The Departed (2006)

Starring Leonardo DiCaprio, Matt Damon and Jack Nicholson; Directed by Martin Scorsese

The Departed is a cinematic tour de force by a director at the height of his game. Scorsese paints an extremely violent and unpleasant portrait of a Boston mob boss (played with great intensity by Jack Nicholson). Circling around Nicholson is pretty much the entire cast of the movie and the entire plot. He is the dark center of it all; he exudes a sensual magnetic attraction that infuses every character and every situation with his lusts, fears, and naked brutality. I think Nicholson deserves an Oscar for this movie, and Scorsese as well.

The Massachusetts State Police want to bring Nicholson down. They send in an undercover policeman (Leonardo DiCaprio, in a stunning performance) to insinuate his way into Nicholson’s gang and send back information in order to catch Nicholson in the act, arrest and convict him.
At the same time, Nicholson sends a spy into the State Police to infiltrate them and send back warning and information about the forces trying to bring him down. Matt Damon is very convincing as the spy, slyly working his way into the trust of the various police officials as he helps keep Nicholson a step ahead of the law.

The movie is a kind of shadow play, as DiCaprio and Damon work in their two venues, feeding their information back to their chiefs while cloaking themselves from suspicion, and constantly looking over their shoulders. DiCaprio has quite the more dangerous task: if Damon is caught, he goes to jail. If DiCaprio is caught, Nicholson’s techniques are brutal, direct, and fatal.

The most interesting part of the movie is how DiCaprio and Damon detect the presence of the other, and try desperately to find who each-other are before they themselves are revealed..

The Departed is a bit like The Godfather, except that it’s a lot more violent. Also, Nicholson plays a monster of a character, with no redeeming features that we can see. He’s violent, greedy, and lustful, and gets pretty much whatever he wants by simply taking it. At least Don Corleone loved his family and tried to protect his people.

The movie takes some unexpected turns as it winds its way to its conclusion. At its heart it’s a gangster film, with a whiff of Al Pacino’s Scarface. It may be that violence contains within itself the seeds of its own destruction. But it’s a shame when so many people have to die in this movie in order to reach that point.