Street smarts

It’s a remake of a much-admired Hong Kong action film (Infernal Affairs, 2002), and it’s directed by Martin Scorsese. The onscreen results are moderately fascinating on both counts, but what ends up mattering most is that The Departed is a tough-guy slugfest for six or seven male movie stars.

The central concept of Infernal Affairs, the parallel maneuvers and misadventures of a gangster working as a cop and cop posing as a gangster, sparks a good deal of interest here, too, with Matt Damon and Leonardo DiCaprio in the respective roles. But Scorsese’s sprawling remake also has Jack Nicholson flexing his diabolical starpower in the central mob-boss role, and that sets a tone of baroque flamboyance for much of the film.

Nicholson gets to do some of his most amusingly theatrical mugging here, which adds a peculiar layer of tragicomedy to what is often a bloody and violent tale. But with Mark Wahlberg, Alec Baldwin, Martin Sheen and Ray Winstone also in the cast, The Departed has a veritable overload of hard-case smart-mouth types. And while that cast is one of the production’s strong points, the crossfire of trash-talk intimidation and insults ultimately has a dull, blurring monotony to it here.

Screenwriter William Monahan transposes the original story to an Irish Catholic milieu in modern-day Boston, a circumstance which ostensibly permits Scorsese to do some re-hash and variation on the Italian Catholic backgrounds of his more personal films (Mean Streets, Goodfellas, etc.) Monahan’s scenario also cooks up a rather unlikely police psychiatrist (dourly played by blonde Vera Farmiga) who gets romantically involved with the opposed infiltrators (Damon and DiCaprio, that is). Neither the Boston accents nor the Byzantine psychologizing are particularly persuasive, although DiCaprio and Farmiga do share one of the film’s most effective exchanges in a scene that temporarily reverses their psychoanalytic roles.

Scorsese directs the proceedings with conspicuous flair and gusto. That and his flashy editing (with longtime editor Thelma Schoonmaker) tend to underline the filmmaker’s stylistic kinship with MTV and Asian action movies. Somehow, he’s managed to make an abundance of bloody violence seem both lavish and succinct—this film flaunts the gore, yet refuses to wallow in it.

Neither DiCaprio nor Damon gives a particularly distinguished performance, but DiCaprio does have the advantage of playing the most interesting of the story’s several pointedly flawed and deceptive characters. Wahlberg wields a generic intensity in the least credible of the main roles.