During the first hour or so the film is all about the cut as Scorsese and Schoonmaker juggle a lot of heavy exposition, three complex central characters and three integral secondary characters. There are plenty of pleasures to be had–it is a return to form–and the way we move from scene to scene and character to character is handled with the kind of craft we expect from Scorsese (the intricate temporal and spatial shifts seem effortless and Scorsese uses pop and rock songs, once again, to hold everything together). Still, something was missing; the film felt a bit rushed and I wasn’t as invested as I thought I would be. And then Scorsese slows the train down a bit, tightening his focus and racheting up the suspence as the “cat and mouse” narrative kicks in. There is a set piece I won’t spoil by describing, but it is a blistering, anxiety inducing, white hot sequence in which the dramatic action takes its inevitable turn for the worse. For the next 75 minutes, the film is an unrelentless yet highly entertaining masterclass in cinematic, edge of the seat, tension. The acting is excellent; DiCaprio, in particular, is a marvel and Alec Baldwin and Mark Wahlberg accomplish a lot in very small bursts of energy. Jack does his best, but I think a scene or two explaining a turn to oddball behavior ended up on the cutting room floor. Still, it was a damn fun, ugly, brutal, bloody ride. I probably need to see it again.
I enjoyed the hell out of the film. And not just as a return to form for Scorsese; I think he’s still playing with form, still finding new ways in and around and through material that strike me off-center, even as they ratchet up my adrenaline and engagement.
I too thought the actors Jeff named fantastic, but I’ll give some extra attention to Matt Damon, who manages to be both despicable and sympathetic, kind of tiptoeing along the line between, occasionally dancing one side or another. It’s as carefully-calibrated a performance as he’s given, and (especially amidst this cast with this director, swallowing the scenery whole) he stood out. Vera Farmiga, as well, despite a seemingly-impossible role; like Damon, she gives an incredibly smart performance, shading all the nuances of identity and deception the screenplay suggests.
SPOILERS!!!!
So Mike, did you listen to Dana Stevens podcast over at Slate? What did you think of the rat (it was a bit too much for me, primarily because it felt extra-diegetic . . . i.e. I didn’t believe that apartment would have rats)? And did the secret envelope send the psychiatrist to Marky Mark (my take as opposed to the argument that the letter and the psychiatrist’s inability to act on the info she received in the CD are plot holes). I did like Damon and believed that he wanted to recuperate some kind of familial comfort–a life–which was why he was so intent on getting the mole so he could get “his” identity back (from Costello in order to procreate and visit Babies R Us with his lady). When she walked past him at the funeral, tears in her eyes, my gut told me she was going to have him offed. And you?
Hum, well, I’m a little surprised you both liked this as much as you did. The dialogue is excellent, and Scorsese coaxes fine performances out of most of the main characters, but I must say that it seemed to fail as a thriller. I didn’t feel real edge-of-the-seat tension at any point in the movie. SPOILER: The scenes with DiCaprio following Damon to learn his identity, or the meeting where Sheen is killed, never build to anything, and we know the outcome before it happens. Only the scene in the warehouse is effectively constructed, and that is ruined by the illogic of the situation. The police know both parties to the sale are present, so why not move in and make some arrests? Who cares if the cameras are not placed correctly?
As for the performances, Damon was excellent, as usual. Wahlberg was good too, but — and this surprised me after reading the reviews — he is the one playing the usual Nicholson role of scenery-chewing, over the top actor who dominates every scene he is in, even when it doesn’t fit the feel of the movie. It works for Wahlberg because he is playing against type. In fact, I was far more impressed with Nicholson than I expected, and this is the best I have seen him in a long time (perhaps ‘About Schmidt’ was a welcome interlude from all the recent crap). He is actually quite restrained and he manages to convey real menace in every scene.
But DiCaprio. I don’t get his appeal as an actor here. All he does is glower, in this as in ‘Gangs of New York.’ He is meant to be half out of his mind with fear, but you never see fear, only rage. He does the same relatively simple thing over and over again. The fact that he is onscreen so often one on one with Nicholson, just accentuates how limited his range and his power are in comparison.
Of course Scorsese can make any movie he wants, but surely the point of the ‘Infernal Affairs’ theme is to capture the impact on the two leads of inhabiting double lives. In the original, both characters come to partially empathize with the group they are betraying; they are torn apart by their dual allegiances. None of that appears in this movie.
And what is point of suggesting that Damon is a latent homosexual? You get him going overboard with anti-gay epithets after the rugby match, then he appears partly impotent around women, and then right at the end DiCaprio calls him a faggot. What? How does he know? Does it have any bearing on the movie?
I missed the latent-homosexuality angle on Damon’s character. My take is that his character was all Oedipal, all the time. When we first see him he’s nine or ten, fatherless, motherless, living with his grandmother. Nicholson takes him in and mentors him, pays for his education, becomes a father-figure, but, ultimately, smothers him to the point where Damon has no autonomy whatsoever. Damon fetishizes the state capital (I’m guessing that’s what that gold-domed building is); his desire for legitimate authority/agency requires that he sever his ties with Nicholson but he can’t do it and it’s eating him up. This is why he wants to catch the mole so badly; he’s making sure nothing stands in the way of him getting out from under Nicholson’s thumb. Then Scorsese underlines Damon’s impotence in every scene. There is literally a phallic shape in most scene’s in which we see him at his most vulnerable (that chocolate desert he’s afraid to touch, the banana Farmiga peels when attempting to comfort him after a night when he couldn’t get it up, the iron in the scene when Nicholson calls and Farmiga is inside the condo as Damon struggles to straddle his two identities, and finally, and most egregiously, the dildo in the porn theatre). In order to escape into some kind of law-abiding life, Damon has to kill Nicholson and he seems to really want DiCaprio to be able to walk away from it all unscathed as well, but things don’t work out and the film’s nihilistic determinism kicks into overdrive. I think these guys toss the word faggot around like boys do in middle school (high school, college, the watercooler at work).
My god you’re observant! I never connected all the phallic objects to Damon’s character. The reason I think the latent homosexual bit is intentional is because of the way the camera lingers on Damon after the rugby match, both as the two teams separate, and as he sits on a bench and repeats his assertion that the other team are faggots. It goes on too long to be inadvertent.
I’m always impressed by Jeff’s attention to the phallus.
I want to push on something that Chris’ critique lodged in my head. I was trying to make sense of Damon’s “latency;” I recall those moments, but like Jeff I didn’t really see them marked as explicit repression, as much as the implicit repressions of desire that run through EVERY male-male relationship in this film. Hell, even Vera Farmiga is a kind of beard; she lets us imagine Damon and DiCaprio (ooh la la) getting it on. (She even kind of looks like both of ’em.)
But I digress. I think the film is less about the morality of cops and robbers (and thus the ethical dilemmas of the respective moles); that was Infernal Affairs‘ central tango, but Departed seems to be dancing to another tune. I think this is a film (like so many of Scorsese’s) about what it means to be a man. Every man in the movie is repressing, covering up–putting on a public face, dealing with private desires, finding his desires to succeed in one group and to maintain his integrity impossible. I could–and maybe will, if the conversation keeps going–draw out this argument more. And I ought to re-see the movie. (And want to.)
I think I love it because, as I linger on it, the film becomes less a Scorsese throwaway pleasure (in between his ‘serious’ movies) and more an epitome of Scorsese’s visions (from Mean Streets to even Kundun) about a fragmented, enraged masculine identity. Johnny Boy has grown up, hell grown old–he’s Frank/Nicholson, and he’s barely holding on, soon to be gone. (Or he’s thoroughly subordinated into the structures of policedom–perhaps Baldwin, perhaps Wahlberg… perhaps both? I admit that those guys/characters fit my schematic least effectively.)
What do you think? I’m not really disagreeing with Jeff–I think his points about impotency are dead-on, and helped me to start to make sense of the issues of masculinity.
And I can see Gio rolling her eyes. Rightfully so–what film isn’t about masculinity? Or what film that *we* see isn’t?
I guess I’m wrong about DiCaprio.
you know what a keen consumer i am of investigations of masculinity. i see masculinity being investigated everywhere. and god knows it is! but in this film i saw mostly (exclusively?) sizzling hot acting, fast and furious editing (i loved the camera jerks), and fun fun writing. as i think i already had occasion to say here, bringing out the dead is the scorsese film that moved me the most. i like my movies earnest and full of symbolism. but i haven’t been to the movies, except for borat, in several months, and this one really brought back to me that special pleasure we get out of watching films.
i agree with chris that dicaprio could have been more nuanced and effective, and with mike that the double lives of damon and dicaprio is not so much investigated as enjoyed for their thrilling potential (i know you didn’t say this, mike). and i need to go wash the kid, so this has to stop here. but i really, really enjoyed this movie. for one, it made me laugh a lot. as it did the audience.
“go wash the kid”? gio and simon have a pet goat? if so, i have recipes.
You have a child, or are you referring to Simon?
Is Lil’ Pony staying over?
let it be known that if i hadn’t had to wash the kid i would not have written as sloppily as i did. back to departed. if you want to see oedipal in it, jeff, you should take into account *both* father-son couplings: not just damon and nickolson, but also dicaprio and sheen. both men kill their fathers, though dicaprio does it only indirectly. sheen’s death is, in fact, the only moving scene in the film: sheen dies so that dicaprio may live.
i liked the girl, too, though i so wished she and billy could live happily everafter. i was shocked when we were robbed of sweet, vulnerable billy so dramatically, matter-of-factly, and unclimactically. is this what directors are reduced to in order to elicit shock out of us?
jeff, don’t be obscene!
Imagine, this film simply could not have been made if there weren’t cell phones. I’m trying to think of other films that would not exist without a specific form of technology. The original Ocean’s Eleven lives by the telephone (dies too). But I think it still could have been made. The telephone is there for exposition. It’s there to make up for a lousy script (but who gives a shit and don’t ask me to do another take, you little prick).
Hey Jeff, so ya didn’t think the apartment could have rats? Isn’t that idea of the film? You never expect to see a rat (especially if you’re the rat).
Chris: the scene where Sheen is killed doesn’t build to anything? It builds to one of the more powerful moments in the film, he lands SPLAT right at DiCaprio’s feet.
And I think DiCaprio gives a hell of a performance, though I’ve always been skeptical of him since Titanic. But I’m beginning to think he’s recovered from that film better than Kate Winslet has. The scenes in the psychiatrist’s office are especially good.
I like Jeff’s Oedipal reading of Damon’s character. He fetishizes the dome–because it’s a giant tit, no? And you’re right about the dessert–he doesn’t touch it because, as he says, he doesn’t know what to do with it. I also noticed an “X” in his office late in the film, when we knew it was over for him. It reminded me of Hawks’s Scarface (and what was that brief snippet of an old gangster film that we saw? Anyone know what film? –I must add here, that Thelma Schoonmaker is in fine form once again). But the one you missed, Jeff, is the scene where he buys the apartment. Does the real estate agent think that Colin is gay? There’s a weird exchange there (he’s got a co-signer–the police, right?–but he can’t say who, so the agent thinks his co-signer is his gay lover?).
There’s a lot of “fucks” in the film. So many, that I wonder why Frank’s girlfriend, Gwen, is not allowed to say it (towards the end of the film, she mouths “where the fuck is he?” but it is dubbed as “where the hell is he?”). Only men can say “fuck”?
Surely Sheen’s death is foreshadowed (a word I only learned last week when my kid’s teacher handed over a report card that actually had a category “understands and conveys foreshadowed events”), forewarned, anticipated, whatever, for a full hour? Sheen was the weakest link in the movie and his death was just a matter of time. The whole scene was an excuse to see the SPLAT. I had discounted Sheen’s death before he entered the elevator. Poor guy was reprising his weakest moments on West Wing.
As for who came out of Titantic better (the iceberg?), Winslet is damn fine in ‘Flushed Away.’
I agree. She is damn fine. Hubba hubba! Whoo-hooo!
Not only does Sheen’s murder build to DiCaprio’s near emotional breakdown, but then there is the rogue shoot-out between the cops and the gang which leads to the undercover FBI agent’s death (and that great scene in the hide out when DiCaprio thinks he’s going to have to kill the guy before he has a chance to die on his own). I caught the the “wrong address” moment and thought it was simply a script error until that moment. The entire sequence is one hell of a piece of filmmaking. And you’re right John, the scene with the real estate agent is interesting; not necessarily because he thinks Damon may be a kept man but because we know he is and he is being kept by a “father” from whom he desperately needs to estrange himself (though, admittedly, at this point he doesn’t know that).
Hey Chris, can your kid tell me what I’m getting for Christmas?
His prediction is that you are getting the Nintendo Wii with the new Zelda game. He thinks everyone wants one a much as he does, and judging by the lines outside Target and Toys R Us last Sunday, he may be right.
i just saw mean streets and i’d like to say that scorsese’s “investigation of masculinity” (this phrase!), unlike many others, just doesn’t put my back up. for one, and very importantly, men seem to measure each other against other men, physically, constantly, by beating each other up, by rolling around and drawing blood, by jumping on top of each other — but not by vilifying women. on the screen, we see very little of jack/frank’s abuse of his women, if he abuses them at all. but there’s more than that. it’s not just about the violence, the constrant threat of fights’ breaking out, the excesses of the body, the homosexual flirtations, the tenderness shocked at itself thus always ready to turn into murder. there’s, at heart, a great acceptance of men’s vulnerability to other men, a compassion among men, a sympathy for each other’s weaknesses, that other films we talked about here don’t seem to have. i like the way scorsese uses bloodbaths as cathartic moments with which to stop all the messing around, maybe even to punish it. i know people have seen the departed as really gory, but the dance macabre this guys waltz around each other, stroking their cell phones and fucking the same woman, is also a bit funny, and the final massacre too gory, too unsentimental, too shocking, too extreme to feel real.
Mean Streets is one of the great films about male friendships. particularly the case of Johnny Boy and Charlie—and, as Gio rightly points out, the film explores the limits of tenderness allowed according to male conventions of behavior, these codes made even more intense by the locale of New York City and the affiliations to organized crime. perhaps the conclusion casts a skeptical eye on the possibilities for these relationships, unless you attribute the sudden outbreak of violence perhaps to Johnny’s drive toward self-destruction and Charlie’s unresolved contradiction between trying to be a good Catholic and trying to get ahead. I love this film–for a while I watched it once a week.
I’m also reminded of DeNiro’s Jimmy Conway losing it when he finds out Tommy DeVito has been whacked in Goodfellas; that scene with DeNiro in tears, destroying a phone booth, is one of the most tender and vulnerable moments I can think of. That being said, I recently watched Jane Campion’s The Piano (Mike and I are teaching it next week), and no one does male vulnerability and tenderness better than Harvey Keitel as the Scotch nativist Baines. It is a remarkably fearless performance by a male actor in cinema. I’m not sure I think of one that surpasses it.
you are teaching a class together. how sweet. i love male tenderness. all in favor of it.
Jeff and I often weep while smashing a.v. equipment in the room.
(Your reading of Scorsese seems to me dead solid smart. I’ve often been struck by how many of his films are about failures of communication–a problem traceable to masculinity, to Catholicism, to various other factors including cell phones in the recent flick. Travis Bickle and Rupert Pupkin completely misreading cues, Paul Hackett dealing with an utter breakdown in communication, and so on…)
I am not much of a fan of The Piano, but I take Jeff’s point about Keitel’s vulnerability and fearless performance—I would, however, offer Brando in Last Tango in Paris as a performance that surpasses it.
I’ve tried at least five times to get through Tango and always walk away (and I like Bertolucci). How can I find my way (butter not included)?
Is it the butter scene that presents the major obstacle? at what point do you walk way from it?
Actually, I keep trying to get to the butter scene. I think I usually walk away from it after yet another long, ponderous scene in which characters walk around large, vacant apartments staring off into nothingness (or perhaps the gaze is more inner-directed). At least that’s what I remember.
empty apartments, gazing into nothingness, indirect remarks are my bread and butter (so to speak!). give it another chance–and then, god help you, I’ll turn you on to Antonioni!
I recall a wonderful debate between Gio and Michael over Bertolucci and Stealing Beauty. Can we revisit that discussion, for old time’s sake?
honestly, I can’t even remember that discussion.
neither can i, john. are you sure it happened?
Si. I believe Michael was praising the film, and Gio countered by calling Bertolucci a dirty old man.
For the record, I only weep when I know Reynolds hasn’t been whacked.
I vaguely remember the argument I think. Stealing Beauty, no great film, is at least honest in being overtly about a “dirty old man”–about the attraction of beauty and youth for age and experience, so it’s strange to make that critique against it. There’s a weird strand of puritannical critique that expects men after a certain age (30? 40?) to put aside sexual desire. The critique unthinkingly supports the ideology that only the period of youthfulness is really vital, an idea that unfortunately goes hand in hand with the worst features of commercialism/consumerism.
and of course i’m finding myself immediately inside the same ol’ argument…
men and women remain sexually active after their forties, but the sexuality of middle-age or old women is not only deemed tasteless, it is banned into invisibility. there is absolutely no room with it. on the other hand, in spite of the scorn of some society, men are allowed a great amount of play — both in the movies and in the real world. i’m all in favor of healthy, longevous sexualities for everyone, but the disparity irks me. also, i get irked by the fact that, in popular culture, older guys hardly ever lust after similarly aged women. the great disparity in age between male actors and their female counterparts irks me too. finally, it would be nice if men lived their sexuality without feeling they need to celebrate it every step of the way. celebrate it dirty little nature, that is, in a simultaneous display of guilt, vanity, and titillation.
i’m so easy to bait. so is michael, apparently. damn you, john.
Gio, you should check out Helen Mirren in Elizabeth I; she’s pretty hot and lusty and not grotesque at all.
yes, i always mean to. i like helen mirren young and old.she seems to be surviving acting middle-middle age much better than other actresses on this side of the atlantic. go helen!
Back to Berolucci for a second. I see Netflix has added a couple of his films: The Conformist, which is excellent, and 1900, which I remember liking but need to see again. The DVD that Netflix has gives a running time of 150 minutes, which seems just way wrong. A user’s comment says the DVD is actually close to 6 hours. This raises an interesting issue: how long is this film supposed to be?
1900 is actually one year long. It was filmed in real time. But it feels like 10 1/2 months–it really flies.
I have an uncut, (I bought it off someone in Australia but cannot remember what DVD region that covers) version that is just over five hours long. The version released in America in the seventies was 245 minutes or so (a leisurely four hours). Amazon lists the newly released region one disc to be 315 minutes long, making it the uncut version so Netflix staffers should be scolded. It’s a frustrating film; one reason I wanted to purchase it was to revisit the film without the horrible dubbing of the VHS tapes that floated around during the mid-eighties. Unfortunately (and I find this in many of the newly reissued Fellini films on DVD), Bertolucci used an international cast and dubbed everything (watching it, one is hard pressed to figure out if there was a shared language on set). So if you want to watch it in Italian with English subtitles, it appears as if every line of dialogue was looped post-production, (Fellini’s 8 1/2 works the same way) and lips and words rarely sync the way I’d like them to. What’s up with those crazy Italians???
Hey John, does the giant dome in The Departed have to be a giant tit or might it simply signify a form of “legitimate” power and authority to which Damon’s character wishes to give himself over.
Gee, I was going to put that joke in my comment but then thought: no need, someone else will do it for you. Good job, reynolds. Wow, and in 9 minutes, too!
I’m no expert on giant tits, Jeff, but I know ’em when I see ’em. Take reynolds, for instance. He thinks he signifies a form of legitimate power to whom all must give themselves over. But actually he’s a giant tit.
Seriously, Jeff, I was just riffing on Chris’s observations, which I think are smart. I was trying to sound smarter. Chris, do you want to weigh in on the dome/tit debate?
I remember the lousy dubbing in 1900. I think the Italians are just lazy filmmakers. Sync sound is too much work. And what’s with this neorealism crap? No casting? No sets? No lighting?
i think that we used to dub everything (instead of having sound taken directly on the set; i don’t know the english phrase for that — presa diretta in italian). that’s why having foreign actors was never a problem. i’m sure there are exceptions. but you can always tell. when i came here i was surprised by how different films sounded. also, all foreign actors had their own dubbers, and when the dubbers died or whatever it was a disaster.
i love the simplification in chris abani’s graceland: all the characters are either john wayne, bad man, or actor. no women. who needs women?
I just saw this film, much later than everyone else. I enjoyed it very much and took it as sort of an experiment–a film that attempts to be a flat, evenly lit canvas wherein a number of characters, each precisely delineated, form various figures together, until each in turn is eliminated. I liked the playful wink of the rat at the end. the puzzling aspect, as you’ve all mentioned, is the emphasis on homosexuality and other kinds of non-reproductive sex (remember that scene with Jack after the opera–what the hell!)–on one hand, this material can be “read” as a kind of commentary on the relationship between fathers and sons, and on the other, as a playful emphasis on the refusal to have a deeper meaning. No issue. At the end all is cancelled….but then again there’s the pregnant woman alone, with whose baby? And Dingman (sp?), the character who escapes from the relentless configurations?
we too just got around to seeing it, and really i was quite underwhelmed. it is a solid, very well-made movie, but just felt to me like a turgid, longer version of infernal affairs. i allow that the two films are after different things–in the original psychology is a function of form; here there’s less interest in form, more in psychology, but i didn’t find any of that particularly convincing or interesting. i have to say i find french and hong kong takes on american gangster films to be more interesting than american gangster films–by stripping them down to genre conventions and attitudes (or overheating them, as in the case of woo) they get at something that a more realistic film like this one loses in all its detail.
I agree. There are many interesting things about ‘The Departed’ and some good performances (esp. Nicholson and Damon) but, for my taste, it does have a bloated, somewhat overwrought quality. The craft is obvious but the attention to detail overwhelms the coherence of the movie. I much prefer the simplicity of the HK take on gangster movies.
I take The Departed as an experimental film in which detail and surface play a key role and play off the psychological naturalism of the characters and setting (the influence of Boston, the different class levels, etc.). I don’t think it’s Scorsese’s best film but I don’t think it deserves the label “realistic.” I think he tries for the spirit of a James Cagney gangster film in an environment dominated by corporate offices and cell phones.
Okay, I’m really coming late to this, but we just watched the movie last night. Having grown up outside of Bawstin, this movie had a whole different meaning for me. The opening shots of the Southie riots framed this movie as really being about the Irish mafia in Boston, much more of a historical film than a genre-ic one, for me. (Even though most of the movie wasn’t shot in Boston.)
I also read the Massachusetts State House (John’s tit) as legitimate power and not about sexuality. I almost always read “Irish” “Massachusetts” and “power” to be about the Kennedys so I saw Matt Damon’s character as, for lack of a better term, “social climbing.” I think there is a lot about class that gets lost in this movie because the markers (“Southie” “The North Shore” “Lace Curtain Irish” “Suffolk Law”) are ones that people don’t (know how to) read.
The cell phones (I guess we’re all going to have to read Ned’s book) seemed so out of place to me because I really felt like I was supposed to be watching 70s Boston, or at least 80s Boston–since by the mid-90s Whitey Bulger had gone underground.
I wasn’t nearly as enamored with Vera Farmiga as others. She slipped in and out of her accent. And for me, everyone’s acting ability is judged on how well they do an Boston accent. Which makes Mark Wahlberg one of the best actors of our generation! (I was totally annoyed by his scenery chewing.)