The Departed

A crime film set in Boston. Two young men come out of the same police academy. One is sent undercover and works his way into the city's biggest crew. The other is already the crew's man and has worked his way into the police. Both sides know there is a mole. Nobody knows who. From there the film is not a chase but a deadlock. Both sides leak, both sides move faster to avoid being caught, and every operation puts both men at risk. Costello is the man in the middle. Head of the crew, frightening and disorderly at once, wrecking the arrangement he built himself. What the narrative is interested in is not crime but identity: both men are living lives that are not theirs, and the film does not ask which is more corroded, it shows you. The telephone sits at the centre of the narrative. A mobile being opened and closed produces the tensest moments in the film. The source is a Hong Kong production. The same plot was moved to Boston and to an Irish American criminal world; behind Costello stands a real Boston crime figure. Jack Nicholson did things in many scenes that were not in the script; the handgun in the bar and the rat at the end came out of that. Throughout the film an X appears near characters who are about to die, a deliberate salute to a classic gangster picture. Leonardo DiCaprio, Matt Damon, Jack Nicholson, Mark Wahlberg, Martin Sheen, Vera Farmiga and Alec Baldwin are in the cast. Martin Scorsese directed and won his first Academy Award for Directing with it, after a fifth nomination; the film won Best Picture. Who it is for: anyone who likes hard, fast, foul-mouthed crime films. Who it is not for: anyone looking for a sympathetic character; almost nobody in this film is good and the last section is merciless.