But Nicholson has his own plant within the Boston police department. He is Matt Damon, who refuses to pull a Becket until he learns that Nicholson is an FBI informant. Whatever.
The supporting cast has Mark Wahlberg as the biggest jerk to ever wear a police uniform, Martin Sheen as his go-along boss, Alec Baldwin as another bigwig cop, and Vera Farmiga as the unlikely mistress of both Damon and DiCaprio.
How others will see it. The Departed turned a box office profit despite a whopping production cost of $90M. At the Oscars, it won Best Picture, Best Director, and Best Screenplay. The public loved it, and today the film has a remarkable 600K user votes at imdb.com. It is true that the user ratings decline from 9.0 under age 18 to 8.1 over age 45, but in any event it is clear that the film is nearly universally admired. It presently ranks #45 on the imdb Top 250.
How I felt about it. Although this is hardly the first time it has occurred to me, I am greatly disappointed by the critical and fan reaction to The Departed. Here is a film in which the dialogue, the characters, their relationships, and the plot events are predominantly unnatural. And due to a combination of star power, the power of the almighty dollar, and the public fascination with bad boys acting out, we have an average-plus film hailed as a masterpiece by nearly one and all.
The biggest embarrassment is that it won Best Picture and Best Director. But close behind is the Oscar nomination of Mark Wahlberg for Best Supporting Actor. I don't blame him for his ridiculously over-the-top performance, or the lines, laced with threats and obscenities, that he had to deliver. That's all Scorsese's fault. But once you take away all the posturing and profanity, you have nothing left, and you can't hang an Oscar on that.
One can imagine cops and FBI agents watching this film and wincing in pain. After all, nobody they know would act like this at the office and keep their job. Even though he is a moviestar commanding seven figure paychecks, not even Leonardo DiCaprio can pick up a shrink by berating her. Especially when shrinks aren't supposed to date their cases. Particularly when they are head cases. And why would DiCaprio have a session with her, anyway? Is it usual for a parolees to meet with publicly-paid psychiatrists?
The last twenty minutes of the film is mostly a sequence of the stars getting murdered by someone unlikely to shoot them. This is done for shock value, I suppose. I am reminded about what someone once said about the movie Wild Things. "Anyone could have ended up on the boat." That is, who lives and who dies in such a movie is ultimately a whim of the director. Howard Hawks was loathe to kill off his leads, and movies like this make me understand why.
DiCaprio, as usual, is mesmerizing, and Matt Damon appears self-aware that he is just an overpaid actor in an overrated film. Baldwin hams it up just enough, and Martin Sheen looks forward to getting pushed off the building, so he can bank his check and leave the set. Jack Nicholson, however, has been overripe since at least A Few Good Men if not The Shining, and his Crook-as-Satan act is the wrong page from the Al Pacino playbook. Pacino set the original bad example for overacting way back in 1975 when he made Dog Day Afternoon.
The relatively few who malign The Departed usually do so because they prefer Infernal Affairs. It is true that the chronology of the latter film works better. Here, it appears that DiCaprio becomes the right hand man of Nicholson immediately, even though he doesn't seem to ever do anything to deserve such a high rank within a kingpin's organization.
The biggest problem of the film, though, is why DiCaprio would agree to get fired, imprisoned, and become a gangster, all for a policeman's pay into some bank account that he will probably never live to access. I suppose it has been done before (White Heat) but it is a crummy hand to be dealt and accept.
We also wonder how DiCaprio won a posthumous Medal of Merit if his personnel file was deleted by Damon. Or how Damon explained the three dead bodies in the building basement. Or how only two people would know that DiCaprio was an undercover cop.
In short, nothing really rings true, and the film has to get by on the presence of its moviestars. Each of the three leads play their established typecasts, and we have to admit, it is more interesting than C-SPAN. But every time Scorsese cues "Gimme Shelter," it makes me want to listen to the Rolling Stones "Let It Bleed" instead of watching the rest of the film, just to see who gets offed.