The Oscar Project #79: The Departed (2006)

by Chris Marshall:

At this point in The Oscar Project, it’s hard to summon up much excitement about the last few films. It has nothing to do with their quality—all the remaining movies range from good to great—but rather the realization that there’s nothing new left to watch. The true point of this endeavor was to give me motivation to watch all the Best Picture winners I’ve never seen, and now that there are none of those left, it feels like I’m just going through the motions.

That’s not to say I won’t finish; I would have to be a crazy person to quit at this point, something I have no intention of doing. But it is true that I’m more looking forward to the Director/Franchise/Genre of the Week posts than I am the last few Oscar winners, simply because those are all movies I haven’t seen before.

That’s enough navel-gazing for one post, though. Let’s move on to the film. The Departed is a very good movie, both in terms of its technical merit and how enjoyable it is to watch. I don’t, however, believe it achieves the same level of greatness as some of his previous films that were unfairly passed over for Best Picture, such as Taxi Driver, Raging Bull, and Goodfellas.

But a second-tier Scorsese picture is usually better than a first-tier film by another director, so that comment shouldn’t be taken as criticism. When you set the bar as high as he did early in his career, it sets up impossible expectations. Look at Roger Federer. After his miracle years from 2004-2007, people would actually criticize him for going a whole year and “only” winning one major. He was a victim of his own greatness.

I think Scorsese is in a similar boat, and I’m guilty of it too. Maybe it’s not as good as his early films, but even so, what difference does that make? It should be judged on its own merits, not compared to work he did 35 years earlier. And in that respect, this is a good movie. It’s full of big stars (most of whom are actually good actors), its characters are well developed, and it’s paced well, even at two and a half hours long. I did find myself a bit confused at times, but that might be because I’m kind of dumb.

The only real beef I have is that it tries to make me care about anything that happens in Boston. I’m pretty outspoken about my distaste for that city, and in general I try to pretend that it doesn’t exist. For one thing, they have the most annoying accent of any region in the world, though to be fair, the accents used in the movie sounded pretty exaggerated to me and are likely as irksome to genuine Bostonians as Danger’s Southern accent in Million Dollar Baby was to me.

Sadly, the Funky Bunch did not appear in the film.

The plot is pretty complicated, but I’ll paint it in as broad a stroke as possible. Basically, a police officer (DiCaprio) goes undercover to infiltrate an Irish Mafia boss (Nicholson), but at the same time, the mob boss has a mole within the police department (Damon). This leads to lots of complications and bloodshed, as you might imagine. Oh, and it even has the requisite Best Picture love triangle with DiCaprio, Damon, and Vera Farmiga, though that’s mostly (but not entirely) tangential to the main story. 

I’ve still never seen the Hong Kong film Infernal Affairs, upon which The Departed is based, but I’ve long been interested in watching it. It’s currently listed in the IMDB Top 250—whatever that’s worth—and I’m really curious about where the extra 50 minutes of run time in The Departed comes from. Again, it never drags, so it will be intriguing to discover how the Hong Kong version tells the story in so much less time.

The 79^th Academy Awards are an important demarcation point in my movie watching career, as it was the first Oscar ceremony I watched from start to finish. This was my second year at Ole Miss, and it was the point when I first started getting “interested in film” in any serious way, hence why I’ve already seen all the Best Picture winners from here on out. But that’s still fairly recent, which also explains why I have so many cinematic blind spots remaining. I’m chipping away, slowly but surely, and it’s such a nice feeling knowing I’ve fixed so many of them the past three months.