The Departed (Martin Scorsese, US)

By Andrew Tracy

Do we really need Martin Scorsese? Heresy though it may appear, the question interrogates not so much the man’s work as its reception—and in light of his recent output, the latter is far more interesting than the former. As Scorsese’s ambitions continue to wane in the belatedly careerist, Oscar-seeking course upon which he has set himself, there is a manifest refusal to let him go the way of other filmmakers whose efforts no longer match their ability. Good filmmakers naturally inspire proprietary feelings, but Scorsese has become less a going concern than a public trust, his secular sainthood guaranteed even further by his laudable contributions to film preservation and restoration. At stake here, it seems, is not simply the fate of one director but of the cinema entire—or at least of American cinema, which in this particular discourse amounts to the same thing.
This curious appropriation is unfortunate for two reasons, one speculative, the other concrete. The first misfortune is the filmmaker’s: the high expectations surrounding every one of Scorsese’s projects (which rarely translate into box-office successes) may well contribute to his drive for ever higher concepts, higher budgets, higher stakes, and, as The Departed ably demonstrates, successively lower results. The second folly belongs to the film critic. Hyperbolic overpraise can be a valuable weapon, but if the original Cahiers crew sometimes bent the truth of an individual film in the service of a higher truth, the mostly uncritical canonization of The Departed wholly detaches criticism from onscreen evidence. Strident as they were, Truffaut and co.’s polemics had an essentially dialectical spirit behind them. In today’s far more multifaceted, decentralized media landscape, the possessive discourse swirling about Scorsese is little more than a many-throated monologue, and one from which the filmmaker himself has been largely excluded.
           
That may be no more than poetic justice, for with this latest film Scorsese has absented his voice altogether. Whatever their individual virtues, flaws, or outright failings, the majority of Scorsese’s films have been about something, even if sometimes no more than their director’s ambition. The crucial defect of The Departed is that it is about nothing—which, in other hands, needn’t be a weakness. Indeed, in other hands it wasn’t. Infernal Affairs (2002) was certainly no world-beater, but it gained in strength from what it withheld: in its airlessly clever and highly implausible premise of twin moles burrowing into the respective ranks of cops and crooks, real-world detail would not only have been superfluous, but pretty near ruinous.
           
Yet it’s that very breach into which Scorsese charges with his remake, or is perhaps reluctantly led to by William Monahan’s severely questionable script. Exchanging the sleek, postmodern facelessness of Hong Kong for the New Old World ambiance of Boston Irish tribalism, The Departed has steeped itself in (a) history before it even starts. When Jack Nicholson takes us from the Depression to the Kennedys in his opening monologue, accompanied by footage of ‘60s street riots, the film deliberately locates itself in a world of deep-rooted traditions and the long-simmering tensions that accompany them. To impaste Infernal Affairs’ spy vs. spy plot over this milieu without compromising the setting’s complex integrity would have required a deft hand, but in attempting to rub too-clever fabrication up alongside hard-bitten history Monahan saps the fun from the former and the necessary air of authenticity from the latter. The Departed tells us nothing about cops, crooks, Boston, or the Irish; it’s a film adrift, with no point of orientation for any of its astonishingly talented collaborators to grasp onto.
           
This aimlessness is bad enough for the actors. While Mark Wahlberg and Alec Baldwin move slightly away from the flailing pack by sketching some fitfully amusing cartoons, Leonardo DiCaprio and Matt Damon are reduced to monotonous monochrome, Martin Sheen loafs around impotently and Vera Farmiga’s already impossible role receives no aid from her wan dopeyness. (Nicholson is beneath comment.) What’s surprising is the laxity that emanates from behind the camera. The banality of Michael Ballhaus’ atypically flat and depthlessly dull photography is only accentuated by equally banal flashes of visual indulgence, such as sheathing Nicholson in red during an opera performance. And far from the “virtuoso exercise in parallel montage” which Dave Kehr claims to find in Scorsese and Thelma Schoonmaker’s editing, “a fugue-like structure...finding creative and sometimes quite beautiful transitions based on matching rhythms, textures, movements, and shapes,” what’s most evident is the startling level of mismatch between even the most simple of transitions. Repeatedly plunking his principals down in neutral two-shots, Scorsese frantically intercuts his way through the (many) static dialogue scenes, paying little heed to body position, facial expression, or the continuous tenor of the scene.
           
Lest this seem a tad trifling, it should be stressed that at issue here is not the violation of any editing “rules.” Rather, it’s that Scorsese has no principles to put in their place. Time after time, Scorsese makes the most conventional of stylistic choices, passively connecting the dots of Monahan’s limp plotting at the expense of temporal or spatial logic—which, in light of the knee-jerk illogic of conventional Hollywood filmmaking, is synonymous with directorial imagination. (In the final confrontation between Damon and Nicholson, why don’t the dozens of surrounding cops intrude upon their little scene? Because they’ve got more lines to get through.) Even when Scorsese attempts to break the monotony with a little self-imitation, such as Nicholson’s slo-mo opening strut to the strains of “Gimme Shelter,” the effect is stifled by his obeisance to the plodding script, as the volume quickly dials down and the aborted montage abruptly shunts to a flat establishing shot.

So the question is beggared: wherefore anoint Scorsese virtuoso in the absence of virtuosity? The fact that even so astute a critic as Kehr, one of The Departed’s few detractors, could preface his negative reaction with a laurel tossed to its stylistic accomplishment says much—not about the soul-stirring “power of movies” (as per Richard Schickel), but the power of received narratives. The Departed, as film, hardly matters here; what counts is the largely imagined hand at the helm. For a confluence of reasons (nostalgic, nationalistic, psychological, ideological), Scorsese has been appointed the exemplar of a certain idea of cinema, and one, as per Schickel’s comment, supposedly innately connected to the foundations of the medium itself.

In this reading, dynamism, propulsion, and stylistic assertiveness are the very pillars of cinema—never mind the cinema’s equal ability for quietude, stillness, and self-effacing meditation. Never mind either Scorsese’s own frequent ill-fit with the Mean Streets-Goodfellas-Casino axis that has come to constitute this exclusive reading of his work; how does the cool and distanced symmetry of The King of Comedy (1983) fit into this model? Or New York, New York (1977)? How about The Age of Innocence (1993)? Kundun (1997)? The filmmaker himself, that is, the choices he makes within each specific film, is moot; it is Cinema itself that speaks through him, and each new film is simply another instance of that essence. Overdetermined and underwhelming, The Departed has that rootless and aimless quality that positively begs for assertive critical performance to compensate for its lack. Like any number of recent “auteur” efforts, from the Kill Bills (2003-4) to Munich (2005) to even Miami Vice, The Departed is just another disposable masterpiece, serving only to stoke some rhetoric before its fundamental indistinction consigns it to the memory hole.

—Andrew Tracy

The Departed

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