin is impotent while peeling and holding an enormous banana. (Maybe Colin’s problem is premature ejaculation. Frank jokes to him about shooting in his pants because he’s too excited (which is pretty funny given the end of their relationship) and also mocks him with a dildo just for fun. He’s literally waving his dick around as he makes it clear that Colin needs to follow his orders.) (There’s also a lot of Henry IV, part II energy going on, especially when you consider that Frank thinks of himself like a king but insists on behaving like a clown. He pointedly draws attention to this himself, so he must have read the play in Catholic school.)
I remember at the time many people balked about the rat scurrying across the balcony in the film’s final scene. My daughter loved that because of how the image matches up with Frank’s earlier drawing in the scene in which he reveals that in the past, if he suspected a rat, he would just kill everyone. She loved the pointed foreshadowing. I’m also fond of a moment when a character falls from the top of a building, and his blood spatters onto Billy. Undercover or not, he still has blood on his hands. The identity may be pretend, but the blood is real.
There’s a great moment, too, when Colin and Billy chase each other through an alley. So much is done with shadows.
Best Action Sequence:
The film’s final showdown, when Billy and Colin face off for the last time, is undoubtedly the film’s most exciting sequence. My daughter noted that this is extremely satisfying, but only because of what happens in the very last scene of the movie.
The Negatives:
Betrayal makes me so uncomfortable. I constantly worry that I will betray people I care about, simply because I don’t want to with such intensity. (In the same way, I worry that I will inadvertently hurt those I want to protect. I will hurt them because I love them. Hurting them becomes my greatest fear, the thing I want most to avoid, so my own anxiety will make it happen somehow. Granted, in me, this probably suggests OCD more than a future in undercover work.) Still there’s a huge part of me that can’t stand the fact that by being loyal to the police, DiCaprio’s character can’t simultaneously be loyal to Frank Costello. This makes no sense, of course. Why should he be loyal to a crime boss? It’s just that if I were in his shoes, I’d be torn. I hate disappointing anyone. I don’t see how you could be involved in violent crimes with gangsters for over a year and not start to feel a kind of kinship with them. But I suspect this is more a flaw with me than a flaw of the film. (In fact, it may be a point the film makes deliberately.) My discomfort is especially weird given that Frank Costello isn’t a particularly sympathetic crime boss. He’s an out-and-out racist and just generally kind of a big weirdo. I feel Vito Corleone is a bit more appealing. As cinematic crime bosses go, Costello is one of the least romantic figures I’ve come across. I don’t like letting people down, though.
I also feel bad that the psychiatrist can’t end up with both men. I think she feels bad about that, too, since she appears to have stumbled on a way to keep a little bit of Billy with her even while remaining with Colin.
And I do feel bad for Colin. I find him unlikeable in every way. I wouldn’t want to date him, and I consider large portions of his mindset and motivations jarringly alien. But I do pity him. Damon plays the role very well.
Of course, these unsettled feelings are less a flaw of the film than a selling point. (I’m struggling to think of some negatives! I love the movie!)
Probably the most problematic aspect of The Departed is a feature it shares with all films like this. It encourages crime. Like Socrates, it corrupts the youth. In the beginning, Frank memorably says to Colin, “When I was your age, they would say we can become cops or criminals. Today, what I’m saying to you is this: when you’re facing a loaded gun, what’s the difference?” DiCaprio’s character is becoming increasingly complicit in violent crimes every day. As an undercover police officer, he’s witnessing people getting killed by his associates right, left, and center. And why? What is the goal of all this? Well…Frank Costello is…selling microprocessors on the black market…maybe…
Is what Billy does worth it? What’s the point? And what Colin does doesn’t necessarily make him any more messed up than Billy! And what is Frank doing? He draws no distinction between law enforcement and criminals. He’s looking out for himself. And he’s right about some things, you know. The Church has covered up child abuse. He’s right about that.
About the only thing Billy accomplishes is giving Madolyn the courage to leave Colin. A kind of justice does win out in the end—doled out by the person who has the courage to be a cop without caring if he looks like a cop. (But isn’t that code kind of what the criminals are living by, too?)
If I were a child watching this movie, I’d conclude, “Wow! I should be a police psychiatrist! You get to sleep with A list actors. You never have to work. You get all the fanciest desserts!” No, I got derailed by a joke. But I’m not sure that I’d watch this and come away with the idea that I should behave in a moral manner. If there is a (positive) moral, it seems to be, “Always take the law into your own hands. Have the courage to be Batman.”
The ending (that very last scene) seems like kind of a fantasy. How often does that happen? It really does remind me of Batman. What happens in the elevator seems far more realistic. That last scene is what we all wish would happen. We would all like to be that guy. But we’re probably the other guy. Life is morally confusing as it happens, and then in the end we all die. As Frank points out when an acquaintance replies that his mother is on her way out (i.e. about to die), “We all are. Act accordingly.”
That’s just such a tragic and confusing reality. (Of course, why should you listen to him? Have you heard some of the other garbage he spews?)
Overall:
I love The Departed, and I’m pretty excited about showing my daughter No Country for Old Men next, so she can see Javier Bardem’s iconic performance as Anton Chigurh. She’s just now at a good age for watching the Coen Brothers’ movies. I’m quite curious what her take will be.