'Hoodfellas

Scorsese returns to mean streets with a hit in 'The Departed'

October 06, 2006|Globe Staff

Martin Scorsese won't be winning any Oscars for ``The Departed." The movie's too hard, too pulpy -- too good. A relentlessly violent, breathtakingly assured piece of mean-streets filmmaking, the film shows the legendary director dropping the bids for industry respectability that have preoccupied him over the past decade and doing what he does best: burrow to the agonized heart of criminality and let the blood and guilt splatter where they may.

Adapted from the 2002 Hong Kong action film ``Infernal Affairs" by the Dorchester-born screenwriter William Monahan , ``The Departed" is also the closest we've come yet to The Great Boston Movie, a beast that requires more honesty than filmmakers (and audiences) have been willing to grant. The film's only serious flaw is that it establishes a venal and local moral wasteland, crisscrossed by scummy realities of class and race, that it never follows up. What begins as a blood-soaked tragicomedy about our fair town's tribal warfare turns into merely a brilliant B movie. Don't let that keep you away.

``I don't want to be a product of my environment -- I want my environment to be a product of me." So says Frank Costello (Jack Nicholson), the satanic South Boston mobster who could be Whitey Bulger's even more evil twin. Narrating the film's opening passages against a backdrop of news footage of the 1974 anti-busing violence, Costello lays out his version of ethnic realpolitik: ``That's what the black chappies never realized. No one gives it to you. You have to take it."

MORE ABOUT ``THE DEPARTED" To view a trailer and a photo gallery, and to show off your "Departed" snapshots, visit boston.com/films.

Frank does, however, give a leg up to a starstruck neighborhood kid named Colin Sullivan, whom he grooms for a long-term project: grow up straight, join the police, be my in-house mole. By the time Colin is played by Matt Damon, he's a canny customer on track to department success -- a rising star with the State Police's special investigative unit headed by the glib, hard-driving Ellerby (Alec Baldwin). Their mission: Bring down the Irish mafia in general and Costello in particular. Colin's mission: keep ``dad" apprised of any incoming busts.

A separate undercover unit run by Oliver Queenan (Martin Sheen) and his hotheaded deputy Dignam (Mark Wahlberg) recruit their own L Street Brownie: Billy Costigan (Leonardo DiCaprio), a police academy misfit with a crooked family he wants to live down. In short order, Billy is jailed on a cooked-up assault, sent back on the streets, and works his way into Costello's mob as an informer.