The South Boston Irish, warts and all, make up the world of Martin Scorcese’s The Departed. They like to drink and womanize, they go to church a lot, and they are capable of turning on each other suddenly and violently, They live and die fatalistically, as if it’s no big deal to kill or be killed, because, as Frank Costello (Jack Nicholson) says, when told someone’s old mother is on the way out, “so are we all.”
The Southie of The Departed is not the Southie my Dad always talked about. His Southie was a place of bonding for life. If you were from Southie, you were the salt of the earth. So said my Dad, and on this subject more than any other, his word could be taken to the bank.
But Martin Scorcese was not making a morality play about South Boston. He was making a cops and robbers entertainment, the kind of movie that used to pair Jimmy Cagney and Pat O’Brien, and in this he succeeded brilliantly. Few movies that run for 2-1/2 hours can keep you from looking at your watch along the way (or falling asleep), but in this case the challenge is to keep from falling off the edge of your chair. Two young men, played to perfection by Matt Damon and Leonardo diCaprio, play two moles – one working inside the Massachusetts State Police for crime boss Costello, the other working for the police inside the Costello gang. As Costello and the police try to identify the rats in their midst, the tension rises, and by the end, almost every actor playing a central character in The Departed turns out to be playing the title role.
Most of the film was shot in Boston, very credibly. The three-deckers, the corner groceries, the hahbah, City Hall, the State House, the subway, the Central Ahtery, all are there. All that was missing was a scene shot at Fenway Pahk or the Boston Gahden. Two of the key actors, Matt Damon and Mark Wahlberg, are native Bostonians, which added to the authenticity. These and the other members of the excellent cast are all clones of characters I ran across every day while spending the first 25 years of my life in Boston. Even their names – Billy Costigan, Frank Costello, Colin Sullivan – sounded eerily familiar. And the scriptwriter just had to be a Billy Monihan.
A few days after watching the movie, Jill and I were driving through Norwood, just south of Boston, when we noticed a funeral gathering by the big Catholic church in the center, St. Catherine’s. The crowd waiting outside the church was made up mostly of young men, sad-faced and tall and splendid in their black suits.
“I wonder who died,” I said as we drove by.
Jill, sizing up the scene, figured it out on the spot.
“Billy Costigan.”
It is a bloody, extremely violent film, in which the only adjectives permitted are four-letter words and their derivatives. The few women in the story exist only as playthings for the men. But the characters in this world act and talk like that. You will not like most of them, but that’s beside the author’s point.
The Departed won the Oscar as Best Picture, and I can’t argue with that. Of the nominees, I saw The Queen (excellent) and Little Miss Sunshine (good, but vastly overpraised). In that small sample, The Departed stood out for its script, ensemble acting, and direction (another Oscar, for Scorcese). I plan to see The Last King of Scotland, another essentially unsavory story about evil men doing evil deeds. Amin wouldn’t have lasted long in Southie, or Costello in Uganda, but from what I have read, the two were cut from the same cloth.
