Brotherhood of Machismo

The Departed

Directed by Martin Scorsese

At what point will movies and TV shows about the belligerence of white ethnic gangsters stop being educational? Well, Martin Scorsese’s The Departed (Goodfellas III, or IV if you count the awful Gangs of New York) should start reassessment. Full of shock and cruelty, it offers little more than a grim, tawdry carnival. It’s time we question how the American (and now Third World) appetite for gangster movies has replaced the Western as a popular genre. These films don’t express our politics or social condition; they’re just a repository for cynicism, a mythology that validates greed, a primer that promotes brutality instead of courage.

In The Departed, Scorsese plunders Irish-American Boston, apparently having exhausted the ways New York and New Jersey Italian-Americans break the law. The Departed features that beneath-the-skin ethnic connection urban Italians feel for urban Irish, but its parochialism no longer owes to Catholicism since religion (Scorsese’s old crutch) barely surfaces in The Departed. Instead, Scorsese revives his obsession with the brotherhood of machismo. 

Costello (Jack Nicholson) is the reprobate mob boss presiding over the degradation of two rookie cops: Matt Damon plays Colin who becomes a mole inside the Boston police dept., and Leonardo DiCaprio plays Billy, a cop who becomes a mole inside Costello’s organization. Both are swayed by Costello’s evil patriarchy and both romance the same female police psychiatrist, Madolyn Madden (Vera Farmiga). Despite the intense performances, Scorsese doesn’t get at the heart of why men go bad. He fails to deconstruct the macho protectiveness that, apparently, draws people to this genre and which uses racial hostility as sociological validation. As usual, Scorsese is a skilled, hard worker; The Departed is flamboyantly well put together (the final gunshots make your head ring) but it is so conceptually shallow that its high style doesn’t matter. Scorsese spotlights ethnicity and machismo to distract from deeper truths. 

It’s worth knowing that The Departed is an adaptation of the 2004 Hong Kong trilogy Infernal Affairs by Andrew Lau and Alan Mak. The story does not originate in the white American ethnic soul, although screenwriter William Monahan piles on the Mystic River blarney: “Freud said the Irish are the only people who are impervious to psychoanalysis,” Colin boasts and not even the shrink contradicts that bromide. Marty and Monahan must believe it; they romanticize it as part of the superficial refashioning of Infernal Affairs. Scorsese’s deracination of that trilogy’s superb genre study bowdlerizes what made it profound. Infernal Affairs added complication to the HK action thriller until its abstract, Byzantine plotting became a challenge to typical HK mindlessness. 

The trilogy worked like a DePalma movie, exaggerating genre tropes to get at truth. But Scorsese’s oversimplified “realism” (opening with unspecified doc footage of Boston’s ’70s busing riots) is trite. He indulges the thrall of corruption and nihilism while the great Infernal Affairs lamented how both its damaged young protagonists yearned “to be a good cop.” The trilogy climaxed brilliantly: In a mutual, time-shifting analyst session, the two cops (who bonded over stereo equipment) confessed despair; their weary side-by-side close-ups cleaved the screen like a broken heart.

Scorsese’s final image of a cheese-eating rat on a penthouse railing uglifies the entire concept. (What is it contemporary American gangster filmmakers don’t understand about personal honor?) Fact is, The Departed remakes a John Woo buddy movie in a Michael Mann style. Scorsese rejects the trilogy’s moral point and the gangster genre’s original raison d’etre. But that may be why mindless critics love it; Scorsese’s post-Catholic guilt fests are, in fact, guilt free.

Clearly no one in Scorsese’s circle of yes-men advises against his obsession. But perhaps, someday, a critical history of Scorsese’s fall from cinematic greatness will reveal how the trailblazing director of Who’s That Knocking at My Door, Mean Streets and Taxi Driver went from chronicling the amorality of the neighborhood tough guys he grew up envying, to turning that covetousness into a flamboyant cinematic pissing match. In his early films, Scorsese gave the corruption of youthful potential a tragic undertone derived from the realities of urban depravation. But his film nerd’s appropriation of tough-guy swagger and unapologetic cruelty won him dubious cultural status. Crowned the poet laureate of the urban underclass, he embraced the role and under-performed it—becoming American cinema’s thug laureate.