Just when you think it’s all over bar the lifetime achievement awards (“Congratulations on your continuing existence, old timer”), Martin Scorsese comes along and shoves your face in a grapefruit. The director’s keenly anticipated remake of Infernal Affairs trades post-colonial frisson for dirty Irish gangsters in Boston to splendid effect. Those who have ever wondered what Jimmy Cagney or Pat O’Brien might have said without the standards of decency demanded during the 30s and 40s need wonder no more. Saints and scholars, my eye. The Emerald Mob, as depicted here, are racist, lecherous, violent and endlessly entertaining.
“If they knew shit, they wouldn’t be Puerto Ricans,” laughs one young punk. He, however, has nothing on Jack Nicholson’s gangland boss Frank Costello. When not asking pre-pubescent girls if their period has arrived or burying some floozy’s nose in a mountain of cocaine that Tony Montana might choke on, Jack is abusing all ethnic groups on an equal basis. “No ticky, no laundry,” he sneers at his Chinese business partners during one of his less hostile outbursts.
Even Jack, never famed for his tender portrayals of do-gooders, has stated that this is the most evil role he has ever embraced. Yet Frank Costello is not without charm. DiCaprio’s Billy Costigan, a young undercover cop sent to infiltrate Costello’s syndicate, certainly seems intrigued by the villain. Meanwhile, unbeknownst to him, Costello has his own spy (Matt Damon) in the police department. But who will finger the other first?
Like the Hong Kong original, The Departed blurs any moral distinction between cops and robbers. The police, for example, have institutionalised the same racist standards as those they seek to capture. “Some guys just join because they want to stick a nigger’s head through a plate glass window,” explains Mark Wahlberg’s stupendously potty-mouthed officer.
Such quips are delivered, with everything else, at a breakneck pace, like the cocaine nightmare of Goodfellas played out over two-and-a-half hours. Unfettered by the responsibility of making a grown-up Ocsar-courting film like The Aviator, Scorsese is having a party and everyone is invited. He hides the letter x in every scene in tribute to Scarface. He fades out with a keyhole technique not used since the days of William A. Wellman and Josef von Sternberg.
Though academics may attend to such games and to The Departed’s place in the Irish gangster canon, in fact, the primary stylistic inspiration is, unsurprisingly, Infernal Affairs. Scorsese is happy to lift certain sequences wholesale from Andrew Lau and Mak Siu Fai’s film while adding signature flourishes and playful references to rats. One must also doff the cap to William Monaghan’s extravagantly profane, testosterone dripping script. While Vera Farmiga is given an opportunity to put in a brilliant turn as the centre of a love-triangle forming between Damon and DiCaprio, this really is boystown. Frequently and commendably, the all-swearing, all-whoring action makes you recall Glengarry Glen Ross as a sissy convention.
Technically, one could argue that this is Jack’s worst performance since The Witches Of Eastwick or that the film, inevitably, can’t maintain the momentum. Certainly, though it doesn’t falter, you can hear The Departed puffing along during the end of the second act. Still, this is Scorsese’s best work in a decade.
Genre rules. Bang. Crash. Wallop. Can’t wait for the graphic novel.