Evolution in action

Noel Vera

I believe the worst charge one can level at Martin Scorsese for what
he's done in his latest film "The Departed" (2006) is that he's
merely made a genre flick--albeit one tainted (if you like) with his
obsessions about guilt, remorse, and the need for redemption.

It's not his first time; "Taxi Driver" has the look and sound
(thanks to Bernard Hermann) of noir, but manages to transcend it by
channeling Dostoevsky's Orthodox angst and Schrader's Calvinist
spiritualism through Scorsese's Catholic sensibilities (it's one of
the bloodiest films about a spiritual crisis ever made); "Raging
Bull" is the melodrama of the boxing picture deconstructed, scored
and shot like a war film; the much underrated "The Last Temptation
of Christ" is a Jesus film shot and acted as if it were happening in
the streets of New York (the motley collection of accents should
have been the dead giveaway), with an ending right out of one of the
more outré episodes of "The Twilight Zone."

Given Scorsese's frequent dipping into genre, doing "The Departed"
shouldn't be a surprise; it's Scorsese returning the favor of
borrowing from a film and filmmaking tradition that borrowed heavily
from his own crime dramas of the '70s and '80s--the male bonding,
the macho posturing, the exuberantly shot and edited action
sequences, usually involving men with guns. Granted this is a genre
exercise that largely remains an exercise, unlike his best or at
least most interesting works ("Taxi Driver," "Raging Bull," "Last
Temptation"); with "The Departed" Scorsese shows that he can still
do a crime drama like few others can.

After circling a few times let me get to the nitty-gritty: I don't
buy the argument that this remake is necessarily inferior to its
Hong Kong original. What, in my opinion, made Andrew Lau and Alan
Mak's 2002 "Infernal Affairs" so memorable was Alan Mak and Felix
Chong's script--a rarity in Hong Kong cinema, where plot is often
calculated according to reels (an ascending series of climaxes that
end each reel), and endings often have epilogues designed to make
everyone happy (not only does the hero win out, but his dead sister
and their lost dog are found alive and safe as well). "Infernal
Affairs" stands in stark contrast to all that; it begins with a
brilliant premise (a triad mole in the police department and a
police mole in the triad gang are ordered to look for each other),
and sustains the premise with an ingeniously worked out series of
reversals and ironic plot twists (at one point, the triad mole is
assigned to look for himself). There's very little fat in between
the spiraling, ever-narrowing narratives, and the characters have
little time to register as characters beyond their various names and
physiognomies (outside of the soulfully charismatic Tony Leung Chiu
Wai as the police mole, and the deviously baby-faced Eric Tsang as
the triad boss). Lau and Mak's visual style is no-nonsense lean,
with little color or pyrotechnics; their goal is to tell the story
as quickly and coherently as possible (something not always possible
with the often less-than-perfect subtitles).

What Scorsese brings to the party is a carefully imagined world of
Irish mobsters and police machismo, where the men rib each other
about taking it up the ass in so many varied and inventive ways the
verbal abuse becomes a freewheeling art form, and sudden bursts of
violence--between police and criminal, sometimes between each other--
are a matter-of-fact given. The impression I got of the film (I
confess I've only managed to see it once, and found it a
bewilderingly rich stew) was of a glossier, more facilely
entertaining "Mean Streets"--altered to reflect the Boston milieu--
pulled like a latex mask over the complex if implausible structure
of the Hong Kong original, no more, no less.

Leonardo DiCaprio is no Tony Leung--he has yet to make an "In the
Mood for Love/2046" (I really consider them one film), much less
a "Happy Together" (my favorite of his performances, and in my
opinion Wong Kar Wai's best claim to greatness), though there are
times when you can imagine Scorsese superimposing Leung's lean frame
against DiCaprio's younger, slightly stockier one. The face fuzz on
DiCaprio's lower jaw isn't any more successful than Leung's at
denoting serious masculinity, but what Leung has in spades over
DiCaprio is this wildly intense glare that can evoke an amazing
range of emotions, from shocked bewilderment to ferocious anger to
extreme despair. Eric Tsang, who plays the triad boss--Jack
Nicholson replaces him in the remake--perhaps doesn't have as
illustrious a portfolio as Nicholson (perhaps; I haven't seen as
many of Tsang's films), but he gets almost as much mileage out of a
scene as Nicholson does, and with far less effort.

What Scorsese does improve on are the various supporting
performances, and their dynamics--you've got Martin Sheen and a
wonderfully foul-mouthed Mark Wahlberg (who contributes
significantly to the sulfuric content of the picture's atmosphere),
warily protecting their undercover operation from what they see as a
compromised police force (the demarcation between factions was less
vividly drawn in the original); you've got a wonderful comic Alec
Baldwin as a police officer a beat slow on the uptake; you've got a
royal flush of gangster countenances, assembled by the man who
directed "Goodfellas" and "Casino"--it's essentially a tradeoff
between a practically irreplaceable lead (Leung) and a more colorful
supporting cast (Sheen, Wahlberg, Baldwin, etc.). Andrew Lau is
easily a better actor than Matt Damon, but Scorsese uses Damon's
callowness in an interesting way, his wholesome, handsome looks in
chilling contrast with his quiet sabotaging--sometimes at the
expense of lives--of his fellow police officer's carefully laid
plans. As Madolyn, a conflation of two characters from the original
script (she beds the film's two leads where in the original they had
their own respective girlfriends), Vera Farmiga doesn't have much to
do, but she does act as a kind of moral thermometer against which we
can measure her two lovers, and I do think she acquits herself
honorably.

The real star of the film, though, and arguably the best reason to
welcome this remake, is Scorsese's compulsively watchable
storytelling style. With editor Thelma Schoonmaker he fashions a
breathtaking montage of parallel narratives, following the careers
of both Damon and DiCaprio as they develop from children to cadets
to fellow moles. He peppers the film with generous helpings of often
profane humor (something the original--or its subtitles, anyway--
lacked, outside of Tsang's performance). Where Lau and Mak emphasize
the glossiness of Hong Kong architecture, all white concrete and
shining glass, Scorsese fills his screen with the distinctive
stonework of Boston, and floods the interiors with stylized reds and
blues (assembling along the way his ever-distinctive brand of chosen
music to punctuate the various scenes--The Rolling Stones' "Gimme
Shelter" for one sequence, Van Morrison's "Comfortably Numb" for
another (a love scene)).

Above all, Scorsese lends to the clever storyline what the original--
in my opinion--so sorely needs: a distinct sensibility (Lau and Mak
do a good job, but can you imagine what Johnny To, Ringo Lam, or
John Woo (who had already directed Leung in a similar role, as an
undercover cop in "Hard Boiled") could have done with this?).
Scorsese seems to be telling a long, blackly comic joke where two
competing organizations--mobsters and police officers--fight each
other for survival. Given similar resources, similarly tainted moral
standings, similarly flawed yet passionate officers/gang members,
the script shows us that the best thing the respective organizations
can do is mirror each other's moves; Scorsese takes that a step
further and shows the whole story as an evolutionary process, where
mobsters and police officers are competing species, with their
separate cultures and social structures, and where the youngest are
taken in and nurtured by their respective father figures (the
powerful sociopath with his carefully polite social climber, the
gentle pepper-haired grandfather with his hot-tempered wolf cub) to
be ruthlessly pitted against each other. Nicholson, intriguingly,
may represent an evolutionary dead end--a monstrous sport (he screws
around endlessly, insatiably, but creates no progeny) who relies on
his innate ferocity and cunning to stay dominant. It's in that
spirit, anyway, that I took the final shot--not just a jokey
reference to what the whole thing was all about, but a blackly comic
suggestion as to who, ultimately, will be left to inherit the earth.

(10/9/06)