The Herald - The Herald Magazine
Cops and robbers on Boston’s mean streets
DESPITE winning four Oscars, including those for Best Director and Best Picture, nobody would claim that this re-make of Hong Kong crime thriller Infernal Affairs is Martin Scorsese’s greatest cinematic achievement.
Most reserve that accolade for Goodfellas, made a decade and a half earlier in 1990. Or for his films from the 1970s such as Raging Bull, Mean Streets and Taxi Driver.
Or even, given the leeway and licence afforded the director in terms of casting, budgets and running time, The Irishman, the film he made for streaming giant Netflix and which was nominated for 10 Oscars at this year’s Academy Awards.
What The Departed does have, however, is some of the best elements of all those films – and on top of that, a jawdroppingly starry cast led by
Jack Nicholson and Scorsese regular Leonardo DiCaprio, alongside Matt Damon, Martin Sheen, Mark Wahlberg, Alec Baldwin and Ray Winstone. Damon and Wahlberg, both from Massachusetts, get to revisit their native accents and if you hear a throaty Scottish burr it belongs to Glasgow-born David O’Hara.
Scorsese being Scorsese, the distaff side doesn’t get much of a look in, however, the sole exception being Vera Farmiga as police psychologist Madolyn Madden. Instead the world of The Departed is very much the world of men, and those men are primarily gangsters or detectives.
The former group is led by Nicholson playing vicious and wonderfully-unhinged Boston crime boss Frank Costello, the latter by Martin Sheen and Alec Baldwin as Captains Queenan and Ellerby, rival police officers on Costello’s tail as he wreaks criminal mayhem in the city.
Where it becomes messy and where The Departed delivers its killer twist is in the roles of DiCaprio and Damon, respectively Bill Costigan, an undercover detective who has infiltrated Costello’s crew, and Colin Sullivan, who has been sent undercover into the Boston Police Department to work his way up and be Costello’s man on the inside.
Gradually, Costigan and Sullivan become aware of each other’s existence but it’s only in the film’s final sequence that they become aware of
each other’s identity and of the person who unites them. It’s as violent and expletiveriddled as you’d expect from a Scorsese flick, though its focus on the Irish rather than the Italian immigrant experience is a change from films such as Goodfellas and Casino.
DiCaprio, one of the most watchable actors working, is his usual magnetic self as the troubled Costigan but it’s the mercurial Nicholson who steals the show in a role based partly on real-life gangster
James ‘Whitey’ Bulger. Bulger, a notorious Massachusetts crime boss, was convicted of racketeering and murder and sentenced to life, and his murder in prison in 2018 made headlines around the world. Less stylish and kinetic than Andrew Lau and Alan Lak’s Hong
Kong original, what it lacks in slickness it makes up for with its emotional punch.
A sequel was planned though never realised, but don’t let that make you think everyone gets out alive.
KNIVES OUT
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DANIEL Craig is terrific (and looks like he’s having terrific fun) in this whimsical whodunnit romp from writer-director Rian Johnson, the man behind Star Wars: The Last Jedi and sci-fi curio Looper (Bruce Willis as a time-travelling hitman, anyone?).
Set in a massive country house in modern-day Massachusetts, Craig plays a magnificently overthe-top private investigator
Benoit Blanc who’s hired by an anonymous client to investigate the death of world-famous crime writer Harlan Thrombey, played by Christopher Plummer. Imagine Sherlock Holmes re-cast as a dapper and gentlemanly Southern beau (Craig) and Murder She Wrote’s Jessica Fletcher as a twinkle-eyed octogenarian with a morphine habit (Plummer).
As proof of Johnson’s post-Star Wars clout there’s an equally stellar supporting cast in the shape of Jamie Lee Curtis, Toni Collette, Don Johnson, Michael Shannon and, for the younger viewers, Chris Evans (aka Captain America in the Marvel movies), Jaeden Martell (from the IT remakes) and, as our heroine Marta Cabrera, Cuban actress Ana de Armas.
Marta was the elderly Harlan’s nurse and confidant, and the last person to see him alive – suspect number one, in other words, though surely she’s too nice to be guilty of murder?
All is revealed, though not before the plot has twisted and turned delightfully.