The Departed – 7.0

Fun, but not to be mistaken for Great.  As with Woody Allen’s Match Point, critics have hailed The Departed as a return-to-form for Scorsese, when in fact it is little more than a stretching of the muscles after a decade on the couch.  Scorsese hasn’t made anything close to Great since Cape Fear, and his most recent attempts, Gangs of New York and The Aviator, were particular failures, despite the herculean efforts of Daniel Day-Lewis and Cate Blanchett.  At least half of Scorsese’s problems can be attributed to his infuriatingly misplaced devotion to Leonardo DiCaprio, upon whose alien-man shoulders no film should ever rest.  Fortunately, DiCaprio manages to get out of the way here, perhaps because so many other, better actors are vying for the spotlight.  He plays Billy Costigan, a cop assigned to infiltrate the inner circle of Boston’s criminal kingpin, Frank Costello (Jack Nicholson).  At the same time, Costello has an inside man in the police force, Colin Sullivan (Matt Damon), who knows there’s a mole in Costello’s gang but not his identity.  Good-cop and bad-cop attempt to uncover and take out the other, and what ensues is an entertaining, rather good-natured game of cat-and-mouse, all foiled secret meetings and furiously typed text messages, until the surprisingly anarchic finale when nearly everyone is taken out in rapid-fire fashion.

Many fine actors fill the bill here, including Martin Sheen as Billy’s straight-shooting mentor, and Alec Baldwin, whose paunchy slickness wins some deserving laughs as Ellarby, the head of the police department.  Mark Wahlberg, in particular, is a minor revelation as Dignam, a senior detective in the police force.  Like that rare playground bully with actual smarts, he levels both DiCaprio and Damon with the film’s best, funniest lines, and steals every scene he’s in.  Unfortunately, these performances can’t cover for Jack Nicholson, who is woefully miscast as Costello.  As the film’s villain, he ought to strike chords of genuine fear, occasionally tempered with dark humor; instead, his bloated-clown schtick garners little more than a few chuckles.  It’s the sort of mistake that isn’t immediately obvious because Jack is Jack, but it’s what his performance should have been that highlights the film’s central problem.  Scorsese manages a cleaner, tighter direction to the whole affair, but he fails to express any of the psychological depth that he used to summon so beautifully; there’s no terror or emotion to trouble us long after we’ve walked out of the theater.  Had he cast former stand-bys like De Niro or Harvey Keitel as Costello, we might be discussing a different film altogether.  It’s an entertaining ride, no doubt, but ultimately just another footnote in a career once marked in chapters.