Nathan's Movie Collection: The Depahhted (2006)
“How did you know he was a cop?” “You know, bad haircut, no dress sense, and, you know, a slight air of scumbag entitlement.”
Note: Most of these movies have been around for a considerable amount of time, so assume there will be spoilers all throughout. There’s no profanity but there’s some censoring that makes it sound weirder than necessary. For whoever needs to know that, I guess.
The fine folks here at Nathan’s Movie Collection HQ have done their best to pick films that represent my taste and one of my favorite genres is something I’ve succinctly named “Guys Yelling At Each Other in Close Proximity.” Kind of explains itself: a bunch of emotionally unregulated guys yelling at each other1 in close proximity about various things. Most of the time, these guys are in law enforcement, as in today’s film. What are they yelling about? Could be crime, could be business, could be both and often is. I believe I mentioned the yelling. The classic and most on-the-nose example in my opinion is 12 Angry Men. Then there’s Heat, The Insider, basically anything directed by Michael Mann. Tony Gilroy made history in the “Guys Yelling At Each Other in Close Proximity” genre with the Oscar-winning film Michael Clayton starring George Clooney.
But the absolute best to ever do it in my opinion is a small Italian American man famously from New York City who’s been at it for around fifty years and has a new movie coming out this weekend. The man whose reasonable opinions on superhero movies mobilized the worst kind of people into defending people who are and will continues to make billions of dollars either way.
I know there’s probably ten other titles I should be picking to talk about this guy but sticking with the genre of choice and going with my heart, the movie is The Departed directed by Martin Scorsese.
This movie is important because I saw it when I was sixteen. I wasn’t allowed to go to theaters, but I was allowed to watch DVDs. There was a flea market we used to go to in Puebla where I’d buy bootlegged DVDs of movies that hadn’t made it to home media yet2. Obviously, this was not how Mr. Scorsese intended his work to be screened but I can promise you that in the years since, I’ve spent an amount of money I’m too embarrassed to try and calculate to see movies the proper way.
When I started really paying attention to what I was watching, I started looking for titles I knew were up for awards and The Departed was one of those movies. That was also the year of Babel, The Queen, and Clint Eastwood’s WWII double feature of Flags of our Fathers and Sands of Iwo Jima. Babel3 went completely over my head while others made me feel like a Serious Film Watcher at the ripe old age of sixteen.
The Departed blew my mind because my understanding was that Oscar movies were supposed to be a little boring and about Something Important so when a Boston cop thriller won Best Picture at the Oscars4, I was like, “Of course, that movie was awesome. Why didn’t it win every Oscar?” I didn’t get what this movie winning Best Picture—and more importantly, Marty winning Best Director—meant to lifelong Scorsese fans. I had yet to see Taxi Driver, Raging Bull, Goodfellas, or any of the movies he should have won for. I’ve since done my due diligence and have come away agreeing that while The Departed is still one of his best, it’s ridiculous that this is the only one he has an Oscar for.
Scorsese’s also one of those directors like Robert Altman who’s got such a long body of work that if you’re picking favorites, you really have to pick one from each decade. I mean, you don’t have to. This is something only a maniac like myself would do. I’m just saying if you’ve seen most of them, there’s different eras to pick from. Anyway, mine are Taxi Driver (1976), The King of Comedy (1982), The Age of Innocence (1993), The Departed (2006), and Silence (2016).
Anyone who says the man only makes gangster movies has probably only seen Goodfellas, maybe Casino. He’s also done dark comedies, costume dramas, a musical, spiritual epics. The Irishman is a gangster movie that’s also a spiritual epic. At the time of writing this, I’ve yet to see Killers of the Flower Moon and I’m mostly avoiding any reviews/spoilers, which I recognize is an odd thing to say considering the subject matter. Anyway, back to The Departed.
Based on the Hong Kong film Infernal Affairs5, The Departed primarily follows two cops, Colin Sullivan (Matt Damon) and Billy Costigan (Leonardo DiCaprio). Sullivan was raised and groomed by mob boss Frank Costello (Jack Nicholson) to go through the police academy and become Frank’s spy inside the police department. Costigan comes from a family with ties to organized crime and is sent undercover by Captain Queenan (Martin Sheen) and Staff Sargent Dignam (Mark Wahlberg) to infiltrate Costello’s outfit and bring them down from the inside. Eventually, the police department smells a rat in their midst, so Colin is tasked with literally finding himself, a metaphor unsubtly hammered home when he starts dating Dr. Madolyn Madden (Vera Farmiga), a police-appointed psychiatrist who happens to be seeing Costigan as a client.
Because this is a Martin Scorsese picture, most of the best dialogue is peppered with profanity, so because there are children reading this, I’m employing the Good Place method of using strong language for this next part.
Early on in the movie, Dignam and Captain Ellerby (Alec Baldwin) are standing side by side in a conference room addressing the investigative unit going after Costello. The following exchange happens between the two men:
DIGNAM: Unfortunately, this shirthole has more forkin' leaks than the Iraqi Navy.
ELLERBY: Fork yourself.
DIGNAM: I'm tired from forkin' your wife.
ELLERBY: How's your mother?
DIGNAM: Good, she's tired from forkin' my father.
Some folks gripe that Scorsese is glorifying the terrible people in his movies, and I’d agree if he didn’t include scenes like this. After Wahlberg and Baldwin are done breathlessly insulting each other, the camera shows the rest of the room laughing at two grown men fighting like teenage boys. This scene in any other cop movie would be there to show you how far these tough guys are willing to go but the way Scorsese shoots it, there’s only so much of this bravado you’re meant to take seriously.
When I wrote about O Brother, Where Art Thou?, I talked about how the Coen brothers approach violence with it always being abrupt and disorienting just like in real life. The violence gets pretty rough in The Departed, as it does in a lot of Scorsese’s work, but it’s still more considered than most other movies. Gratuitous violence to me is a superhero leveling an entire city while nameless citizens are flung about like rag dolls. But enough about Marvel movies, in a newsletter about Martin Scorsese of all things.
Matt Damon and Leonardo DiCaprio were two actors I was obsessed with at the time so the idea of them both being in the same movie was enough for me to try and see it however I could. I still think it’s an all-timer for both of them. This time around, I really noticed how their characters grappled with crooked father figures, a Scorsese special. Costello’s an outright crook while Queenan’s ostensibly on the side of the law. I used to see Sheen as the kinder character and while I still do, I also see how he uses that paternal approach to manipulate Billy in the same way Colin’s being manipulated by Costello. Billy loses Queenan when he’s thrown off a roof by Costello’s men. Colin and Costello have a confrontation that ends with them drawing guns and shooting at each other. Frank starts to tell Colin he’s like a son, which Colin scoffs at. “Is that what this is about? All that murderin'... and forkin'... and no sons?”
Damon plays Colin with an overconfidence that makes it a little gratifying when things blow up in his face6. All throughout the movie, he’s been mocking Madolyn’s job, at one point joking about officers crying about having to shoot their gun. But when he’s up on the rooftop, he goes from mocking Billy to threatening him before breaking down crying and begging to be killed. I say this without trying to imply anything about the man in real life: Matt Damon is really good at playing cowards.
The one person in this I’ve really become a fan of in recent years is Vera Farmiga, who’s great playing a psychiatrist caught in a patient confidentiality nightmare. It’s one of the weaker points of the movie, but Farmiga really holds her own in every scene, so much so you wish there was a little more time with her. Outside of The Departed, I became a bigger fan of hers through the Conjuring movies but more importantly, she directed the movie Higher Ground, a spiritual drama about a woman wrestling with her Christian faith. I watched it for the first time this year and it felt so familiar to my own faith journey, I wrote something about it back in June. To date, this is the only thing she’s directed which I find surprising because it’s a such great movie.
I’ve already gone obscenely long on this, so I’m gonna land the plane by saying this may not be the best Scorsese movie but it is definitely my favorite. Look, I’ve said before and I’ll say it again: Martin Scorsese is really good at making movies.
This could also describe most of Adam McKay’s filmography, but I’ll talk more about that next month.
When people joke about finding religious loopholes in their younger years, it’s usually about sex. I was just bending scripture to try and to see Spider-Man 3 early.
I’ve since come around on Babel, as well as most of Alejandro González Iñárritu’s movies. Out of the Three Amigos (Cuarón, del Toro, Iñárritu), I think he tends to catch the most flak from critics and to that I say, open your heart and let Alejandro in.
I think the real answer is that the Academy looooves long movies.
A movie I have yet to see so I cannot compare the two.
Heh.
“The man whose reasonable opinions on superhero movies mobilized the worst kind of people into defending people who are and will continues to make billions of dollars either way.”
Thank you.
About the bootleg dvds, in my youth, my parents used to take me to Los Callejones in LA, where they also sold bootleg dvds. That’s where I got my first copy of LoTR: The Two Towers 😂😅
I’m also a Vera Farmiga stan. I love her in Bates Motel.