DVD Review | The Departed

Old Jack City

by Thomas Delapa


Jack Nicholson, Leonardo DiCaprio, Matt Damon and a cast of seven robbing hoods. The Boston underworld. Director Martin Scorsese. Now that you've seen the bad-ass ads for The Departed, I know what all youse wiseguys are thinking: a mob movie in the tradition of GoodFellas.

Well, you can fuhgetaboutit. Redolent of four-letter words, Scorsese's flatulent Boston massacre doesn't amount to hill of beans. Count me among those who wished to depart from The Departed before it was over.

Perhaps still smarting from The Aviator's Oscar snub, Scorsese has landed with bloody vengeance back on his home turf in the gangster flick. But this is easily his worst film since Cape Fear. How bad is GoodFellas Does Boston? So bad that even Jack Nicholson is a deadly bore.

When we first see Nicholson as sleazy gangland boss Frank Costello, he's slithering into a dark cafe, sporting a grizzled goatee and armed with insinuating sexual language. Nicholson's accompanied on the soundtrack by the Rolling Stones' "Gimme Shelter," helping to cue us in that Costello is, by golly, the devil. At least Scorsese mercifully delivers us from "Sympathy for the Devil."

In William Monahan's script—lifted from the 2002 Hong Kong hit, Infernal Affairs—Boston is a ratty hellhole where you can't tell the difference between the crooks and the cops. That's literally true when it comes to Billy Costigan (DiCaprio), a troubled rookie policeman who's assigned to infiltrate Costello's gang. Costigan's cop doppelganger is Colin Sullivan (Damon), who in actuality is Costello's top mole in the state police.

Scorsese and Monahan pile on the bodies and four-letter words with a nihilistic glee that might even cause Tony Soprano to run to confession. Somewhere among the scumbags, dickheads and fucksticks (that's a new one), Monahan's lamebrain script wants to connect the corpses in a study of how gangland crime is rooted in a perverse sense of family obligation. Gee, and I thought I was just watching a Scorsese snuff film.

Beginning with his miscasting in Gangs of New York, DiCaprio has let his own fixation with Scorsese as his screen daddy take him down a dark Steadicam path. With the exception of an admirably subdued Alec Baldwin, all the actors in this movie seem to be juiced on testosterone shots from Floyd Landis' doctor. The unwritten mobster dialogue here isn't "Top of world, Ma!" but rather, "Look how tough I am, Ma, I'm in a Scorsese movie!"

Not only is Scorsese repeating himself in self-parody, but even his usual flair for pop music sounds a death knell. Alongside "Gimme Shelter" (twice) and Patsy Cline's "Crazy" (twice), composer Howard Shore can only contribute a limp background score. Veteran cinematographer Michael Ballhaus' camera is as dead as Costello's numbing parade of victims, including one who falls splat from five stories up at DiCaprio's feet.

Buried within Monahan's script is a relevant 9/11-era theme about the absurd turf wars waging between city, state and federal crime agencies. In one attempt after another to collar Costello, the police bungle the arrest, looking like the Keystone Cops in plainclothes. That Costello may be an FBI informant further blurs the lines of cop and criminality, adding to the witches' brew.

But Scorsese lets his cast play everything at a fever pitch in overheated confrontations that boil over with random acts of brutality. Loosely based on the notorious mob exploits of "Whitey" Bulger, The Departed is no departure for Nicholson, who riffs on all his past Satanic-majesty roles, from The Witches of Eastwick to The Shining.

An ugly 2 1/2-hour whack-fest, The Departed left me hoping that Scorsese will never darken the screen with another gangster movie again.

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Originally published in Boulder Weekly, 10/12/06
[Postscript: The Departed won the Best Picture and Best Director Oscars for 2006.]

Film Review | Inception

Say Goodnight, Leo
by Thomas Delapa


Even before the summer started, perhaps no other major Hollywood release created more anticipation than Inception, a potential sci-fi blockbuster about a team of cerebral thieves who break into people’s dreams and steal their deepest, most lucrative secrets. With Leonardo DiCaprio on board and writer and director Christopher Nolan (The Dark Knight) at the helm, this was the sort of movie that box-office dreams are made of.

Chock-full of surreal settings, mind-bending special effects and roller-coaster action, Inception definitely won’t put you to sleep. But like most dreams, you’re likely to forget about it in the morning.

You never know which way is up (or out) in this mega-budget fantasy spectacular, which might even leave Freud scratching his head. Nolan’s fractured plot conjures up dreams within dreams within dreams, giving audiences the slightly nauseous feeling of being trapped inside artist M.C. Escher’s impossible, Mobius-strip staircases. Too glib for his own good, Nolan rarely provides as much as a handrail.

Double-espresso intense, DiCaprio is Dom Cobb, a troubled dream weaver haunted by memories of his wife (Marion Cotillard). A high-tech Ulysses in exile, Cobb just wants to go home and live with his two kids. To do that, like many a Hollywood crook before him, he’ll have to pull one last job. Hired by a Japanese businessman (Ken Watanabe), Cobb and his impossible-dream team must get into the head of a wealthy heir (Cillian Murphy) and manipulate him into breaking up his father’s energy empire. To fully buy into Cobb’s madcap pseudo-scientific methods, you’ll have to more than suspend disbelief: You’ll have to expel it entirely.

The uncanny affinity between dreams and the cinema seems to be on Nolan’s mind, at least at Inception’s intriguing beginning. (How ironic that Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams appeared in 1899, only four years after France’s Lumiere brothers first screened motion pictures.) Like movies, dreams have a logic and reality all their own, create fabulous worlds and can magically whisk the dreamer from place to place and time to time. Desperate to keep his wife’s memory alive, Cobb artificially clings to his own dreams and memories of her. Yet her presence is so strong, at times sinister, she stubbornly pops up at the most inconvenient times while he’s on his illicit dream jobs.

With a slew of exotic locations from Morocco to Tokyo and the trippy special effects, this production must have been a nightmare to shoot. It also must have been Nolan’s dream to whip up a Matrix-like box-office phenomenon. Ever since Memento, his memorable 2000 breakthrough, the British director has all too readily merged into Hollywood’s fast lane, passing up novel, low-budget substance for mass-market pulp. His recent comment to Entertainment Weekly that “it’s not a film that confuses people” still has me scratching my head. In fact, that’s all Inception does, especially when he tacks on a predictable twist that’s far from rousing.

Anyone not daydreaming will notice how often the characters are forced to explain the plot, primarily because the spectacularly overblown action can’t. Cobb and his crew constantly invent and reinvent the rules for their fantastic voyages into the unconscious, tossing out so much arcane jargon (“the kick,” “limbo”) that you’ll feel like you’re in a Scientology psychology class.

So after all the resounding sound and fury that struck me like a James Bond movie on L.S.D., you may be forced to wonder, as one character does, “Whose subconscious are we going into, exactly?” If you think Nolan really has a good answer, well, dream on.

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Originally published in Conducive Chronicle, 7/22/10

Film Review | Shutter Island

Two flew over the cuckoo’s nest

by Thomas Delapa

“It was a dark and stormy night...”

Victorian novelist Edward Bulwer-Lytton’s opening line is so infamously portentous, even Snoopy dug spoofing it.

But dog-eared clichés obviously didn’t stand in the way of Martin Scorsese in his direction of Shutter Island, a waterlogged psychological thriller starring Leonardo DiCaprio. Be afraid, be very afraid. Just remember, it’s only a movie. And yeah, DiCaprio sees dead people.

Collaborating with his Aviator star for the fourth time, Scorsese battens down the hatches for a blustery and tempest-tossed B-movie overblown into 138-minute, A-movie scale. Up the coast from Cape Fear and a few miles from where he left us in The Departed, Scorsese and crew sail to the lunatic fringe of Boston harbor, where a maximum-security asylum ominously sits like Alcatraz for the criminally crazy. Fantasy Island it’s not.

Landing into the doom and gloom is DiCaprio’s Teddy Daniels, a hard-nosed 1950s federal marshal, and his dutiful new partner (Mark Ruffalo). They’ve been assigned to the case of a missing axe murderer, who one night vanished from her cell “as if she evaporated.”

Cue the furious wind, sound the lightning, and bring on the blaring fog-horns. As soon as the pair set foot on the grounds of Ashcliffe Hospital, the night gets darker and the storms get stormier. Production designer Dante Ferretti pours it on, flaunting (and floating) every sort of Gothic convention and summoning up the ghosts of monster-horror-chiller movie past.

There’s no escape from Shutter Island, little buddy, nor from its mad grab bag of WWII-era historical buoys, including, but not limited to, Cold War government conspiracies, concentration-camp atrocities, Nazi lobotomies, brainwashed spooks and old-fashioned American mass murderers. It’s also drenched with arch film homages, from 1940s “B” film master Val Lewton to Sam Fuller’s 1963 loony-bin thriller Shock Corridor, and zigzagging all the back to 1920s German expressionism.

Call me crazy, but Scorsese’s script (from a book by Dennis Lehane) is so overstuffed and campy fantastic, it would send Freud himself back to the couch. It’s gimmicky, too, since it’s one of those thrillers that cheats by making unknowable—in retrospect—what’s real and what isn’t. Once on the island, Daniels is haunted by ghoulish visions of his dead wife (Michelle Williams)—as well as his horrific memories of liberating a German death camp. From the outset, he butts head with the hospital’s placid director (Ben Kingsley), who just has to be hiding something. If Kingsley isn’t suspicious enough, lurking in the shadows is a German doctor (Max Von Sydow) with a fondness for Mahler.

In these choppy but shallow waters, Scorsese tosses in a school of red herrings, each more lurid than the one before. Whatever 1950s social comment the film seems to be making, it’s yanked out of the picture by an undertow of gruesome sensationalism.

Over the course of Scorsese’s long, much-honored but schizoid career, he’s listed wildly between artful, deeply felt movies like Taxi Driver and Raging Bull and pulpy commercial rust buckets like Cape Fear and The Departed. Despite (or because of) a crazy plot twist, you can find Shutter Island in the latter. In the final analysis, it’s all wet.

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