“Cops or criminals… when you're facing a loaded gun, what's the difference?”
Crime boss Frank Costello (Jack Nicholson) poses this question at the beginning of The Departed and director Martin Scorsese spends the next two and a half hours rebutting any possible answer.
Most action movies keep their audiences on the edge of their seats by informing them on a need-to-know basis. As the movie progresses, each character will offer up a new piece of the puzzle until the final 'ah-ha' moment. Scorsese takes a different route with The Departed. He gives his audience all of the information up front but keeps his characters in the dark, arming them only with a version of the truth. All the while he is reminding us that each man’s reality is merely a product of what others tell him and what he, in turn, tells others.
The Departed is essentially the story of two young men who, despite choosing very different paths in life, inevitably end up playing the same game. We are first introduced to Colin Sullivan (Matt Damon), who at a young age is recruited by Boston’s top gangster, Frank Costello. But Sullivan doesn’t grow up to be any ol’ lackey. Instead, he is groomed by Costello to be his eyes and ears inside the system. Little does he know, while he quickly rises to the top as one of Boston’s finest, one of his fellow officers, played by Leonardo DiCaprio, has managed to infiltrate Costello’s organization.
Eventually both sides realize there is a “rat” amongst them and we quickly stop looking for differences between the two, as we are shown that both hold only two guarantees – “honesty is not synonymous with the truth” and “we are all on our way out.”
Scorsese really outdoes himself with The Departed. He takes the crime genre to a new high with a movie that is as thought provoking as it is gripping. But good directing is only half of the story. The cast of The Departed is the very definition of an ensemble that knows just how to complement one another’s performances. And there is no doubt in my mind the performance of Jack Nicholson will land him a walk down the red carpet this year.
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