The Departed

Starring: Leonardo DiCaprio, Matt Damon, Jack Nicholson, Mark Wahlberg, Martin Sheen Directed by: Martin Scorsese Runtime: 149 min. Rated: R Release date: September 29, 2006 - More Info
READER RATINGS:
7.6 OVERALL	Smart . . . . . . . . 8.6 Sexy . . . . . . . . . 6.5 Funny . . . . . . . . 7.4

The Nerve Review

Martin Scorsese has perhaps leaned a bit too hard on the Rolling Stones over the years — they are to his oeuvre as Duke Ellington is to Woody Allen's — but there's no denying that "Gimme Shelter," with its jangling guitar riff and vague sense of dark menace, makes an ideal theme song for The Departed, Scorsese's electrifying remake of the Hong Kong action smash Infernal Affairs. We hear it first during the film's prologue, which briskly sets up one of the most ingenious premises in all of cinema: Irish mob boss Frank Costello (Jack Nicholson) places one of his soldiers (played in adulthood by Matt Damon) in training as a police cadet, then winds up unknowingly adding an undercover cop (Leonardo DiCaprio) to his crew. Each mole, ignorant of the other's existence, works his way up the food chain; surreptitious tipoffs from both sides produce an uneasy stalemate. Inevitably, each is charged with the task of locating the rat in the house — in other words, with unmasking himself. It's tricky to maintain an effective smokescreen, though, when you're also desperately trying to identify and deep-six your equally panicky and ruthless doppelgänger, without getting flushed out yourself.
Directed by the team of Andrew Lau and Alan Mak, Infernal Affairs was fairly sedate by the standards of Hong Kong bulletfests. Scorsese, working with a pungent rewrite by William Monahan (Kingdom of Heaven), cranks everything up to eleven, fragmenting an already convoluted story via jagged editing, relentless cross-cutting and nonstop momentum. This amphetaminic approach sacrifices much of the original's slow-burning tension; the most memorable sequence in the Hong Kong version, a secret duel conducted entirely with Morse code and text messages, makes little impression here.
On the other hand, virtually every other scene is more vivid, more memorable, certainly more quotable. The testosterone-heavy cast (which also includes Martin Sheen, Ray Winstone, Alec Baldwin and a hilariously belligerent Mark Wahlberg) clearly relishes every syllable of Monahan's ornately profane dialogue, and Scorsese, despite the relocation to South Boston, is back on his old stomping ground — more confident and relaxed, in his hopped-up way, than he has been in years. The Departed lacks the emotional heft of his '70s and '80s classics (this premise really needed Mr. John Woo), but it's easily his best and most satisfying film since GoodFellas, scandalously entertaining and often shockingly funny. — Mike D'Angelo

What the hell is everyone smoking? Reading the poisonous advance news on M. Night Shyamalan's latest, you'd think the director was offering up a badly shot home video of himself sitting on the can reading aloud the phone book from cover to cover. Amid all the nonsense in the press about M. Night's ego, M. Night's crazy movie, M. Night's tell-all book, M. Night's split with Disney, M. Night's impending career meltdown and whatnot, there's one simple, important fact being conveniently ignored: Paul Giamatti has just given the greatest performance of his career — as a lead in a Hollywood studio movie no less — and no one is noticing.
    Lady in the Water is, first and foremost, not the disaster everyone has predicted. It's a perfectly fine film — an effectively made, often very funny, mood piece-cum-fairy tale where thriller elements come into sharp relief every once in a while and then fade back into the background. The story concerns stuttering building superintendent Cleveland Heep (Giamatti) who discovers a water nymph (Bryce Dallas Howard) living in the pool of his drab but colorfully populated apartment complex. It turns out this creature is a mystical being that has to deliver a message to a writer (played, probably to his everlasting regret, by Shyamalan himself) and then return home. But preventing her from returning is a mysterious wolf-like creature that lives in the lawn around the pool. In order to figure out what to do with his unexpected guest, Cleveland has to learn the specifics of the fairy tale he is living in, find some way to apply that fairy tale to the mundane reality of his apartment complex, and get all the neighbors to assume their designated roles in the story.
    It's actually a pretty cute little conceit. It's also a flighty, fragile one — alternately ridiculous, comic, sad, ridiculous, creepy, and also, well, ridiculous. No living actor should be able to pull off this story's odd dance between mundane pathos, mythic fantasy, and creeping dread. Except that Giamatti does — he's a child when he has to be, a sad and lonely little man when he has to be, and a hero when he has to be. He holds this crazy stunt of a movie together, bringing to it depths of emotion even Shyamalan probably didn't anticipate.
    To be fair, Lady in the Water does have its problems. By casting himself in a pivotal role as the writer, Shyamalan appears to have distracted attention from the fact that his real surrogate in this film is Giamatti's character — the poor, flustered workaholic who has to get everyone to play their parts and somehow make magic happen. It also doesn't help that Shyamalan is a merely serviceable actor lost in a sea of talent. Jeffrey Wright deserves special mention as a crossword fiend, as does Bob Balaban as a hilariously stuffy film critic (another Night-ism blown way out of proportion by the cognoscenti) whose recitation of classic structural tropes seems to be, in part, an admission by the writer-director that he knows there's a more conventional way to tell this story. And the elaborate fairy tale Cleveland is unraveling probably has a couple of beats too many, though its baroque intricacy is part of the joke. But all in all, Lady in the Water shows Shyamalan effectively breaking out of the thriller genre — one that, at least for this critic, wasn't all that thrilling in the first place — and sending things in an altogether more risky, fascinating, and powerful direction. It helps that he has the greatest actor of his generation along for company. — Bilge Ebiri click to close

Your Reviews

I really do not wish to get real technical aspects, (cinematography, screenplay, effect ...), with my review of this movie because so many people have and will do that with this movie. There are a few things that I think that this movie brought to the table that are so real, and haven't been done before, (or at least as well). I loved how even when even, the main characters died in the movie they generally didn't get the chance to give a "speech", (Colin Sullivan (Matt Damon) was shot mid-sentence), which is so real. Even Billy Costigan, (Leonardo DiCaprio), was giving his “speech” at the end it didn’t sound like a grand prepared speech like so many movies do. When a cold blooded killed pulls a gun on you guns are fired. There is no argument with them like many movie show. Also in the real life of drug kingpins and cops there usually isn't a happy ending. Cops die Dealers die this is life.

posted by moneyburns on 10/20/2006 8:47:39 PM

I really do not wish to get real technical aspects, (cinematography, screenplay, effect ...), with my review of this movie because so many people have and will do that with this movie. There are a few things that I think that this movie brought to the table that are so real, and haven't been done before, (or at least as well). I loved how even when, even, the main characters died in the movie they generally didn't get the chance to give a speech, (Colin Sullivan (Matt Damon) was shot mid-sentence), which is so real. Even Billy Costigan, (Leonardo DiCaprio), was giving his “speech” at the end it didn’t sound like a grand prepared speech like so many movies do. When a cold blooded killed pulls a gun on you guns are fired. There is no argument with then like many movie show. Also in the real life of drug kingpins and cops there usually isn't a happy ending. Cops die Dealers die this is life.