« Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close - Jonathan Safran Foer
Main
A Touch of Death - Charles Williams »

Martin Scorcese returns to form with his new film, The Departed after trying with his last couple of movies to court Academy voters with little success. His Gangs of New York was a bloated, big budget period epic. The Aviator, which I really liked, was his period bio-pic. Now with the third film of his Leo trilogy (triLeogy, maybe?) he returns to his bread and butter - the crime story. But this time, like Woody Allen with Match Point, Scorcese has left his comfort zone of New York and sets the film in Boston giving him new mean streets, new accents and a mafia full of Irish instead of Italian tough guys.

This is a welcome return to what Scorcese does best. And it isn't even the virtuoso cinematic performance you expect from him. A lot of the sweeping cameras and ever-present classic rock soundtrack is actually toned down a bit to give room to the great performances he gets from Leo DiCaprio, Matt Damn, Alec Baldwin, Mark Walhberg, Martin Sheen and newcomer Vera Farmiga.

This is totally my kind of film. There are some shocking plot twists, some funny bits of dialogue and a great premise about two undercover moles who are searching for each other not knowing who the other actually is. Undercover cop stories allow for some great scenes of soul searching and struggle with self-identity. Here things even get to the point where Matt Damon, a cop on the take, ends up having to find a mole in his unit, the mole actually being himself. It's a paradox that reminds me of Philip K. Dick's A Scanner Darkly, which I read recently, where an undercover narc has to keep tabs on his own alias. This film also deals with the old intriguing spy-who-came-in-from-the-cold trope of an undercover agent who is so deep undercover that only a couple of people know who he really is. And what happens if those people are suddenly gone?

I really loved this film and look forward to seeing the original on which it was based, the 2004 Hong Kong film Infernal Affairs.

Posted at October 18, 2006 03:58 PM