GLENN KENNY'S REVIEW (posted 10/03/2006)

More The Departed • Photos: Red Carpet Movie Premiere

This astonishing picture is being heralded as something of a comeback for director Martin Scorsese, whose last two fiction films, 2002's Gangs of New York and 2004's The Aviator, were grandiose, ambitious, and somewhat compromised films. Scorsese's last film proper, however, the Bob Dylan documentary No Direction Home, is one of the finest things the director has ever done. So comeback this is not, really. It is, however, a triumphant revisiting of territory in which Scorsese is an unchallenged master — the crime drama. An Americanized adaptation of the electrifying Hong Kong thriller Infernal Affairs, The Departed, scripted by William Monaghan, depicts a double game within the Boston mob and the undercover echelons of that city's police. Just as the undercover unit has planted an agent (Gangs and Aviator's DiCaprio, in his best work with Scorsese yet) in the gang of mobsters led by Frank Costello (a ripely dissolute and menacing Nicholson), so has Costello planted one of his own (a disarming Damon) inside the department. As each mole's machinations are mooted by the other's, they, Costello, and DiCaprio's putative protectors within the department find themselves caught up in an increasingly tense and brutal chess match. Making matters worse is that the "rats" on each side have found themselves in love with the same woman.

The Departed hews pretty closely to the plot of the original and adds a few chewy, nasty twists along the way; even though I'm a fan of Infernal Affairs, I didn't think about it once while actually watching Scorsese's film, which immediately immerses you in a seedy world that's entirely different from the one depicted in the earlier film. The director here returns to his grab-you-by-the-back-of-the-neck-and-make-you-look mode of moviemaking, and his command of different methods of doing so is just staggering. In some scenes, his cutting and use of music create a sense of dislocation and disorientation that's very New Wave; in other sequences, he'll stage a suspense set piece that's textbook classical and no less effective for it. The movie's violence is brutal, and practically constant; sometimes it almost seems like a taunt, as if Scorsese's saying to everybody who's been pining for another GoodFellas, "Oh, you like violence, do you? Well, how about some of this?" Mayhem aside, what's most uncompromised about this picture is its overall tone — its many funny bits (most of them courtesy of Nicholson, Baldwin, and a truly outstanding Wahlberg) notwithstanding, The Departed ends up the most affectingly bleak movie Scorsese's made since Taxi Driver.

—Glenn Kenny