Film Analysis: The Departed

The Departed The Departed is about two people playing the "rat" and the "mole"; Leonardo DiCaprio as a cop pretending to be a thug for the Irish mob and Matt Damon as his opposite, an informant for the mob. Both are trapped in circumstances where you can't tell the good from the bad. Each man is living a double life where one misstep will mean life or death if he is caught. This movie was directed by Martin Scorsese with the lead actors Leonardo DiCaprio, Matt Damon, Jack Nicholson, Mark Wahlberg, and Martin Sheen. The screenwriter is William Monahan (the same man who screen wrote The Kingdom of Heaven) and the director of photography is Michael Ballhaus. The Departed was filmed mostly in Boston & New York. It was released on October 6 2006.
I choose this film because you never know what's going to happen in the next scene.
The element of suspense plays a key part in this movie. As the audience, you expect-if not both-that one of them gets caught or that they catch each other. In one particular scene, Billy is tailing Colin, and as the audience you feel like something going to happen and you're hooked. Above all I enjoyed the characters of Billy Costigan (Leonardo DiCaprio) and Colin Sullivan (Matt Damon). For the majority of the movie, they don't even meet. Yet, they are so connected; through Frank Costello (Jack Nicholson), Madolyn (Vera Farmiga), their mutual love interest, and state police department. Billy and Colin themselves are so similar it's scary. They are masters of betrayal and deceit, the only difference is the reason why they become these masters and yet this reason is eerily similar. Colin became a mole to help his figurative father and Billy to live down the reputation of his crooked family. Jack Nicholson's character is fun to watch. He has all the money and power any person would want, and yet, when he could be caught and sent to jail. He still risks everything for his entertainment; his overly inflated ego. One of my favourite lines he says is when he dispassionately executed a woman on a beach, and says to his henchman Mr. French, "She fell funny." This movie shows the childishness of three of these characters. Colin's disgust as he is betrayed by Costello, Billy's fear of having nothing to
trust which leads to his unravelling, and Frank's egotistic personality. This relates to the theme of the movie, that nothing is what it seems. One of the few downsides of this movie is that there are a lot of inconsistent time gaps and there isn't much to show the audience that time has passed except for when the characters say so. A suggestion I have to remedy this downside is that the director could have added filler images showing what that characters-especially Billy-goes through as time goes on. There was one thing I couldn't understand in this movie: why Colin was so fixated on the yellow dome until I read a review on the movie and the critic notes that Scorsese places this dome in the movie to show that he refuses to shy away from the corruption that extends from Costello's nest of vipers to the State House as a commentary on the government. This movie was critically acclaimed and I don't disagree. This is one of the best written, directed, acted movies in a long time. The combination of Scorese's excellent directing and the talent of the actors are perfectly put to use in an extremely clever written masterpiece.