The Departed (2006)

Martin Scorsese films are long -- 138 minutes on average -- and they keep getting longer from decade to decade. But he is one of the premier American film directors, so he has earned the right. This one was 151 minutes, and I had to watch it in two parts. In fact, it was so long, I ended up watching four other films before watching the second part. Not that I wasn't into the story. It's just one of those films with a slow build, and I didn't feel any need to rush through it. I think that's a characteristic of a good film -- the feeling that you can just sit with it for a while in silence. You don't feel the need to finish quickly or check the time left over and over again. The story itself is classic: What's good? What's evil? Who can you trust? And why do you think and act as you do? All great questions. For the most part, I assume that everyone is out for themselves in this film. Maybe they're working for a greater cause, maybe they're not, and maybe they really don't know why they're doing what they're doing. At one point Bily (Leonardo DiCaprio), an undercover cop working for drug runner and overall bad guy, Costello (Jack Nicholson), says to him, Why don't you just retire? You've got all the money you need. You don't need the headache anymore. Billy wants out. He doesn't want to be found out as the rat, and the walls feel like they're closing in. At some point, the truth will come out, and he might not know it until he has a bullet in his brain. But Costello doesn't have an exit strategy. It's true, he admits. He doesn't need the money, and he no longer needs the women. He doesn't fully explain why he keeps doing what he does, but the easy answer is, Because that's what he does. For Billy and Colin (Matt Damon), why they do what they do is a little more complicated. Is it for the money? Is it for some sort of redemption? Do they owe someone something, and so either for honor or because they're forced to make a kind of "repayment," they play their parts? Both are rats -- one is a rat for the bad guys, and the other is a rat for the good guys. It's also possible that there are other "rats" in the film, or maybe everyone is a rat to a greater or lesser extent. Maybe instead of "rat" the term should be "human." Because that's what humans do -- they act like "rats" while attributing human actions to lowly creatures -- creatures who, let's be honest, are experts at surviving. But what distinguishes a rat from a human? Maybe not as much as we would wish. Humans are very good at surviving. Until they're not. Not much impacts me in movies. You watch a lot of movies, and you pretty much understand how they work and what will or should happen next in the story, but I have to say, the last 10 minutes of this film impacted me. I wasn't completely ready for how everything "played out." Some of it was logical, from a movie layout perspective, but it's not always just the why something must happen, but also how the director puts his mark on how it happens. Scorsese's mark is all over this film, but especially the ending. Madolyn (Vera Farmiga) is the police psychiatrist that teethers the film's two main rats together. She's in a relationship with Colin, and she also finds herself attracted to Billy. As a result, she deceives both of them, without realizing how both of them are deceiving her. Ultimately, she's a "good person," I think, but she's compromised by what she's willing to do. We assume the baby she carries is Colin's, but honestly, is there a chance that it might be Billy's? It's not a question the movie chooses to explore, but it's left open, I think, to make us ponder: would she ever tell Colin that the child might not be his? Dignam (Mark Wahlberg) really surprised me. Maybe he shouldn't have, but when he does what he does, Colin accepted it, like he knew it would happen. And maybe Digman is simply doing it for Queenan (Martin Sheen), but he had to get the information from Madolyn, right? She was the one with Billy's envelope, and she had to go to him with its contents. The last scene... The rat walking on Coin's apartment balcony railing, with the gold dome of the Boston Courthouse in the background. How cool is that? How cool is that? Who is the Departed? Are we all? And how long does it take some of us to realize that we're already dead?

Rating: 5/5 stars