Martin Scorsese’s talent for mayhem

You can say this about Martin Scorsese: he will never make a small movie, or a quiet one (though Kundun came close.) In The Departed, he’s back to his old favorite stomping ground, namely gangland violence. He picks Boston, with its Irish mob network, as the setting for his remake of the 2002 Hong Kong film Infernal Affairs. Though New York is Scorsese’s usual observational perch, Boston adds a new flavor to his malevolent male mix, another lurid color for his palette of mayhem.

Some things director Scorsese will never grow tired of:

• Stylized violence, the bloodier and more stomach-churning the better;

• Seventies music by the likes of Eric Clapton, the Rolling Stones and John Lennon;

• Tales of moral ambiguity in mobster settings.

The Departed treads over territory familiar to those who saw GoodFellas and Casino. It’s about violent guys and their loyalties, and the tough choices they have to make when the vise starts to tighten.

We enter the scene in Boston, circa the late ’70s, when ethnic violence between blacks, Italians, Hispanics and the Irish runs high. Atop it all – astride it – stands Frank Costello, a mob boss and latent psychopath whose motto is "You have to take it." Played by Jack Nicholson with his patented evil leer, Costello is shrouded in shadow for his first scenes, the better to suggest his Mephistophelean eminence. Who plays the devil better than Jack, after all? While picking up his weekly "collection" at a local grocery, he enlists a young Colin Sullivan (later played by Matt Damon) as his protégé.

Flash forward 20 years. After Sullivan graduates from Boston’s State Police Academy, he’s in a perfect position to help protect Costello – from the inside. Meanwhile, a young and scrappy Billy Costigan (Leonardo DiCaprio) barely graduates, only to be offered a take-it-or-leave-it gig by Assistant Chief Dignam (Mark Wahlberg, possessing the most authentic South Boston accent of the bunch): Go undercover and infiltrate Costello’s gang – or else.

It’s interesting that Scorsese recruited three Young Hollywood honchos who are difficult, at a glance, to tell apart: Scorsese knows, after all, that this movie is about identity, and how difficult it is to hold on to. The casting – along with Alec Baldwin as a foulmouthed chief detective – also provides a good canvas for rapid-fire male banter, stuff that would make David Mamet proud.

You’d think, too, that Scorsese’s exuberant embrace of violence and mayhem would pair up perfectly with Nicholson, but something funny happens around halfway through The Departed: Nicholson’s acting takes an express train detour to Looneyville.

He’s done this before, of course, most notably in The Shining. But whereas in that Kubrick movie Jack’s craziness was part of the larger unraveling, here it sticks out like a thumb in a strait-jacket. Nicholson is chillingly cold and impressive in early scenes, schooling Damon in the ways of the world, exacting painful and violent revenge or just shooting the breeze with Irish thug Mr. French (Ray Winstone); but his evil shadow grows outlandishly cartoonish around, oh, perhaps the scene where he throws clouds of cocaine up in the air and orders his hooker friend to start snorting, his face bathed in rich, demonically red tones.

You really have to see Nicholson working his face up into a rat’s toothy glower, or lapping up a fly he has just killed on a bar table, to experience a veteran actor raising the bar on over-the-top to exciting new heights.

Next to Jack, DiCaprio is a model of seething implosion, and his character is the one we root for. Could even be an Oscar nod here. Plunged into an environment of boundless violence (the Irish, we learn, are miles ahead of Marty’s Italians when it comes to sheer viciousness), he fights for his life, playing Dignam’s stoolie assignment without any sense of the rules or end-game. (Incidentally, cell phones play a big part in this movie, as stoolies and rats are reduced to surreptitious texting to tip each other off. Interestingly, Scorsese uses those Motorola flip-phones like macho punctuation: characters snap ’em shut tersely, gritting their teeth, the way they used to chomp cigars in the old Edward G. Robinson movies.)

Scorsese loves to explore dualities, as far back as Johnny Boy and Charlie in Mean Streets, so here he pits Damon’s slick, white-collar mole against DiCaprio’s blue-collar South Boston scrapper. Of course we despise Damon, which means he does a fine job playing the fortunate son Sullivan. He’s a little like Lt. Exley in L.A. Confidential: ready to exploit any turn of events to further his career. But in one of the movie’s unconvincing coincidences, both Sullivan and Costigan date and bed the same lady – a police force psychiatrist played by less-than-glamorous Vera Farmiga. The better to show how identity shifts and shades in the underworld.

Technically, it’s always a treat to watch Scorsese use the paints in his box. As usual, he relies on rock music to provide a kind of hyperkinetic Greek chorus to the unfolding narrative: here, as in GoodFellas and Casino, he uses only snippets of songs, bits of Badfinger’s Baby Blue, the Stones’ Gimme Shelter, Lennon’s abrasive Well Well Well, or the Pogues-like Dropkick Murphys to great punk effect, quickly overlapping and layering, serving up endless nuggets from Marty’s personal jukebox that never seems to go beyond 1979.

One exception is a new version of Pink Floyd’s Comfortably Numb, done by Van Morrison and The Band, offering an elegiac reflection on the doomed tides of Billy Costigan. Thank God Marty didn’t pick up the phone and call Bono this time.

Part of Scorsese’s game is to reference other movies, and he’s always been an apt pupil of cinema. Here, though, he mostly serves up references to his own gangster movies, and despite his whipsaw editing and gorier-than-life depictions of violence, The Departed feels like a poor cousin to GoodFellas, Casino, and even the less-successful but no less ambitious Gangs of New York. One sly piece of reality reference comes in the final shot, though: a framed view of Boston’s gold-domed State House, seen through a window. A large rat strides across the balcony railing outside, a timely reminder that Boston’s rat population was (literally) multiplied a thousandfold when its mega-expensive $15-billion Big Dig excavation began. But then again, the rats will always be with us. And so, hopefully, will Martin Scorsese.