The Departed (2006)
Directed by Martin Scorsese
To take down South Boston's Irish Mafia, the police send in one of their own to infiltrate the underworld, not realizing the syndicate has done likewise. While an undercover cop curries favor with the mob kingpin, a career criminal rises through the police ranks. But both sides soon discover there's a mole among them.
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40 films that influenced The Departed
What critics say influenced The Departed
True, it still doesn’t make “The Third Man” as great as history remembers it, but without Carol Reed's classic 1949 noir, we wouldn’t have films like “ Chinatown ” or “ The Departed ."
He adds impish visual touches such as silent movie-style iris shots, as well as cuts and compositions recalling "The Third Man" and "Psycho."
The aforementioned scene, the use of the Rolling Stones' "Gimme Shelter" (significantly, from their Let It Bleed album), the reference to the Stones' Exile on Main Street, the evocation of Carol Reed's The Third Man (1949), the nod to the "X" imagery from Howard Hawks' Scarface (1932), etc. these give the film its tone, its feeling, its weightiness quite apart from their more overt symbolic value.
Another, deftly borrowed from The Third Man, simply involves Madolyn walking past Colin at a funeral, her impassive gaze deadlier than a speeding bullet.
The aforementioned scene, the use of the Rolling Stones' "Gimme Shelter" (significantly, from their Let It Bleed album), the reference to the Stones' Exile on Main Street, the evocation of Carol Reed's The Third Man (1949), the nod to the "X" imagery from Howard Hawks' Scarface (1932), etc. ?
He loves to toss into "The Departed" a homage to a film like "The Third Man," to give audiences a reference point about things that please him.
And if Scorsese's direction draws a little deeply from his work on Goodfellas and Casino--"Gimme Shelter," which he used on both previous soundtracks, is used twice here--well, those were awfully good movies.
Billy's scenes are often set to "Gimme Shelter," with a judicious phrase from Badfinger here ("Guess I got, what I deserved"), Van Morrison there ("Comfortably Numb").
The Scorsesean aspects of The Aviator, plain to even the laziest eye, nevertheless escaped reviewers at large, so the director smacks them in the forehead with the opening image -- a luxuriant lateral pan with Jack Nicholson narrating in the shadows, "Gimme Shelter" blasting on the soundtrack.
Otherwise he strikes out, using a grating cover of Pink Floyd's "Comfortably Numb" that practically ruins a seduction scene between Farmiga and DiCaprio, and approaching laziness by reusing the Rolling Stones "Gimme Shelter" yet again (apparently, Goodfellas and Casino weren't enough).
You’ll have to go back to GoodFellas to find a Marty movie this fun, this enamored of language, of ethnic slurs, of “Gimme Shelter,” of explosive violence.
From the first shot of the film, accompanied by the opening riffs of "Gimme Shelter" by the Rolling Stones (a favorite of the director who has also included the song in "Goodfellas" and "Casino") the soundtrack helps tell the story.
The aforementioned scene, the use of the Rolling Stones' "Gimme Shelter" (significantly, from their Let It Bleed album), the reference to the Stones' Exile on Main Street, the evocation of Carol Reed's The Third Man (1949), the nod to the "X" imagery from Howard Hawks' Scarface (1932), etc. ?
Channeling James Cagney in White Heat and Paul Muni in Scarface, Nicholson leeches out the glamour to create a landmark portrait of evil.
Two dozen films under his belt, and Martin Scorsese can still crank out a gem worthy of comparison with "Taxi Driver," "Goodfellas" and "Raging Bull." "The Departed" doesn't have quite the same air of brilliance about it as those classics did, but it sure comes close.
Working from a script by William Monahan, Scorsese has made a picture that's more in line with such past mob morality tales as GoodFellas and Mean Streets than with his recent spate of ambitious (and Oscar-lunging) period epics like The Aviator and Gangs of New York.
“The Departed” is not one of his greatest films; it doesn’t use the camera to reveal the psychological and aesthetic dimensions of an entire world, as “Mean Streets,” “Taxi Driver,” “Raging Bull,” and “Goodfellas” did.
A preoccupation with the Irish underclass gives The Departed a certain distinction as well, though at times it's laid on a bit thick (the pederast priest notion is pushed farther, perhaps, than it should), and the three principles often parallel a similar trio of hoods in Goodfellas: Damon, like Robert De Niro, hides callous indifference beneath a winning smile; DiCaprio, like Ray Liotta, is all paranoid stares and repressed rage; and Nicholson, like Joe Pesci, uses clownish tics to disguise the mind of a pure psychopath.
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(To do Warners justice, Marked Woman (1937) starring Bette Davis as one of the prostitutes who helps convict the gangster based on Lucky Luciano, has a more nuanced sense of situation than The Departed.)
For years, until “The Departed,” in 2006, they were the only crime-gangster movies to have won Best Picture.
Sure, “ Goodfellas ,” “ The Departed ” and “ Scarface ” are terrific stories in their own right, but they probably wouldn’t have been made without the success of Coppola’s epic.
Frank, who bears more than a passing resemblance to the notorious Boston thug James (Whitey) Bulger, is not isolated in high-walled solemnity, like the Italian grandees in “The Godfather.”
The film is practically the Asian equivalent of “ The Godfather ," and was such a blockbuster success when it debuted overseas that it spawned a prequel and sequel (respectively) much in the same vein of the famous crime drama.
As mob boss Frank Costello, Nicholson dominates a film filled with great performances, mixing Socrates with The Godfather to become a badass Irish mobster like no other.
In many ways, the film is very much in the tradition of his gangster-noir classics, and a fan clearly can recognize echoes of the themes, style, dialogue and dark humor of "Mean Streets," "Taxi Driver," "GoodFellas" and "Casino."
"The Departed" isn't a particularly ambitious project for Scorsese, who returns to moral themes he's explored in all his crime movies going back to "Mean Streets."
There is no reason to compare "The Departed" to Scorsese’s other gangster films, "Mean Streets" and "GoodFellas," just as comparing those two films is an exercise in futility.
Just as Spike Lee took a basic caper and added his own pet issues to elevate Inside Man to the upper echelons of its genre, Martin Scorsese has taken The Departed, based on an intriguingly simple premise, to its own heights by infusing issues that have concerned him ever since Mean Streets.
Martin Scorsese 's profanely funny, savagely entertaining "The Departed" is both a return to the underworld turf he's explored in such classics as "Mean Streets" and "GoodFellas" and a departure.
Director Martin Scorsese ("Taxi Driver"/"Raging Bull"/"GoodFellas"/"Mean Streets") takes another crack at a violent urban drama after straying from that familiar turf with his last two films "The Aviator" and "Gangs of New York"; it's the kind of pugnacious subject-matter he has earned his legendary rep on.
For one showpiece example, there's a scene where the action is accompanied by both the climactic scene of John Ford's The Informer (1935) playing on a TV and the Badfinger song "Baby Blue" on the soundtrack.
Costello's red-drenched night at the opera follows into the merest view to a coke-fueled orgy, with The Band's version of "Comfortably Numb" completing the rhapsodic impressionism; the shift from Italo-American New York City to Irish Boston is a smooth one for the Catholic anguish remains in place, as a TV glimpse of The Informer (Victor McLaglen contorted in chiaroscuro penitence) segues into a Virgin Mary mosaic, which is promptly smashed over the head of a thug.
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Scorsese underlines the idea of untimely ends by scoring the movie with songs from performers whose careers were cut short by tragedy, such as John Lennon ("Well Well Well") and Patsy Cline, whose gorgeous heartbreaker "Sweet Dreams" floats through many of Costello's scenes like a melancholy ghost.
Allusions to the Hong Kong original are kept in check (the abrupt underground meeting with the triad leader, Michael Ballhaus' photographic tribute to Chris Doyle in one rain-slicked night passage), just as the director acknowledges previous instances of cultural cross-influencing by looking back at Reservoir Dogs, another Asian-tinged duel of honor.
Director Martin Scorsese's latest masterpiece defies the crime-fiction genre and throws more curves than a Major League pitcher.Based on the 2002 Hong Kong film "Infernal Affairs," Scorsese's "Departed" is infused with Tarantino sensibilities (think "Reservoir Dogs" or "Pulp Fiction"), phenomenal acting performances and a wickedly smart script.