Gone to America

It’s been a long time since I wrote a movie review – over a year. I started working full time job and I just found I didn’t have the time or energy to try and put my thoughts about a film into words and sentences. I started off this section of the blog by reviewing every single film I saw whether I liked it or not. In fact, the hardest ones to review were the ones which I didn’t think much about at all – there really wasn’t any need to immortalise my thoughts on Starsky and Hutch. So I started just reviewing movies that I felt I had something to say about, and maybe mentioning others I’d seen with one sentence capsule reviews at the bottom. But then I stoped doing that. I think it was because I saw fewer and fewer movies that I felt were interesting. I just had less to say. And then when I did see one, I had gotten so far out of the habit of hewing sentences out of impressions that it was too hard to start again.

It was going to take a really extraordinarily fascinating movie to bring me back. And here it is – Martin Scorese’s The Departed. I’ve never see Infernal Affairs on which it’s based, so I can’t compare them. This, to me, is just a movie on its own. I generally try and avoid spoilers in my reviews, and I’ll do that here, but I suspect I’ll be discussing things in such a way that certain events will be less surprising after reading this. Sorry! Feel free to stop at this point.

I went to see it twice. I’m not sure when the last time I did that with a movie was. Maybe Goodfellas! This wasn’t because I liked it so much the first time – on the contrary, I was a little disappointed. It was striking and entertaining, and there were enjoyable performances to be relished, particularly Jack Nicholson and Mark Wahlberg, but it didn’t really feel like a Scorsese movie to me, and that’s what I really wanted.

Why was this? Several reasons. For a start, it’s set in a new milieu for Scorsese. Sure, he’s dealt with gangsters before, but they were always Italian-American and here they’re Irish. He’s dealt with the Irish-American experience before In Gangs of New York, but that was a historical movie and in that sense explicable as coming from the same impulse as The Age of Innocence. Secondly, in many ways this is a police procedural movie – Scorsese has almost never shown any interest whatsoever in the cops point of view before. Thirdly – and I think is the one that threw me – it just doesn’t look like a Scorsese movie. Its palette is different – there’s a lot of blue, not a lot of red. It doesn’t have any really memorable bravura shots or edits. The shots and edits that stand out do so because of their content rather than their inherent spectacularity. In these ways it’s less recognisably a Scorsese movie than The Aviator. But that was just a brilliantly directed movie – this is a brilliant movie.

What else makes a Scorsese movie a Scorsese movie? Violence. And there’s plenty of that here. But it’s different, less “splashy”. It is shocking, though, particularly towards the end. And that’s what brought me back for the second time. I reacted very strongly to the violence that wraps up the movie. I’ve seen a lot of people die in movies. Anonymously, casually, startlingly, imaginatively, implicitly, graphically, incidentally and in long drawn out scenes by bedsides. Hell, I’ve even died in a couple of movies (I actually specifically wrote a death scene for myself in that last one). I’ve never had a movie make me feel the tragedy of sudden, violent death like this one. Even for Scorsese, for whom violence is always meaningful and never just an entertainment choice, this was special.

Recently Scorsese has done an interesting thing – he has stepped outside his comfort zone of the Italian-American experience of his childhood for his movies about violence. He stops relying on his own memories and experiences of the characters and incidents he himself observed, and starts with Gangs of New York looking at the Irish-American immigrant experience. Why? What do Irish-Americans have that Italian-Americans don’t? Both groups of immigrants followed the pattern of being discriminated against and working their way out of the ghettoes. Both have histories of violence, underworlds, gangs and organised crime – the Italians much more notoriously.

What the Irish have that the Italians don’t (to the same degree) is an involvement in politics and civic life. The Irish road out of the slum often led by way of the police force and the Ballot Box. Right at the beginning of The Departed Jack Nicholson’s crime boss Costello explicitly makes this connection – “Twenty years after an Irish guy couldn’t get a job we had the presidency” (paraphrasing). This allows Scorsese to look at the relationship of violence to power to society wothout ever travelling outside the cultural and historical world of his characters. Everybody in The Departed shares a history, a perspective. They live their lives in radically different ways and make radically different choices, but they are all tied together in their ethnicity. Being Irish in this film is a very important thing, whether you’re a cop or a criminal.

Cops and gangsters. Probably the most repeated piece of dialogue from this movie – it’s in all the trailers and other promotional material – is spoken also by Costello, also towards the beginning of the film: “When I was your age they used to say you could become cops or criminals. What I’m saying to you is this… When your facing a loaded gun, what’s the difference?” Outside of the context of the film, this is actually a pretty ridiculous sentiment. There’s all the difference in the world! But this is not a film about law and order, good and evil. The cops and robbers here are not primarily morally differentiated. They are factions. They are opposing armies.

If you don’t buy this then a lot of the film makes no sense whatsoever, which I think was one of the reasons I didn’t really get it the first time around. The police department in this movie is completely implausible as such. It defies all rationality. Maybe it makes more sense in a Hong Kong genre context, but given the way we are usually shown American police departments functioning it’s entirely bizarre. I mean it doesn’t have to be The Wire but some nod to verisimilitude would be nice.

This version of cops and robbers only makes sense through the prism of Sun-Tzu’s The Art of War. This isn’t about due process, it’s about gaining the upper hand before striking. When the final confrontation comes it in no sense plays out like the police raid one might expect from the notional genre “police procedural thriller” – it’s an ambush. Nobody behaves like there is any chance of merely being arrested – this is life or death. This is not about justice being done, crime statistics, clearing cases, bringing charges – this is victory or defeat, pure and simple.

This is the world in which the drama plays out. Leonardo DiCaprio and Matt Damon coming from the same place, living opposite lives, making opposite decisions. They share the same woman and the same tragedy. They are both living lives of deceit. Not simply in the sense that they are each moles in the worlds in which they live, but in a more complex and ironic way they are both in the position of being out of place in the world to which they are actually loyal. Sullivan (Damon) really could have been a cop, and not just a crmiinal pretending to be one, and Costigan (DiCaprio) would have made an excellent gangster. He will never be at ease as a State Trooper. He comes to realise this himself as ceases to desire to return to being a cop and instead just wants to get out altogether. And clean cut ladies man Sullivan surely wouldn’t last a minute in the dirty, violent world that his allies actually inhabit day to day.

These two men are out of place wherever they are. Their lives are very different, but they both share a sense of lostness, of things not being right. This is painfully near the surface for Costigan. DiCaprio gives the best performance of his I’ve seen as a man completely without friends. A man utterly alone, divorced from all meaningful human contact. He is so full of potential, but has nobody in his life to tell him what to do with it and no ability to figure it out for himself. He lives at the edge of himself.

Sullivan by contrast has a great life. We see him constantly smiled at by gorgeous women as he makes his way through his modern office in his suit. He lives in a beautiful apartment and has a beautiful girlfriend. The difference in the two mens’ lives is vividly illustrated in a sequence crosscutting between Sullivan’s first date with Madolyn (Vera Farmiga) and Costigan having a cast applied to his broken hand. Sullivan charms Madolyn effortlessly, teasing her delightfully, while Costigan can only gaze longingly at the attractive, businesslike nurse focused entirely on his busted arm, unable to think of anything to say to shift her attention to him.

But it’s not that simple. Sullivan’s apartment is paid for by Costello, and he knows it. His relationship with Madolyn is based on lies. He can’t perform sexually, or talk about it. In contrast when Costigan encounters Madolyn he unbalances her not with charm but with anger and vulnerability and insight. She moves in with Sullivan, but her short, uncomfortable, interrupted relationship with Costigan is the one based on emotional truth. The closest Sullivan comes to being honest with her is one night in bed. He says (paraphrasing again) “If we’re not going to make it, you’ll have to be the one who ends it. I’m Irish – I’ll deal with something being wrong for the rest of my life.” And that’s what at the end of the day these two characters have in common – they’re Irish, and they’ll deal with something being wrong for the rest of their lives.

Death. There’s probably less death here than in other Scorsese movies, but it’s closer to the surface here – hell, it’s called “The Departed”. The movie shows how Costello wields violence to control his world. The first line of the movie spells it out: “I don’t want to be a product of my environment. I want my environment to be a product of me.” Throughout the course of the movie we are left in no doubt of the source of his power. He’s a fairly old man – seventy – but he is utterly, utterly in charge of his world. “One of us had to go, and with me it tends to be the other guy” – “A lot of people had to die for me to be me”. He keeps everybody off guard. Nobody knows where they stand with him.

And ultimately that’s where the power of the film lies for me. It’s about life in the shadow of death, represented by Costello. Isn’t that all life? Everybody is living close to the end of their lives, which will come quickly and without warning. A startling movie. The first time I saw it I though it was disjointed and rambling. The second time I realised it was rich and textured. I wish there were more filmmakers for whom filmmaking was an act of intellectual engagement, who use film to express things that can’t really be expressed any other way.

Anyway, I guess I’m out of practise. I don’t think I’ve really said what I wanted to say about this. What did anybody else think?