After the Oscar-bait double-whammy of Gangs of New York (2002) and The Aviator (2004), Scorsese finally captured the coveted golden boy with The Departed. I’m glad he won for a movie that is vintage Scorsese—unrelentingly violent, foul-mouthed, testosterone-addled, and shot through with Catholicism at its most compromised and fallen—as opposed to one of his more strained and studied efforts. That said, The Departed is unlikely to win the Godfather of American film any new fans.

Considering Marty flirted with priesthood for awhile, it’s unsurprising that his movies often meditate (or unhealthily obsess) over modern man’s spiritual impoverishment. Grace clings by its fingernails in the cynical Mean Streets of Scorsese’s movies. His characters are often unlikable Hollow Men—more concerned with outward appearance than inner holiness. It’s a curious irony that Scorsese’s embarrassingly silly Last Temptation of Christ is one of his least convincing cinematic explorations of the nature of faith.

A recurring theme in his films is the siren song of materialism drowning out the voices of the angels. Christ’s Last Temptation, for example, was a normal life—wife, kids, a day job. (I’m reminded of Chesterton’s quip about St. Francis—his temptation to start a family was not a sin but a sacrament.) The mobsters in Goodfellas and Casino, Bill the Butcher in Gangs of New York, or Howard Hughes in The Aviator are larger-than-life antiheroes whose trappings of the Good Life are outward flourishes of their single-minded pursuit of their own power and glory, not God’s.

Scorsese described The Departed as his first movie with a plot. It’s a good one, too, with a Gordian-knotted complexity and kind of Shakespearean unreality: two young Boston police officers go undercover, one to infiltrate a crime boss’s syndicate while the other is the crime boss’s mole in the Police Department. Leonardo DiCaprio as Billy Costigan (the good cop who gets no recognition) has a frazzled, frayed energy and Matt Damon’s superficially wholesome, charming Colin Sullivan (the bad cop who earns all the awards, accolades, and promotions) is a masterful portrait of a man with a hole where his soul should be.

Costigan and Sullivan are blood brothers, each desperate to please a surrogate father. Martin Sheen plays Captain Queenan, a clean-living Catholic who personifies gentle paternalism by taking the troubled but talented Costigan under his wing. (When Sullivan has Queenan followed, one of the surveillance officers wonders if he’s interested “in the good Catholic life”). In a movie chock-full of calculating sociopaths dripping cruel machismo, Captain Queenan is a welcome spot of warmth.

His doppelganger is Frank Costello (Jack Nicholson), the shadowy figure from the opening sequence who buys Colin Sullivan’s young soul for the price of a loaf of Wonder Bread and some comic books. “Non serviam,” he growls to a group of young proteges, quoting his spiritual predecessor, Lucifer. Costello’s religion is money, and he is Boston’s high priest of the criminal underground. Nicholson tends to let his eyebrows act for him, but few are better at being seedy, seductive, and soulless at once. For all his pomp and swagger, Costello is Shakespeare’s Poor Player, “who struts and frets his hour upon the stage, and then is heard no more.” From Jake LaMotta to Bill the Butcher to Frank Costello, Scorsese is fascinated by outsized characters undone by the cold fact of mortality.

The Shakespearean bloodbath that ends the film seems an expression of Scorsese’s deep-seated and longstanding nihilism. But the world he portrays is soaked in blood from the beginning, and violence begets violence in a vicious circle. Often the only comfort to be culled from a Scorsese film is that you’re not a character in one.

USCCB rating: L — limited adult audience

Posted by John Murphy on Saturday, April 14th, 2007 at 4:33 pm.