It would be absurd to isolate any one sequence to stand for all of Martin Scorsese’s filmography, but the first meeting between Leonardo DiCaprio and Jack Nicholson in The Departed (2006) is surely among the director’s finest this century—an expertly controlled microcosm of the savagery and sophistication of the larger film which, turning twenty this year, now takes its undeniable place alongside his other classics.
Flunked out of the Massachusetts State Police, livewire William Costigan (DiCaprio) has slunk back to his sometime-home in Boston’s Southie, where his escalating acts of criminality have caught the attention of Irish mob kingpin Frank Costello (Nicholson). In truth, of course, Costigan remains a Statie, his mixed-class upbringing lending him the natural duplicity of an undercover bait-trap. For Scorsese, saloons are theaters where men transform their station through acts of charisma and violence, but here—Sunset Park’s Irish Haven standing in for Southie’s Triple O’s—Costello makes his approach in funereal quiet. Unpredictability is Costello’s métier, and his henchmen appear likelier to devour Costigan than recruit him. The young hothead’s latest tantrum has some Providence mafiosi looking for revenge: will he accept Costello’s protection and the devil’s pact that comes with it?
Costigan’s double life is pushing him toward real instability and he answers all of Costello’s questions like they’re riddles. An exchange over Costigan’s late father snaps between them like bone. Blarney only gets you so far at the front of the bar; in the back room, where the tricolor gathers dust beside an Old Glory straight out of Stanley Forman, the interrogation takes on Bush-era enhancements. By the time the brass on the Stones’ “Let It Loose” crescendoes, Costello is slamming a workboot into Costigan’s injured arm, practically feeding him the (false) confession he desires to extract it again.
The catastrophes that follow in The Departed flow directly from this moment of (self-)deception. Costello has seen instantly through Costigan’s ruse—as surveillance tightens and his operations begin to unravel, how can he possibly doubt that his new protégé is the rat for which he obsessively searches? Psychoanalysis is just one motif in William Monohan’s baroque screenplay, adapted from Andrew Lau and Alan Mak’s slick Hong Kong franchise-starter Infernal Affairs (2002), but brimming with American baggage, from the opioid crisis to the Patriot Act to a preview of the central technology (“micro-praw-cessahs”) of our emerging Pacific Cold War.
Monohan’s boldest intervention in his source material, though, comes courtesy of Freud—closing Scorsese’s loop with The Sopranos (1999-2007) and offering the director a darker, more contingent vision of the family than his stories of Italian America ever permitted. (A line about the Irish immunity to psychoanalysis is, naturally, invented from whole cloth—a bluff in the seduction between two working-class strivers.) Costello, an heirless, Lear-like sovereign, rules through the paternalism of the neighborhood clan, racialized and incestuous; his lechery is a warped mirror of the Catholic child sex abuse then newly-broken by The Boston Globe. And like James “Whitey” Bulger, leader of the Winter Hill Gang on which he’s based, Costello himself is a rat—an informant and collaborator with the FBI. When Frank tortures William, it’s second best to torturing himself: like any criminal or traitor or king, his real, desperate search is for the person who can finally bring his reign to an end.
Those who dismiss The Departed’s final shot—of a rat crawling beneath a view of the Massachusetts statehouse—frequently overlook the fact that this same statehouse, during the peak of Whitey’s reign, was the perch for his brother, Billy Bulger, President of the State Senate and one of the commonwealth’s most powerful politicians. Whitey would remain at large for another five years. Revisiting the film with hindsight, Nicholson’s psychotic mood swings, sexual gluttony, and artistic pretensions are also a fit for the profile of Hollywood gangster and Scorsese nemesis Harvey Weinstein.
The Departed screens tonight, September 10, and on September 13, at the Roxy on 35mm as part of the series “2006 Movies You Must See Before You Die.”
