The best movie I've seen in Toronto thus far isn't even playing at the festival. Warner Bros. quietly invited a few journalists who are scheduled to interview Martin Scorsese via telephone next week to see The Departed, his remake of the 2002 Hong Kong police drama Infernal Affairs, about the cat-and-mouse games between an undercover cop (Leonardo DiCaprio) who infiltrates the mob and a mobster (Matt Damon) who infiltrates the Boston police force.
I'm not supposed to write too much about the movie yet, so I'll just say that anyone who's been waiting for Scorsese to return to form after the Oscar-baiting turgidness of The Aviator and Gangs of New York won't be disappointed. I don't know how The Departed will fare with Oscar voters: It's a cops-and-robbers genre piece, the kind of picture (The French Connection aside) Academy members tend to look down on for not being serious or weighty enough. But this is Scorsese's best and most invigorating work since the underrated Casino, if not GoodFellas, as well as his most sheerly entertaining.
DiCaprio and Damon both give career-high performances; Jack Nicholson, playing a mob kingpin, makes poetry out of his eloquently profane dialogue (his lines often reminded me of the dialogue in Deadwood); Vera Farmiga, as a psychiatrist, lives up to her hype as the Next Big Thing; and in smaller roles, Mark Wahlberg, Alec Baldwin and Martin Sheen are all aces. I had heard grumblings that the absence of The Departed from any of the big fall film festivals implied that the movie was probably a stinker. That may be the case with some other upcoming films, but The Departed is class-A pulp - grave, resonant, psychologically complex and acted to the skies. I can't wait to see it again.
I wish the idiotic Academy members would stop with the "looking down" on films bullshit just cuase it isn't some ridiculous social commentary or dull ass period piece. Give Scorsese his damn Oscar already! For Christ sake! If this movie is THAT good, then it deserves nomination, despite it's genre. This is why people think the Oscar's are a joke now a days. It's ridiculously predictable, overtly full of itself, and just, in a word, LAME.
Posted by: Juan | September 11, 2006 at 01:36 AM
"Infernal Affairs" won Best Picture AND Best Director(s) at the 2003 Hong Kong Film Awards. Too bad Clint Eastwood didn't co-direct "The Departed." (Jinx.)
Posted by: Brian Feldman | September 12, 2006 at 04:02 AM
I kind of hope Scorsese gets to join the Greatest Directors Club though. Kubrick-Kurosawa-Hitchcock-Welles et al.
Posted by: Brian Feldman | September 12, 2006 at 05:29 AM
But does The Departed, um, depart from Infernal Affairs in any significant way? Because if it's the exact same story all over again, I'm not all that interested. At this point, anyway.
If Eastwood had directed The Depated, then I definitely wouldn't want to go.
Posted by: Juan B. | September 14, 2006 at 03:44 PM
Clint would have made it either totally depressing or sentimental just to bait the Academy. I'm glad he didn't direct this film.
Posted by: Ray U. | September 14, 2006 at 09:09 PM
An excellent movie. Don't miss it.
FD
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Posted by: FD | October 27, 2006 at 04:11 PM