‘Departed’ talks good, tough game

Soren Andersen, for the Northwest Guardian

Tough guys.

Talking tough. Acting rough.

And because it’s a Martin Scorsese picture that’s we’re talking about here, the roughness is extreme. Brain-matter splatter is a dominant decorative motif in “The Departed.” This movie is gory.

But it’s the tough talk that’s “The Departed’s” glory. Screenwriter William Monahan has given his rough, tough characters such ferocious and flavorful things to say that you can sense the actors smacking their lips as they dive into the red-meat feast laid before them. Sitting at the head of the table is Jack Nicholson. He’s in his glory, playing a demonic Irish American gangster with a satanic glee reminiscent of his work as the Joker, another crazed criminal with a lust for outsized evildoing.

His character, Frank Costello, is a hoodlum of gigantic appetites – for sex, for violence – a devil with a Mephistophelean gray goatee, disarrayed hair and the signature Nicholson mad gleam in his eyes.

He runs a mean mob in Boston with smarts and savagery, shooting people down and chopping people up with enthusiastic ruthlessness. There’s a great scene where he calmly instructs an underling to dispose of a severed hand as a test of intestinal fortitude. Can the flunky do the master’s bidding without losing his nerve or his lunch? Frank measures the man’s response with frightful focus.

So much for the savagery. For the smarts part, Costello cagily recruits a young man from his tough South Boston fiefdom to join the Massachusetts State Police and become the mobster’s deep-cover eyes and ears inside the department. At the same time, a supersecretive undercover unit inside the State Police is infiltrating one of their own into Costello’s organization.

The crooked cop, Colin Sullivan, is played by Matt Damon. The cop posing as a crook, Billy Costigan, is played by Leonardo DiCaprio.

The story is taken from a taut 2002 Hong Kong thriller titled “Infernal Affairs.” Divided loyalties, metastasizing paranoia and operatic violence turned the picture into an overseas hit. Transferred from Hong Kong to Boston, it is every bit as gripping.

Damon, always a smooth customer, is fine playing a smoothie whose polish and intelligence propel him quickly into the upper ranks of the State Police. DiCaprio is even better as a conflicted guy with a hair-trigger temper and an anguished moral sense. The temper and his penchant for sudden, volcanic violence is what draws the attention of Costello, who sizes him up as a useful recruit to his organization.

In a scene with a police psychiatrist he discloses that he can be a bundle of nerves on the inside while displaying fearless calm on the outside. Under stress, he says, his hands never tremble, and he’s both proud of his exterior control and puzzled by the dichotomy of what’s hidden within and what’s shown without and how he can exist with the contradictions. This is the third time DiCaprio has worked with Scorsese, and he gives his most forceful and oddly – given the nature of his character – comfortable performance of any of the three.

In neither “Gangs of New York,” where he played a vengeful street criminal, nor in “The Aviator,” where he played Howard Hughes, did he seem to inhabit those characters as thoroughly as he does here.

The psychiatrist, played by Vera Farmiga, is the only substantive female character in the picture and is romanced by both Colin and Billy, though neither man knows about the other’s involvement with this woman.

They’re very aware of each other, however, though neither knows the identity of the other. And that’s exactly what each is assigned to discover: Use their insider access to find the rat so that he can be exterminated. In the late going, Sullivan finds himself assigned by his superiors to hunt for the rat in the department … himself. The plot twists tighten.

Not since “GoodFellas” has Scorsese exhibited such command and clarity in the telling of a complicated story. In this all-male milieu, familiar to fans of “GoodFellas,” men jostle and battle for dominance. Tribal loyalty is prized above all, whether the tribe is crooks or cops, and no one is hated more than a turncoat. And no one is admired more than an alpha male who exudes toughness and fearlessness. There’s a lot of bull-moose style antler-locking here, not only among the leads but also among minor characters.

Mark Wahlberg, playing an intimidating cop with a scalding personal style, is tremendous in a small part, and his thick Boston accent is perfect. But then it should be. He was born in Dorchester, a tough working-class section of Boston. He seems to know his character in his bones.

Not listed among the cast but nevertheless playing a key role in “The Departed” are cell phones. Characters are on them constantly, tipping one another off or tripping one another up. The snap of the devices being opened and closed is as ubiquitous as the click of a round going into a chamber … and just as deadly.

The Departed

Director: Martin Scorsese

Cast: Leonardo DiCaprio, Matt Damon, Jack Nicholson, Mark Wahlberg and Martin Sheen

Running Time: 2:16

Rating: R; violence, language, sexual situations

Where: In wide release