The Departed
Those damn Buoston accents, I luove it. “Anointed Pederast” when referring to men of the cloth, they should have used that tagline on Spotlight (or at least a punk band name). I really want to rewatch Infernal Affairs now.
The setup is a clear contrast between the DiCaprio and Damon.
Billy is someone who comes from a crime family through and through, whose mother’s funeral is deserted but with a card from Costello himself, who has all the opportunity to be a crook, but hates the criminals with all the fiber of his being. A good guy.
Colin is just a smart kid, from a regular middle class family. He’s just unremarkable, but Costello got him when he was a kid (maybe sexually?), and he quickly rose through society until he is detective, charged with “mildly inconvenience” organised crime in town. He was just a snotty kid, but after being worked over by Costello, he makes a pass at every single piece of ass he sees, but then cannot perform his duties on the bedroom. Childhood trauma from his altar boy days, or downright homosexuality? He also snares at the realtor like the rotten class traitor he is.
Billy is the perfect guy to go undercover and infiltrate Costello’s organisation. He’s used to code-switch between middle class Bostonian and Southie drawl. The sarge hates his guts, but he’s not dirty, just prejudiced against the fucking Irish. Billy spends some time in the clink, while the dirty cop stars living large, always eyeing the gold-plated state congress.
The psychiatrist is the moral compass. Colin has a lot of red flags, I mean a shitload of them, but she seems to like the bad boys, or gets conned by a sociopath. Instead of staying with the loving but unstable guy who begs her for Valium… She wears a Harvard hoodie and went to UMass, so she’s high class, maybe that’s it, slumming is only for pleasure. She gets completely broken in the process, and with a baby too. She is the real villain, the only one with an arc that remains alive by the end.
I mean, the red flags are way over the top. Right from the first meet cute, that shit about the hiding her childhood photos, all the “jokes” which aren’t. She got him dead to rights when he takes that Costello call, but still gives him the benefit of the doubt. Unless Billy is the father, which makes it even more senseless.
Everyone else dies, one way or the other. Ironically, the guy chasing ambition dies in disgrace, while the guy that wants the opposite of that is the one with the state funeral, bagpipes, the whole nine yards.
That final Marky Mark scene is there just to make us feel good, but it doesn’t make much sense. It’s still a depressing ending.
I can see why pitching this would be a problem, it sounds exactly like a soap opera. But the script elevates such humble story into a cohesive and believable package. With the rest of the cast plus some bells and whistles, it’s a very strong piece of cinematic story.
This is Marky Mark’s role of a lifetime, it’s like a cop version of R Lee Emmy mixed with Private Joker. Alec Baldwin doesn’t shoot anyone in the face, that must be a relief for the rest of the cast and crew. He does punch some dude then squirms for a bit, like almost every other person. The rest of the cast were basically stars already before this, just another notch in their massive belt.
This is my place for ramblings about sequences of images that exploit the human visual limitation know as persistence of vision.