The Departed
Martin Scorsese takes a Hong Kong classic, sprinkles some Scorsese dust on it, and turns it into a classic of his own
Directed By: Martin Scorsese
Other Notable Films From Scorsese: Goodfellas, Taxi Driver, The King of Comedy
Starring: Leonardo DiCaprio’s twitchiness, Matt Damon’s incredible Boston accent (good), Jack Nicholson’s incredible Boston accent (bad), Mark Wahlberg’s bluster, Martin Sheen’s fatherly warmth, Vera Farmiga’s charm
Screenplay By: William Monahan
Movie Synopsis: An undercover cop inside the Irish Mob and an undercover criminal inside the Massachusetts State Police each try to smoke the other out before their cover is blown.
Signature Line: “I’m the guy who does his job. You must be the other guy.”
THE INTRODUCTION
An accounting of time, and people, and context
Martin Scorsese has had the career of a bonafide icon.
His filmography, spanning now nearly six decades, includes ten different nominations for Best Director from the Academy Awards (making him the most-nominated director on the planet1), ten different nominations for Best Picture from the Academy Awards (which is the single most prestigious award a movie can be nominated for), at least three movies that will live on for as long as film is a medium (Taxi Driver, Raging Bull, and Goodfellas), and no fewer than seven more movies that are also fighting to be included on the WILL LIVE ON FOR AS LONG AS FILM IS A MEDIUM list (The King of Comedy, Cape Fear, Casino, The Departed, The Wolf of Wall Street, The Irishman, and Killers of the Flower Moon). But I don’t wanna talk about any of that right now. I wanna talk about the commercial he did for American Express a little over two decades ago. So:
In 2004, Martin Scorsese appeared as himself in a commercial for American Express. In the ad, Scorsese was picking up some photos he’d dropped off to get developed at one of those one-hour photo studios like what you would find inside a Walgreens or CVS. When he saw the newly developed photos, which he’d taken at his 5-year-old nephew’s birthday party, he was immediately disappointed in himself. He held his face in his hands, sighed, then bemoaned, “How could I have done this? It doesn’t make any sense. Look at it.”
Scorsese held up a picture of his nephew blowing out his birthday candles and asked the photo shop employee what he thought. The employee, a little bit confused and also a little bit nervous, said, “It’s… pretty?” Scorsese stared at him for a beat, looked at the photo himself again, flipped the photo around so that it was back in the guy’s eyeline, then quickly spurted his own assessment: “Composition is forced, lighting is bad, angle is off.”
He then cycled through the rest of the photos, each one receiving its own damning critique as he slapped it down onto the countertop.
“Too literal.” Slap.
“Too violent.” Slap.
“Too metaphorical.” Slap.
“Too dark.” Slap.
He held up one final photo, a portrait of his nephew in a birthday hat, smiling as he held a gift he’d just received. “Here, we have the protagonist,” Scorsese said, his trademark rat-a-tat staccato now at full pitch. “But where’s the antagonist? Where’s the drama?” The commercial ended with him declaring that he needed to reshoot the whole thing, then calling his nephew on the phone and saying, “Yeah, Timmy. It’s your Uncle Marty. How’d you like to turn five again?”
As a standalone thing, the commercial was great. It was really funny and really charming and a clever way for Scorsese to acknowledge his well-earned reputation for being a perfectionist. As an ancillary artifact of movie history, though, it’s somehow even better—an unexpected glimpse into how Scorsese’s dedication to capturing things on film shapes his entire existence.
Later that year, Scorsese talked about the commercial during the TCM documentary Scorsese on Scorsese, an interview special where he discussed various bits and pieces of his work. His commentary started out playful, with Scorsese laughing at himself about it, but shifted as he continued talking. It ended with Scorsese, his face in his hands again, trying to corral all the thoughts speeding through his supercomputer brain, before arriving at his final conclusion:
“I take myself too… the word is ‘seriously,’ I guess. But, you know what? The damn thing is, you gotta be serious about making a picture.”
THE VIEWING
A timestamped rewatch of The Departed
0:00: Usually what happens in the introduction of each GOOD MOVIE essay is I write about what was happening in Hollywood when a particular movie came out and what was happening with the actors and director when a particular movie came out. Since I used all of this week’s introduction, though, to talk about an unrelated Martin Scorsese anecdote I find to be fascinating, here are nine tidbits about The Departed and its actors to orient us:
The Departed is the only Scorsese movie to clinch a win in either the Best Director or Best Picture category at the Academy Awards. (It won both.)
Scorsese thought a film as violent as The Departed had no chance of winning any sort of awards. It was supposed to just be a cops-and-criminals crowd-pleaser. It ended up winning four(!!!!) Oscars.2
The Departed was the third movie in a row that Scorsese and Leonardo DiCaprio made together.3 After six straight years of collaboration, the two were in lockstep. Scorsese knew how best to utilize DiCaprio’s acting talents, and DiCaprio knew how best to exist in front of Scorsese’s lens.
Leo hadn’t yet won the Best Actor trophy he’d been coveting. My guess is he could’ve won it here if the studio hadn’t campaigned for his performance in Blood Diamond instead. (Blood Diamond came out three months after The Departed. It was a huge year for Leo.)
Matt Damon also had a hopeful award-bait prestige movie come out three months after The Departed. (The Good Shepherd.) (It ended up not being that great.) (But still: a big year for Damon, too.)
The Departed marked the first (and remains only) time Jack Nicholson and Martin Scorsese worked together on a film.
Nicholson was actually one of the presenters for the Best Picture award at the Oscars when The Departed won for Best Picture.
Every major role in the movie was supposed to go to someone else. Tom Cruise was supposed to play Leonardo DiCaprio’s part, Brad Pitt was supposed to play Matt Damon’s, Al Pacino was supposed to play Jack Nicholson’s, Ray Liotta was supposed to play Mark Wahlberg’s, Robert De Niro was supposed to play Martin Sheen’s, and Mel Gibson was supposed to play Alec Baldwin’s.
Scorsese has often joked that The Departed is the first movie he ever made that had a plot, which is a thing I find particularly entertaining because I would argue that he’s never made a movie less dependent on its plot than The Departed.4
Okay, let’s get to the actual movie now:
0:38: The first line of the movie is Jack Nicholson, his voice carrying a perfect amount of rumble, saying, “I don’t wanna be a product of my environment. I want my environment to be a product of me.” It’s a heater of a start. Regarding gangster movie intro lines, you can’t place it any lower than third all time. (It’s up there jostling for second place with “I believe in America” from The Godfather.) (First place is “As far back as I can remember, I always wanted to be a gangster” from Goodfellas.)
0:56: Bang. “Gimme Shelter” by The Rolling Stones is playing. One of the things that makes The Departed so much fun is that Scorsese does all the Scorsese stuff we love about his movies in it. We get the Rolling Stones needle drop. We get the freeze frame. We get the zoom-in. We get the camera whipping around in unexpected directions. We get the confrontation in a seedy bar. We get the hard cuts in or out of scenes. We get the trenchant commentary on modern American life by way of violence. And we get the Catholic guilt. It’s all here. And it’s wonderful.
0:57: By the way, this is actually the third movie Scorsese used “Gimme Shelter” in. The other two were Killers of the Flower Moon and The Last Temptation of Christ.5
2:50: I know that some people didn’t like it, but I really enjoy the bit that Scorsese does with Nicholson for the opening section of the movie where everybody else is lit perfectly except for Nicholson, who is always in the dark. He introduced Nicholson, the movie’s shadowiest figure, as a literal shadowy figure. This is not the Scorsese movie you watch if you want subtlety. This is the Scorsese movie you watch if you wanna spend two and a half hours pointing at the screen like Leonardo DiCaprio in Once Upon a Time… In Hollywood.
4:58: Nicholson finally steps out of the shadows and into the light when he’s delivering a line about how cops and criminals behave the same way when someone is pointing a loaded gun at them. He’s in the light for the rest of the movie. (Scorsese’s gonna bring the shadow thing back later, but with a new character. I’ll point it out when we get there.)
5:05: Typically when I’m writing about movies or a TV show, I use a character’s name rather than the actor’s name whenever I’m talking about a scene or moment or line or whatever. That doesn’t feel right for this movie, though. It’s just, everybody in The Departed is such an overwhelmingly all-caps HOLLYWOOD PERSON that I’m never watching the movie like, “Oh, man. Billy Costigan is in a real pickle here.” I’m always like, “Fuck, man. Leo looks fucking stressed.” So that's how this timestamped rewatch is gonna go. (The only person I don’t do that with is Nicholson’s Costello, who is always Costello when I’m talking about the character and Nicholson when I’m talking about the actor. I’m not sure why it feels right for him and not for everybody else? Probably because the name “Costello” is just very cool, is my guess.)
8:40: Martin Sheen (who plays the police captain) and Mark Wahlberg (who plays his ultra macho right hand man) are talking to Matt Damon, who has been assigned to the investigations unit in the Massachusetts State Police. Here’s a piece of it:
MARTIN SHEEN (talking to Damon): You’re a worker. You rise fast.
MARK WAHLBERG (snidely): Like a 12 year old’s dick.
[a beat of uncomfortable silence; then…]
MATT DAMON (to Wahlberg): …Thank you, sergeant.
MARK WAHLBERG: My pleasure.
Wahlberg is a goddamn maniac in The Departed. It’s mesmerizing. He’s in a movie with Jack Nicholson (twelve Oscar nominations, three wins), Leonardo DiCaprio (seven Oscar nominations, one win), and Matt Damon (four Oscar nominations,6 one win), but any time he’s on the screen he’s the only thing your eyes wanna look at.
11:52: Alec Baldwin’s here. I’m not sure I could name five people who are better at doing the thing of when a guy is talking to a room full of people he views as his subordinates. He just has this very confident, very condescending, special type of asshole arrogance in him that is wildly magnetic. He weaponized it the best for his monologue in Glengarry Glen Ross (1992), but this version he does here—which he douses with a hint of sweetness—is also really great.
15:05: Any time I rewatch The Departed, I find myself asking if this is the best performance of Leonardo DiCaprio’s career. The way the mania builds up in him as the movie goes along is just so unbelievably effective—all of his twitchiness, the strain of his voice, the way his eyes sell the paranoia that’s inside him. It’s a dazzling performance that, even amongst all the other dazzling performances he’s given, really stands out. If it’s not the best performance of his career, it’s at least the best performance of his career up through the movie’s 2006 release date, beating out his showing in The Basketball Diaries (which I love him in), Romeo + Juliet (which I love him in), Titanic (which I love him in), and Catch Me If You Can (which I love him in).
16:40: Matt Damon buying a seven-figure condo on an $80,000/year salary should’ve really put everybody on alert that something wasn’t right with him. I mean, he works with a bunch of people whose whole job is sniffing out crime and nobody noticed this? Even the real estate agent was like, “Ehh, what’s going on here?
18:34: Bang. We just got the title card (18 MINUTES INTO THE MOVIE!), along with an A+ soundtrack moment (“I’m Shipping Up To Boston” by Dropkick Murphys). All the pieces are in place: Martin Sheen has his undercover agent he’s gonna try and get into Costello’s operation, Costello has his reverse-undercover agent he’s gonna try and get into Martin Sheen’s operation, and everybody’s CAUSE SOME TROUBLE dial has been turned all the way to the right. Let’s get dangerous.
19:27: A cool trick here is that Scorsese plays “I’m Shipping Up To Boston” all the way up until Costigan’s Aunt Cathy (played by Mary Klug) takes the cigarette out of her mouth while greeting him at her front door. There's no break at all. It’s MUSICMUSICMUSIC at max volume, and then the instant she takes the cigarette out of her mouth the music cuts off and she starts talking. It’s a perfect encapsulation of how kinetic and frantic the entire movie is. The rhythm of the writing, paired with Scorsese’s savant-level ability to maximize pace, makes watching The Departed feel like you’re hanging off the landing skids of a helicopter that's trying to fly through a tornado.
20:38: Kevin Corrigan’s here. He plays Leo’s cousin. He’s a great movie scuzzball. Look at his stupid scuzzball eyes. I love him.
22:15: The cranberry juice scene. (The one where Leo busts a guy over the head with a glass because the guy asked if Leo was on his period after he ordered a cranberry juice at the bar.) Truly great stuff.
22:39: After Leo hits the guy over the head with the glass, Mr. French (Costello’s second-in-command, played wonderfully by Ray Winstone) runs over, grabs Leo, slams him against the wall, then asks Leo if he knows who he is. When Leo says no, Mr. French responds, “I’m the guy who tells you there are guys you can hit and there's guys you can’t. Now that's not quite a guy you can’t hit, but it’s almost a guy you can’t hit. So I’m gonna make a fucking ruling on this right now: You don’t fucking hit him. You understand?” William Monahan was writing his ass off in this script.7
23:58: (By the way, the funniest part of Mr. French’s “There Are Guys You Can Hit And There's Guy You Can’t Hit” spiel is that as soon as he’s done talking to Leo, he goes to the guy he just told Leo he wasn’t allowed to hit and then punches him in the face four times because the guy sighs at him.)
25:49: I have a hard time picking a favorite scene in The Departed, but I’ve never once had that conversation and not at least mentioned this one where Baldwin and Wahlberg are debriefing a room full of people who are working on bringing down Costello. It’s 110 seconds straight of Mark Wahlberg being the most MARK WAHLBERGIAN (positive) that any human has ever Mark Wahlberged. He’s a stick of dynamite here. It’s the second best performance he’s ever given,8 and also the only performance that’s earned him an acting nomination at the Oscars.9
25:57: Wahlberg is clearly the featured act in this scene, but secretly my favorite line comes from Alec Baldwin. An FBI agent10 asks Wahlberg if he currently has a man in with Costello, to which Walhberg responds, “Maybe, maybe not, maybe fuck yourself. My theory on Feds is they’re like mushrooms: Feed ‘em shit and keep ‘em in the dark. You girls have a good day.” After Wahlberg walks out, Baldwin, with perfect timing, deadpans, “Normally he’s a very nice guy. Don’t judge him from this meeting alone.” I laugh every single time.
27:10: Vera Farmiga’s here. Matt Damon is trying to chat her up in the elevator at work. This cast is unreal. (Farmiga plays Dr. Madolyn Madden, a police psychiatrist who ends up in a relationship with Damon and later has an affair with Leo.)
30:05: Leo just beat up two Italian guys trying to shake down a shop owner. I joked earlier about how this is not the Martin Scorsese movie you watch if you want subtlety, but a cool subtle thing is that this fight, which leads directly to Leo meeting Costello for the first time, takes place in the same location where Damon (as a child) met Costello for the first time.
32:07: Farmiga and Damon are at dinner together. Damon is an absolute shitheel in this movie (arrogant; entitled; a liar; an aspirational worm; etc.), but it’s very easy to see why Farmiga’s character falls for him. He is wildly charming on their date. Even all of his worst signs—chewing with his mouth open, complaining about the restaurant not having a certain dish, saying he’ll always have a job because he’ll just start arresting people if worst comes to worst—are somehow enjoyable. I know that this is Leo’s movie above all, and I know that Wahlberg is a nuclear comet every time he’s on screen, and I know that Jack Nicholson is a tremendous amount of fun, but on rewatch, Damon might be the sturdiest, best part of this movie.
32:35: Several months ago, my cousin Gary asked me via text who I thought portrayed agony the most convincingly in any movie. I was bored and I was lonely, so I gave him three answers: one for emotional agony, one for physical, and one for both combined. For emotional, I went with Matt Damon during the “It’s not your fault” scene in Good Will Hunting (1997). For physical, I went with the part in An American Werewolf in London (1981) when David Naughton transforms into a werewolf. And for the two combined, I went with the scene in Glory (1989) when Denzel Washington’s Private Trip was flogged in front of his entire military company after trying to go AWOL.11 If I could reanswer Gary’s question today, I think I’d swap out David in AAWIL for the part here where Costello smashes Leo’s already-broken hand several times with a boot while interrogating him about whether or not he’s still a cop. I’d completely forgotten how awful it is.12
42:48: Okay, Leo is officially in Costello’s crew, and Damon is officially in charge of his own three-man team within the Massachusetts State Police investigations unit now. I’m having a great time right now.
50:58: Farmiga is trying to talk to Damon about how he was unable to get an erection the night before. The tiny subplot of Damon being impotent is a clever little counterbalance to how sexualized Costello is. (Incidentally, Farmiga is holding a banana that’s broken in half while talking to Damon about his penis not working. Martin Scorsese is hilarious.)
55:18: Leo is starting to spin out. He tells Wahlberg and Sheen that he’s fed up with being undercover. He knows death is inevitable if he stays in it. Wahlberg threatens to delete Leo’s undercover file from the police database, which would erase any and all proof that he’s a cop (and, incidentally, almost certainly doom Leo to death). This is a really good scene. I wonder if any of13 the clash that Wahlberg and Leo had in the ‘90s over The Basketball Diaries is bubbling up under the surface for them here.
1:00:28: The state police and the FBI have combined forces to set up an impromptu surveillance operation on Costello because Leo alerted them that Costello’s gearing up to offload some missile microprocessors to another crew of very bad guys. Everyone is very pumped about the joint task force. In fact, if you ever thought to yourself, “You know what I’d like to see? A giddy Alec Baldwin excitedly grabbing his dick while wearing a tie a few inches too short and a button-down he’s beginning to sweat through,” you are in luck, my friend.
1:01:19: Martin Sheen—THE HIGHEST-RANKING GUY AND ALSO A GUY WHO SUSPECTS THAT COSTELLO HAS PLANTED A RAT IN HIS POLICE DEPARTMENT—is standing in front of Matt Damon literally while Damon is on the phone with Costello, and Sheen has no fucking idea. In fact, he takes this moment to put Damon in charge OF THE WHOLE SURVEILLANCE OPERATION.
1:02:39: Damon managed to send Costello a text about not using cell phones during the microprocessor deal without ever even taking his phone out of his pocket. He did it all blind. This is elite level rat work we’re watching here. Maybe the greatest rat work ever. This man is the LeBron James of rats. There will be statues of him built outside of the Rat Hall of Fame.
1:06:34: A blind spot in the camera placement of the surveillance operation caused everything to go to shit, leading to this delightful exchange:
Wahlberg: This is unbelievable. Who put the fucking cameras in this place?
The Guy Who Put The Cameras In The Place: Oh, who the fuck are you?!
Wahlberg: I’m the guy who does his job. You must be the other guy.
1:07:57: The director Howard Hawks did a thing in 1932’s Scarface where he foreshadowed each person’s death in the movie by placing an X somewhere on the screen beforehand. Scorsese pays homage to him by doing a similar thing in The Departed. For example, right now Leo is on the phone with Wahlberg, telling him he’s thinking about jumping on a plane and skipping town before he gets killed. See the Xs in the background?
Here’s one during the opening of the movie, signaling that Costello will die at some point:
And here’s one with Damon (this one even happens in the actual place where Damon eventually dies):
Movies are fun.
1:08:50: Farmiga is on another date, this time with Leo. In last week’s Love & Basketball issue of GOOD MOVIE, I pointed out how crazy it was that Omar Epps dated Sanaa Lathan, Gabrielle Union, and Tyra Banks all in the same movie. Farmiga is putting together her own impressive roster here, except but her two guys in the movie are deviants. She’s in a serious relationship with a corrupt cop who’s under the thumb of a mob boss, and she’s about to have an affair with a guy she believes has a criminal record of assault and who just cussed her out and denigrated her profession. Dating in Boston seems hard.
1:09:59: “GIMME SHELTER” IS PLAYING AGAIN. Marty’s chucking up shots from 35-feet out right now. I love it.
1:11:58: “I’m getting the feeling we got a cop in my crew.” That's a thing Costello just said to Damon. He wants Damon to use his resources within the police department to figure out who the cop is. Here’s a question I have: If you suspect there's a cop in your crew, how is the new guy not the prime suspect??? It’s strange to me that Costello just by default assumes that Leo is the rat.
1:15:35: “I am not gonna hurt you.” That's a thing Leo just said to a guy he’s trying to get information out of. It’s not very convincing, though, given that Leo said it to him about twenty seconds after smashing him over the head with a framed poster of Jesus Christ.14
1:15:43: …Aaaaaaaaaand Leo just shot the guy in the kneecap, lol. It took eight seconds for him to hurt him after telling him he wasn’t gonna hurt him.
1:15:47: Shooting someone in the kneecap is a very effective way of getting information out of them. The guy’s telling Leo everything now. Turns out, Costello is an FBI informant. That's why the state police have never been able to stick a case against him.
1:18:59: I know these guys are all murderers and scumbags or whatever, but the scene where the guy in Costello’s operation who’s responsible for disposing of bodies isn’t sure how to spell “CITIZENS” is pretty endearing.
1:22:38: Leo went to see Farmiga. She was in the middle of packing up to move in with Matt Damon because their relationship has gotten serious, but right now she’s in the middle of having sex with Leo, which, to the degree that I understand relationships, Matt Damon is gonna be pretty unhappy about.
1:23:00: Alec Baldwin wants to put someone in charge of finding the rat in the investigations unit. He chose Matt Damon, who is the rat in the investigations unit. (I wonder if cops like this movie. Or do you think when they’re watching it they’re just sitting there like, “Man, all these guys in here are absolute idiots”? Someone who is a cop, please answer this question for me.)
1:26:21: There's a part right here where, as a gag, Costello pulls out a prosthetic penis and pretends like he’s about to ejaculate on Matt Damon. (How’s that for a sentence?) And I’m realizing right now that of the four GOOD MOVIE picks we’ve gone through so far, two of them have featured dildos.15 Fifty percent is way too high of a dildo-to-non-dildo movie ratio. I make this promise to you right now: We will go at least one full month without featuring any more movies with dildos in them.
1:28:39: Leo has been tailing Damon, who has the CITIZINS envelope that Damon’s gonna use to try and figure out who the rat is in Costello’s operation. Damon just realized that he’s being followed, and so he ducked off around a ledge. He’s getting ready to stab to death the person following him to death. Guess what’s up on the screen…
1:32:26: Remember the thing I was saying a moment ago about how it was strange to me that Costello wouldn’t hone in on Leo being the rat in his crew? Okay, Leo and Costello are talking together again right now, and it’s making me think: Costello did suspect that Leo was the rat, it’s just that he was too infatuated with Leo to let himself really believe it. Because what’s happening right now is:
Costello is questioning Leo for the second time about being a possible police informant. As he’s doing so, Leo says the following: “I look around at your other guys… I mean, they’re all murderers, right? And I think: Could I do murder? And all I can answer myself is: ‘What’s the difference?’” It’s the exact same sentiment that Costello expressed at the start of the movie when he was talking to the child version of Matt Damon about how police officers and criminals behave the same way under certain circumstances.
My new theory is that Costello always knew deep down that Leo was the rat, but he suppressed the thought because Leo reminded him so much of himself. Damon hints later in the movie that Costello was always a little bit sad that he never had a son of his own. I think the more he got to know Leo—and see how sharp he was—the more Costello started to think of Leo as a surrogate son. That's why he could never fully commit to the idea of Leo being the rat. He knew that as soon as he said those words out loud, he’d have to kill Leo.
1:43:35: Matt Damon has dispatched a team from the police department to surveil Martin Sheen, which means we’re but a few short minutes away now from Martin Sheen being thrown off a building and falling to his death. Do you think it hurts to fall to your death? Like, if you get thrown off the roof of a very tall building, do you feel it when you hit the ground? Or does everything happen so fast that there's not enough time for your brain to register the pain? Someone who has been thrown off a building and fallen to their death, please answer this question for me.
1:47:04: Two things about Sheen falling to his death: (1) I love that Scorsese chose to play the fall in slow motion. It makes Sheen’s plight feel so much worse, and so much more awful. (2) Look at the windows:
1:48:54: Right after Matt Damon realizes he is directly responsible for the death of the captain of the police department, which he knows is a sin there is no coming back from, he gets up from his desk, leans over, and then clicks the light switch off. He’s officially a shadowy figure now.
1:58:47: Everything is an all-caps MESS. Martin Sheen is dead. Wahlberg has been suspended. Damon knows that Costello is an FBI informant. Costello knows that he still has a rat in his crew. Leo knows the chances of him making it out of this alive are getting slimmer and slimmer. “I’m Shipping Up To Boston” by The Dropkick Murphys is blasting out through the screen again. I feel like Ray Liotta at the end of Goodfellas when he was running around doing all them errands on cocaine at 7AM.
2:02:20: IT’S A SHOOTOUT! COSTELLO AND HIS CREW WENT TO DO A DRUG DEAL AND DAMON SENT THE POLICE THERE SO NOW EVERYBODY IS SHOOTING EVERYBODY! EVERY SINGLE PERSON IN COSTELLO’S CREW IS DEAD EXCEPT FOR AND COSTELLO (WHO GOT SHOT IN THE GUT BUT IS STILL ALIVE) AND LEO (WAS THE ONLY ONE SMART ENOUGH TO SNEAK OUT BEFORE THE SHOOTING BEGAN).
2:03:18: Costello and Damon are having a very contentious exchange: Costello realizes that Damon is the one who sent the police to the drug deal, and Damon realizes that Costello is gonna happily trade him up to the FBI the first chance he gets. Only one guy is gonna make it out of this scene alive…
2:04:43: …Aaaaaaaaaaand Costello is dead. Damon is such a perfect little snake in this movie.
2:06:42: Leo has gone to the police and revealed himself as Martin Sheen’s undercover agent. He finally meets with Damon, who’s in charge of things now. Let’s see how long Damon can go without screwing this all up…
2:09:18: Two and a half minutes. It took two and a half minutes for him to screw it up. Let’s watch the sequence for this week’s FOOTNOTES video…
2:14:04: Leo mailed Damon a recording that proves he was Costello’s rat inside the police department. But Farmiga (who lives with Damon now) opened it after she saw Leo’s name on the return address because she thought it was gonna have something to do with the affair she had with Leo. Do you think she was relieved or devastated by what she found when she opened it? On the one hand, at least you avoid getting outed for cheating on your partner. But on the other hand, you just found out that the guy you’re living with—the guy who is probably the father of your unborn child—is a federal prison-level criminal.
2:15:45: Leo arranged for Damon to meet him on the same rooftop where Martin Sheen was murdered. I’m not sure what he was thinking with his plan here. It’s a big-time bobble by Leo. This is his character’s version of Damon leaving the CITIZINS envelope on his desk. Both guys played great for the first 46 minutes of the game and then absolutely fell apart in crunch time.
2:19:21: The way Damon’s voice cracks when he asks Leo to kill him rather than turn him in… <3 <3 <3
2:19:31: FUCKING HELL. LEO IS DEAD(!!!!!!!!). HE ARRESTED DAMON ON THE ROOF, BROUGHT HIM DOWN TO THE GROUND LEVEL VIA THE ELEVATOR, AND THEN AS SOON AS THE ELEVATOR DOOR OPENED HE WAS SHOT IN THE HEAD BY A SECOND RAT THAT COSTELLO HAD IN THE POLICE DEPARTMENT. A TRUE SHOCKER OF A MOMENT HERE. THE FIRST TIME I WATCHED THE DEPARTED, I KEPT WAITING FOR HIM TO GET UP. THAT'S HOW CRAZY AND UNEXPECTED LEO’S DEATH IS; I WAS WAITING FOR HIM TO WALK OFF A FUCKING BULLET TO THE HEAD LIKE IT WAS A SPRAINED ANKLE.
2:20:36: Okay, some housekeeping: Leo is dead; Anthony Anderson, who I know I haven’t mentioned yet but was also in this movie, is dead (he was shot by the same rat who killed Leo); and the second rat is dead (he was shot by Damon; Damon’s plan is to pin everything on him). Damon is the last man standing. The good guy loses. The worst guy wins.
2:23:24: Matt Damon is heading back to his apartment. Three things to point out here as we finish off the movie: (1) He’s carrying groceries in a paper bag, which is noteworthy because his first meeting with Costello when he was a kid—presumably the meeting that sent him toward his current path—ended with him carrying groceries in a paper bag. (2) He walks over a giant red X as he approaches his door. And (3) the most damning evidence of Matt Damon’s overall shitheel-iness in The Departed is when he leans down to pet a neighbor’s dog and the neighbor pulls the dog away from him because she doesn’t want him to touch the dog.
2:24:10: Gah. Wahlberg was waiting for Damon inside the apartment. Damon, seeing that Wahlberg is dressed in a murder outfit (full-body tracksuit, shoe booties, rubber gloves, beanie), knows that he’s about to die. More than that, though, he knows that he deserves his fate, so he doesn’t try to fight it at all. He just sighs in defeat and mutters a weak “...okay” before Wahlberg shoots him in the head. The worst guy does not actually win. The worst guy gets shot in the head, just like everyone else. What an ending.
2:24:37: The movie’s over. Good movie.
ACCIDENTAL SIMILARITIES
Things that last week’s movie (Love & Basketball)
has in common with this week’s movie
Both movies have scenes where we see a main character as a child.
Both movies have scenes where someone suffers a knee injury.
Both movies have scenes where someone cheats on their significant other.
Both movies have scenes where someone watches some people through a window. (In Love & Basketball, Monica’s mom watches her and Quincy near the end of the movie. In The Departed, some law enforcement officers watch Costello and Leo eating lunch in a diner.)
Both movies are set in cities with iconic NBA franchises.
Both movies feature supporting actors who would later go on to star in reality shows. (Tyra Banks’s America’s Next Top Model and Alec Baldwin’s The Baldwins.)
THE LAST BITS
Things that I Googled while watching The Departed
Is it “Dicaprio” or “DiCaprio”? I can never remember. (It’s “DiCaprio.”)
How did Scorsese not win Best Director for Goodfellas? It went to Kevin Costner for Dances With Wolves, which, I mean, several people should’ve gone to jail for this.
Did Mark Wahlberg or Reese Witherspoon win any awards for Fear? They did not.
What movies did Jack Nicholson do after The Departed? I couldn’t remember off the top of my head. Turns out, that's because he only did two. He did The Bucket List in 2007 and How Do You Know in 2010. He hasn’t been in any movies since then.
Is it “Dicaprio” or “DiCaprio”? I forgot so I had to Google it again.
Next week’s movie: Jurassic Park
You can rent it for $4 from all the places you rent movies from.
This essay was edited by Hannah Giorgis. The FOOTNOTES video was produced by Richie Bozek.
The craziest part about this stat is that his first nomination came for 1980’s Raging Bull, while his most recent nomination came for 2023’s Killers of the Flower Moon. He’s been a Best Director mainstay for OVER 40 YEARS. (The second craziest part about this stat is that he somehow did not get nominated for 1976’s Taxi Driver, which remains an all-time flub for the Academy.)
Best Director, Best Picture, Best Adapted Screenplay, Best Film Editing.
Gangs of New York in 2002, The Aviator in 2004, and then The Departed in 2006.
The plot is important, of course, but the further away from the movie’s release we get, the more it becomes clear that what the movie was really about—the thing that makes the movie truly exceptional—is that it was just a handful of movie savants getting together and seeing what would happen if each one of them decided they were gonna press their acting accelerator all the way down to the floorboard for the entirety of the movie and see what happens.
Just kidding. It was Goodfellas and Casino.
Technically it’s five nominations, but one of those was as a producer on Manchester By The Sea (2017), a movie he didn’t act in, so I’m not counting it here.
Leo would say later in interviews that reading The Departed was the first time he didn’t have any notes for a script.
Boogie Nights (1997).
He’s actually the only actor who was nominated for an Oscar for their work in The Departed, which is nuts.
This guy is played by Robert Wahlberg, Mark Wahlberg’s brother.
Denzel earned his first Oscar for his performance in Glory. He’s truly unbelievable in it.
Gary’s answer, by the way: Jesus Christ in Passion of the Christ, lol.
Wahlberg has talked in interviews about how the two clashed around the time of The Basketball Diaries because he found out that Leo had voiced concern about his acting ability prior to filming. (Wahlberg ended up being really good in The Basketball Diaries, by the way.)
CATHOLIC GUILTTTTTTTTTTTTTTT.
Seven is the other one.
What do y’all think was in the envelope that Leo gave to Farmiga that he said not to open unless something happened to him? It was proof of Damon being the rat and instructions to contact Wahlberg about it, right?
Loved this essay. Loved it!
I always assumed that kid is Leo's. Despite his claims, Damon''s is not "working overtime."