cold filtered

Today I went to see Martin Scorsese's The Departed, which is, in a singular case of translation-being-better-than-the-original, being called Les Infiltrés here in France. It's a double game between the Irish mafia and the Boston police who each have a mole inside the other organization. Both operate with extreme delicacy and care, and for two hours the suspense rises, the action mounts, brutality increases, and the nets tossed out to fish in the moles tighten suffocatingly.

These first two hours are extremely well made and highly entertaining. There is no blatant silliness to make all but the most imbecile viewers cringe. There is no positive face recognition from six blurry pixels taken by a security camera at night (see Enemy of the State). There is simply a dark, blurry photograph. The intricate schemes to capture the bad guys and how those bad guys subsequently extricate themselves are a pleasure to watch. The exhilarating soundtrack supports the action marvelously.

There is some fine acting in the movie, but it's not all gold. Jack Nicholson plays Jack Nicholson like no one else could possibly play Jack Nicholson. (This reminds me of a cartoon I saw in the newspaper the other day of a guy saying, You know, the new James Bond, I think he plays Sean Connery better than most before him.) It's a pleasure to watch his lunacy. Leonardo DiCaprio oscillates between trying to look extremely mean and genuinely looking like he is suffering from excruciating mental disturbances. It's a nice change for infrequent movie-goers like myself who remember his perfect incarnation of male bimboness in Titanic. Mark Wahlberg has rough lines but not much of a role. Matt Damon is lame. It's been all downhill for him since the Bourne Identity. He should go and find Forrester.

For all the elaborate edifice of mutual trust and suspicion, of one rat trying to bite the other before the other bites the one, the end is sadly unfulfilling. In the last fifteen minutes, the Byzantine construction is blown into little pieces for no good reason, and what's left doesn't make much sense. Most end up dead, and two mysteries remain. What's in the envelope that Billy gave Madolyn, and who put the baby in her belly?