|
|
 |
 |
|
Monday, October 09, 2006
Scattered thoughts on The Depahted
Look out folks, there be spoilers here!
1. I'm pretty sure the cell phone was invented just for this film. I know they've been around for twenty or so years now but I think it was all leading up to that scene where Matt Damon calls Leonardo DiCaprio on Martin Sheen's bloody cell phone, DiCaprio's cell phone lurches towards him on vibrate and then they're both on the line to each other, only communicating silence. A great scene in a film filled with great scenes.
2. The previous Scorsese film this most echoes is Goodfellas. Fine by me, I watch Goodfellas about once a month, sometimes more (hey, look at that). DiCaprio's storyline as cop-playing-gangster William Costigan Jr. felt like the "Death of a Wiseguy" scene at the end of Goodfellas held for the length of the film. He's as paranoid as Ray Liotta's Henry Hill (and of course both of them should be). Costigan downs Oxycontin like Hill ingests Valium and cocaine. One of the best things about that Goodfellas scene is how music is used in the background to create tension. The same technique shows up in many scenes in The Departed. I loved John Lennon screaming "Well Well Well" while DiCaprio and Jack Nicholson discussed, amongst other less savory topics, Lennon himself. Pink Floyd's "Comfortably Numb" is also put to great use and you can never go wrong with "Gimmie Shelter."
4. I know the film is based on Hong Kong's Infernal Affairs (rising on my Netflix queue I assure you) but changing the setting to Boston and the Irish Mob gave it a real interesting subtext. The film is most concerned with men and one woman living in between the very rigid sides of law and crime. Nicholson's Frank Costello tells us right at the beginning "When you're facing a loaded gun, what's the difference" between cop and criminal? That conflict the main players have to deal with reminds me of an important part of the American Immigrate Experience. Irish-Americans, a group I am a part of on my mother's side, were once disenfranchised. Now by all outward appearance they seem to have been assimilated into mainstream White society. But that history of an excluded community creating their own system, the birth of almost all organized crime in this country and beyond, still exists as long as people like Costello exist. Costigan and Matt Damon's Colin Sullivan live in both the world of respectable society Irish-Americans are a part of and the underworld that was once the only option the community had. This historical/political angle is only really examined in Nicholson's opening scene with a young Sullivan and when Martin Sheen's Oliver Queenan and Mark Whalberg's Dignam go over Costigan's double-sided family history. It's still one of permeating the "dreadful ambiguities [that] coarsen the soul" as Scott Tobias points out.
4. Although the most important things to take from that opening scene: Wolverine comics will lead to a life of crime.
So yeah, as pointed out by an army of film critics this is Scorsese coming back to what he does best in Goodfellas, Casino, Taxi Driver and Mean Streets. I enjoyed The Aviator more than most but I was still glad to see Marty bringing a still vital, vibrant sense of storytelling to the crime genre after so many years. I actually thought this was more of a thriller than the other films were, most notably in that great, great scene where Costigan tracks down Sullivan in the Asian neighborhood. All the surveillance and by extension voyeurism is thematically related to Alfred Hitchcock and Brian De Palma's films. Scorsese is more interested in internal conflicts than genre expectations though. After seeing the film once (I might see it again while it's still in theatres) the scenes that standout to me are Costigan realizing is doom after witnessing Queenan's body on the ground and Sullivan futilely pleading to his wife outside the door after she learns the truth about him. Both scenes are of men knowing that the balancing act they've been trying to keep up has gotten the best of them and now only punishment is ahead of them.
Permanent Link: 7:36 AM |
1 comments
Comments:
excellent thoughts on the movie, I'd attempt to write my own review of it but I was so blown away by it I can't construct coherent sentences when I talk about it...Also, I'm glad you left out Nicholson's little gag in the porno theater. There are just some things you can't un-see.
# posted by : 6:40 PM
-- Home
|
|
