Review of The Departed

Endless respect for Martin Scorsese - I love Mean Streets, Taxi Driver, Raging Bull, After Hours, King of Comedy, GoodFellas, and Last Temptation of Christ - but The Departed was just plain muddled and somewhat pointless, not really deserving of inclusion in that list. Doublecrossing, triplecrossing, quadruple-crossing gangsters plus a lot of cellphone silliness, edited like a 2 and a half hour movie trailer with some great actors turning in wildly uneven performances. Jack Nicholson is manic and rambling, completely over the top and not very believable. Matt Damon simply fails at conveying real emotion and Leo DiCaprio is monotonously tortured, Martin Sheen and Vera Farmiga are wooden and lifeless. Surprisingly the best acting is delivered by Alec Baldwin (hysterically funny) and most of all Mark Wahlberg (completely believable as a tough-as-nails state police sergeant). At no point did I see anything which resembled the real operations of organised crime, the police, or even psychiatry - Farmiga's character breaks every rule, constantly - she is described as a 'hot sh*t' psychiatrist, but I would argue about 'hot' being appropriate in this context. The twists, turns, folds, and manipulations of the plot do not reward the attentive viewer, they merely allow Scorsese to move from set-piece to set-piece. The rapid-fire editing condenses the story to only the most significant events, and I think here he has gone too far, as the exhausting pace feels more like an ordeal than a story. The appearance of the rat at the end is like some kind of joke - symbolism so leaden you can't possibly miss it. I didn't even like the soundtrack, especially the inclusion of 'Comfortably Numb', a song from the soundtrack of The Wall (another muddled mess of a film!) which does not describe any character's state of mind. On the positive side, there is some great bravura filmcraft, and it's never really boring, and Wahlberg is just superb. It's still better than most of the genre in the last decade and as usual some fantastic ideas (the cross section of the cellphone secretly texting in Damon's pocket, for instance, was great). My advice would be to watch Internal Affairs if you like this sort of film. I rate it 6 out 10 because it's never mediocre. It just falls very short of a classic.