Jeremy’s Tophunder №8: The Departed

9 min readMay 28, 2020

The Departed kind of gets a bad rap among Scorsese movies, or at least it does outside the state of Massachusetts. People from Boston -love- The Departed, but everywhere else, it’s almost dismissed as lower-tier Scorsese fodder.

And I think it’s really dumb.

Most of the criticisms I hear of The Departed are just bad faith arguments. Scorsese won the Oscar for Best Director for his work here, and it remains his first and only Oscar win. Looking over his filmography, it seems patently absurd. He didn’t win an Oscar for Raging Bull (Robert Redford won for directing Ordinary People, an entirely forgettable movie). He didn’t win for Goodfells (Kevin Costner won for Dances With Wolves). He wasn’t even nominated for Taxi Driver (which I can’t even fathom now). His win for The Departed is sometimes dismissed for sticking out like a sore thumb — The Departed isn’t regarded as highly as those other three movies. It’s treated as if it was a Lifetime Achievement Award, as if his work on The Departed wasn’t Oscar-worthy. In a similar vein, his win for The Departed is written off based on the competition that year — 2006 was a particularly uneventful year in movies. The other “big” movies for that year’s awards season were Babel, The Queen, Little Miss Sunshine, and a few others that are perfectly fine movies, but certainly not ones that people still talk about 15 years later. So of course Scorsese would finally win an Oscar when there was no real stiff competition.

But the rub is that none of these criticisms have anything to do with the movie.

The movie itself is really good, and it seems like some critics lose sight of that. Sure, it’s not perfect, and in terms of overall film quality, they’re right that it doesn’t really hold a candle to Scorsese’s earlier work. However, if we divide Scorsese’s career into two halves, one running from his directorial debut in 1967 through Goodfellas in 1990 (13 movies over 23 years), and the second half running from 1991’s Cape Fear through the present (13 movies over 20 years), I would argue that not only is The Departed Scorsese’s best work over the second half of his career, it’s far and away his best work.

I place a rather disproportionate amount of value on the quality of supporting characters in ensemble movies like this. Yes, the movie is driven by Matt Damon, Leo DiCaprio, and Jack Nicholson. That’s the backbone of the movie and it just doesn’t work unless those three guys all submit great performances. For the most part, they do (I’m tepidly underwhelmed by one of them, but we’ll get to that later). But what pushes the movie over the top for me are Mark Wahlberg, Alec Baldwin, and Martin Sheen.

I mean, you can probably guess why — look at the names of those three actors and then consider that none of them are among the three most important characters in the movie. You might even be able to argue that Vera Farmiga’s character is more essential than any of them. And all three of them have incredibly memorable moments in the movie.

Wahlberg legitimately steals scenes from Leonardo DiCaprio, who is only the best actor of the last 25 years. Unfortunately, there isn’t much by the way of high-quality, shareable clips of The Departed, so we’ll have to make due with this:

Honestly, I would put Wahlberg up against any competition for the title of best performance by a supporting character in any Scorsese movie ever. It seems almost sacrilegious to say, considering (a) it’s Mark Wahlberg, and (b) he’d be competing against, for example, Joe Pesci in Goodfellas, among others. But I think the title is Wahlberg’s. He dominates every scene he’s in.

Meanwhile, Baldwin delivers some of the movies funniest lines. Here he is outlining the importance of marriage, and here he is on his way to go outside to smoke a cigarette. Together, Baldwin and Wahlberg are great in one of the few scenes they share, right after Queenan dies and everyone is arguing about what happened.

It’s the supporting characters that make the movie outstanding, as opposed to just very good. As mentioned above, there are obviously three A-List stars at the top of the cast, but in truth, if I’m thinking of my favorite characters and favorite scenes of the movie, it’s the supporting characters and their best scenes that I think of first.

The element of The Departed that I really love is the degree to which it’s actually different from other Scorsese crime movies. There are truly no winners in the movie. Matt Damon’s character, Colin Sullivan, becomes a mole inside the Massachusetts State Police because he’s looking for a path out of his crappy life in Southie. At the start of the movie, both of his parents are already dead and he’s living in poverty with his grandmother. Frank Costello gives him a way out. But he never actually gets out. There are moments throughout the movie that hint at his motivations — his obsession with the golden dome of the state house, his fleeting desire to leave Boston with Vera Farmiga’s character. But he never quite gets there because he can never separate himself from Frank. He is never quite accepted into the upper-class world that he wants, and then he ends up dead. Leo’s character, Billy Costigan, just wants to find his identity. He never really had one growing up, as seen in his interview with Mark Wahlberg. He was like two different people. And he continues to be two different people throughout the movie, until he, too, ends up dead.

Compare this to other Scorsese movies with similar themes. Henry Hill in Goodfellas gets what he wants (to be a gangster), at least for a little while. Same for Jordan Belfort in The Wolf of Wall Street (he’s disgustingly rich, for a little while). Nobody ends up with what they want in The Departed. Most of the central characters end up dead, and even before they died, it’s not like they had the life they truly wanted.

So, let’s talk about a few of the problems.

Vera Farmiga is, well, not that great. She’s normally pretty good. I like her in Up in the Air, I like her in Nothing But The Truth, I like her in Source Code, and while I never saw it, her performance in the TV series Bates Motel was very well-regarded. She’s just not very good here. Part of it is her accent (it’s bad), but even removing that from the equation, she’s just not quite up to par in a few scenes.

This kind of brings me back around to one of my pet peeves about movies set in Boston (which I first mentioned when I wrote about Spotlight). Not everyone has to have a Boston accent. There are plenty of people in and around the city that don’t drop their R’s or sound like they’re doing a bad JFK impression. Not to harp too much on Farmiga, but nobody thought to tell her “hey, the accent isn’t working out, let’s just not do one,” and it’s kind of a bummer. Overall, the movie does it pretty well. Damon and Wahlberg (Boston natives) obviously lead the way, but Baldwin and Sheen and DiCaprio all pull it off well. But Farmiga’s accent stinks.

The one person I didn’t really mention there is Jack Nicholson. I’m not sure how much of this is driven by selfishness, but I wish Jack had been better. Don’t get me wrong, he’s a solid B+ and does everything he needs to in order for his role (and the movie) to work. But he definitely could have been better. His accent is fine (there are a few moments where it’s not great, but for the most part, he pulls it off), and he’s objectively great in a few scenes. But it seems like for the most part, he spent his time on set thinking to himself that he’s Jack Nicholson, and he doesn’t really have to go all-out in order to submit a good performance. And he was right. He submitted a good performance. But it wasn’t a great one. Ultimately, I’m not sure who’s to blame there, or even if any blame is deserved. But there’s a scene or two where he over-does it too much, and there’s a scene or two where he doesn’t quite bring enough. This could have been the defining role of his later career, but I guess he just didn’t care quite enough. I realize it’s selfish, because it’s not like he ruins the movie or comes anywhere close (I can’t stress this enough — he’s mostly pretty good), but I can’t help but feel just barely disappointed.

The most common criticism is the final scene, when the camera pans out Matt Damon’s window to show us the golden dome of the state house once again, and a rat runs across the railing on the porch. Yes, it’s a bit heavy-handed. And when I say “a bit,” I mean “obnoxiously.” My defense for this scene? Actually, I don’t have one. It’s one of the more inexplicable moments of Scorsese’s career. If anything, my biggest problem with it is how much it distracted everyone from the amazing musical cue that plays over the credits — “Sweet Dreams” by Roy Buchanan. The music mirrors the scene — the dreams of all of the major characters falling short. It’s a great song choice, and nobody noticed it, because the rat on the railing might as well have been a neon flashing sign.

The Departed is one of my favorite movies ever, though, despite its flaws. There was one evening where it was being broadcast on TV, on some channel that was rather liberal with the re-dubbed lines to mask profanity and other unseemly lines of dialogue. It was so jarring that I couldn’t enjoy the movie. So what did I do? Just not watch the movie? Well, that’s a ridiculous idea. Did I pop in the DVD? I would have, but I didn’t have a DVD player that worked. So I bought the movie on Amazon. I bought a digital copy of a movie that I already owned on DVD. I could have rented it for $4, but I bought it for $10, because I knew I’d end up watching it multiple times over. And I did. That purchase paid for itself within two or three months.

It really has everything. It’s cops and bad guys (check) in Boston (check) starring Matt Damon (check) and Leo (check) and Jack (check), directed by Martin Scorsese (check) with phenomenal supporting performances from Wahlberg (check) and Baldwin (check) and Sheen (check). Other than convincing Vera Farmiga to ditch her accent and convincing Marty to lose the rat on the balcony, I can’t think of anything about the movie that I’d really want to change. It’s not my favorite movie, and I don’t think it ever has been. But it’s always been in the conversation, and never much lower than it lands here, nestled safely in the Top 10.

(For a refresher on the project, I introduced it in a Facebook Post on Day 1)

Here’s our progress on the list so far:

2. A Few Good Men

3. The Social Network

4. Dazed and Confused

6. The Fugitive

7. The Dark Knight

8. The Departed

9. Saving Private Ryan

11. The Big Short

12. The Prestige

13. The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring