Elevators scare me now. Well, they do since last evening.
The chilling effect they had in Martin Scorsese’s latest masterpiece The Departed might have something to do with it. After more than 10 years of period films (save the occasional Bringing Out The Dead), one of America’s most original and fearless auteurs returns to familiar territory, quite literally. A far cry from the opulent nobility of The Age of Innocence and the resplendence of old Hollywood in The Aviator, he returns to the familiar, dingy and stark streets – arteries that pump blood in and out of the sordid deeds of organised crime. This is Scorsese doing what he does best – analysing the murky underbelly of lives lived in the shadow of wrong and taking a voyeur’s delight in doing so. Freud with Panavision, or something like that.
Continuing a cinematic tradition essentially created by himself, Scorsese takes the exploration of ‘the fallen’ to a whole other level. Where Goodfellas convinced and then horrified a whole generation as it navigated from mythicised glamopolis to moral ghetto within hours, quietly carrying an ember of astonishment that blazed up later, Casino presaged the self-destruction of the empire – we’d seen it coming and when it did, our shock, fossilised from the outset, was overwhelmed by a feeling of bitterness and grief. Both these films, of which The Departed is a direct descendant, are eulogies.
In Goodfellas the longing for the charged, dangerous and powerful world on the other side of law is a strong undercurrent, culminating in the final scene which mirrors that of The Great Train Robbery – Henry Hill’s guilt at what he has done is outweighed by his commitment to the romanticised sins of his past, which he would repeat, given half the chance. He has not outgrown the fantasy, unlike the viewers, making the object in a sense, detached from the larger terror of his situation; it is only the spectator with the bird’s eye perspective who sees the extent of Hill’s moral paralysis. It zooms in on the characters and, effectively, allows their condition to magnify itself for us organically. In Scorsesian formulae, the character’s internality is inversely proportional to his or her outer surroundings.
In Casino the threat of collapse hangs like Damocles’ sword over the film and here too is nostalgia, a longing for things to go back to the way they were. Rothstein will forever be haunted by the deaths of Ginger and Santoro and wishes that events hadn’t unfolded in the way they did. His heartache, though, is of a different nature than Hill’s – he wants to rectify his errors and make different decisions perhaps, to alter the course of things so they wouldn’t have ended so badly. But again, even Rothstein’s demons are intensely concentrated and miniature – he doesn’t really regret his choice of career, for example. He just feels bad that his wife and best friend were killed because of it. It is again a situation that amplifies the mind of the characters while allowing everything else to come into slow but sharp focus in the background. And there’s another quality of Scorsese’s films that comes to the fore in Casino – the compression of the narrative; the terse, crisp pacing of the films’ stories captures with great impact its universe. They’re episodic almost to the point of actually being memories. Even with his grander projects like Kundun, Gangs or The Aviator, Martin Scorsese fills up the room, stacks it up with themes and ideas and little elements. Like a butcher, he fattens his films before feeding them to us in bite-sized pieces.
This tradition of composing profane elegies to expansive moral dystopias is continued in The Departed. Although a remake of the mind-blowing Hong Kong classic, Infernal Affairs, the film has Martin Scorsese written all over it. It combines some of the texture of both Goodfellas and Casino, a hybrid of the gradual grotesqueness of Goodfellas and doomed decadence of Casino. In The Departed there is the glitzy sheen of action movie volubility with two beautiful leads wielding guns and spouting fast dialogue combined with the brutal but quite obvious fatality of the whole affair. If Goodfellas was about the demystification of crime and Casino about its actual decay, The Departed is about the descent into the fascinating labyrinths that are the geography of crime and the eventual deadly consequences of that fall. Like I said before, ‘the fallen’ are what arouse most the curiosity of the director.
In literary terms, Goodfellas is a morbid limerick – starting off with a normal idea and then revealing the twist; Casino is a wistful ode – dedicated to a remembrance of things past; The Departed is a dirge – a funeral hymn all the way.
Now concentrating solely on this film, which stars Jack Nicholson, Matt Damon and Leonardo diCaprio, there is a lot to be said about the masterful way it has been put together. Just as a bit of an overview, Nicholson is the mob boss, Frank Costello; Damon his stooge/son figure who infiltrates the police, Colin Sullivan; Leonardo diCaprio, the cop who becomes a criminal, Billy Costigan; Martin Sheen is the avuncular Queenan who takes Costigan under his wing and Mark Wahlberg is the fiery, potty-mouthed Dignam who…well, knows how to ‘take it outside’ in the truest sense.
Beginning with the physique of the film, the use of light and colour, or lack of it, is interesting. Most of the film takes place in semi-darkness – Nicholson’s diabolical Frank Costello always remains in half-lit or even pitch black curtains of menace, almost dissolving into the dark background and becoming one with it. On the other hand Damon’s Colin Sullivan is often in rather verdant, radiant surroundings, right from his first appearance as a 14 year old in a diner where Costello after terrorising the owner, proceeds to buy Colin food and a comic book, as if establishing a sense of ownership, even paternity. Interestingly, the comic book is a copy of Wolverine, another character who has severe identity issues and who is also taken in by an older mentor, Professor Xavier, except in his case, he joins the side of ‘the good’ as it were. Its almost as if by placing the comic with the food, Costello introduces young Colin to his nemesis who is, in fact, so much like him and with whose life his very own existence will become intertwined. The food represents his life and Wolverine is the equivalent of Billy Costigan. Leonardo diCaprio, carrying forth the torch of De Niro as Scorsese’s muse, is the real hero, if anything like that can exist in this miserable place, as the tortured and righteous Billy. Like Costello, Billy’s filmic palette is very grim and gloomy – muddied blues, browns and blacks make up his world. He is an unhappy man, and it shows.
The iconography of the film also speaks volumes about its intent – organised crime versus organised religion. As is a trademark of Scorsese, the religious imagery is predominant. Even the title of the film is taken from a passage in the Bible. As begun in Mean Streets, the battle between gods and godfathers continues to rage and dominates a large area of what the film tries to say. Most prominent in Gangs and the controversial The Last Temptation of Christ which humanises Jesus to the extent of making him almost doubt his divine calling and revert to a ‘normal’ life, is Scorsese’s need to examine faith and loyalty. Here too the topics of guilt, betrayal, greed, belief and trust are discoursed upon. The Bible is a major influence in the works of Scorsese, perhaps because of his own Italian Catholic upbringing, and it shows in his diagnosis of the familiar traumas that afflict all his stories and the people which inhabit them. Jack Nicholson’s insult to the priest in the restaurant lays bare the way he treats his conscience. Within a milieu of godless assholes and spiritual dislocation, his protagonists endeavour to find peace and happiness – things that religion is supposed to provide one with – but they never truly wake their souls up. They know they are lost in some form or the other, be it the eternal divorce from love that Newland Archer comes to terms with in The Age of Innocence or the sacrifice of the diseased but vital human condition by Christ in Temptation. They struggle for a while to lead good lives but ultimately succumb into the black hole of their bad choices. There is a defeatist angle to the Christian hell/heaven question. The simple logic in all his films is: “Life is hell, sure, but I don’t even know if there is a heaven, so why bother?”
Then there is a very distinct use, in The Departed, of elevators. They seem to be a metaphor for the claustrophobia and horrifically easy trade of lives sliding over each other that form the core of the film. We’re all familiar with the oppressive and tense few moments in a crowded elevator, when the walls seem to close in on you, you’re afraid that the one in a million chance of it getting stuck halfway might just happen and you’re in such close proximity to the people standing next to you, you can almost hear their thoughts. The elevator is, it can be said, a microcosm of human drama and identity even. There are a number of totally unrelated and disparate individuals standing there for maybe a minute or two with their fears and problems weighing down on them, a sense of urgency to leave the unnatural atmosphere of the chute through which one is moving and all kinds of emotions heightened by the lack of space. And there is a sense of self encapsulated so unconsciously into those brief moments that you don’t even know it – your history, your future, what you had for dinner, an appointment with the dentist…in the suffocation of the elevator, these things are often pushed to the fore. And these are the very things that make us we. Our definitions are highlighted in the tightness of the elevator.
As has been said before, Scorsese works well in small spaces. By smothering his scenes, filling them up and compressing them, he accentuates the tyranny of the scenario with which his characters are being faced. The Departed basically takes place in a giant elevator which is hurtling with great speed towards a ground zero that everyone in the film has set base in. Sullivan and Costigan are two people who are standing together inside it, as each other. Before stepping into the elevator, they’ve exchanged lives, and now a potent, dangerous silence and humid pressure in a sense, of the walls closing in on them, remains. Costello could be inserted as the crazy lift-boy who decides when to start and stop and Queenan as the Good Samaritan who saw them step in with the crazy guy and wants to help. But ultimately the law and those who break it are all victims of the same ghosts. As Costello puts it, “When I was your age they used to say you could become cops or criminals. What I'm saying to you is this... When you’re facing a loaded gun, what's the difference?” Everybody is part of the dirty game, trying to pull off the same Machiavellian pyrotechnics, trying to get their job done, no matter how.
This insularity is responsible for rendering The Departed one of the most gripping films of the year. As the space makes it almost impossible for the story and thus, the characters to breathe, so does the time. In the warped continuum of the story, the clipped cuts back and forth between two parallel real time stories intensify the action. On a larger level it’s almost as if the film occurs inside a time capsule belonging to the ‘70s. The quality of the films is reminiscent of the Movie Brat era, of which Scorsese was a leading proponent and of which he seems to have preserved a great deal of in terms of spirit. There is no 21st century just-enough-for-it-to-appear-honest-to-our-target-demographic bullshit. These are real people with real fears and honest opinions about their lives and how to live them. Agreed, their situation might be unusual but then, given that kind of a state of affairs, we’d all behave in more or less the same way. Shouting matches, sex and haggles with departmental store owners all happen. Why? Because they happen anyway. The hyper-reality of the positions these characters are in does not devour the basic reality of their being in a place and time on earth. They are traceable dots on a four dimensional map, not twinkling lights in some distant galaxy.
Coming to some of the themes the film addresses, as has been said before, guilt, deceit, greed and sacrifice shape the template for all Scorsese films. Here too, they receive top billing. Of course there is the more adventurous good cop/bad cop dynamic at work here to incubate these ideas within its cinematic electricity. The film’s grammar spells out the polarity in this cat and mouse game and emphasises the nature of the volatile triptych that Costello, Sullivan and Costigan have unwittingly formed. A very grim neurosis permeates the film, criss-crossed by the need for redemption, self-destruction, confusion and what power can do to trust.
Sullivan’s guilt at what he’s doing to the police is assuaged by his success at what he does. Surprisingly, for a mobster, he makes a damn fine cop. But even he knows his true worth and as much as he fools everyone else, Sullivan cannot fool himself. He’s a rat from the gutter, albeit one with a shiny badge. He feels remorseful but not enough to let go of his inner monster. Costigan’s guilt is much more complex – he is amazed at his propensity for violence and doesn’t like very much the person he’s becoming, even if it is for a so-called ‘right’. Cheating on other people isn’t a job that the upright Billy, who wanted to become a cop to spite his family that had ties to the Irish mafia, takes naturally to, unlike Sullivan. He certainly doesn’t revel in it like Sullivan seems to. He’s almost disgusted with himself on certain occasions. Unlike Sullivan who ingratiates himself with everyone and pretends quite readily to be someone else, Costigan can never truly embrace this dank prison of conscience. Sullivan evades his guilt; Costigan wears it like a sock.
Even his first meeting with Costello is markedly different from that of Sullivan. Costello, at presumably the same diner where he met Sullivan, smashes almost to pulp the bandaged hand of Costigan in a perverse sort of initiation ritual. With Sullivan he’d nourished, with Costigan he was bent on destroying.
Conversely, with Queenan, the other father figure in the film, there is a reticence when he meets Sullivan. He mistrusts him and it’s apparent. He refuses again and again to divulge his mole in the mob to Sullivan, even though his dislike or discomfiture is pointedly different from Costello’s malevolent display. His invitation to dinner to Costigan on the night he comes home, however, is surprisingly similar to Costello’s buying of food for Sullivan in the beginning, confirming their equivalent positions in the scheme of things. Queenan’s kindness is unconditional – it is a product of genuine concern for a protégé; Costello’s show of magnanimity is nothing but a bribe to entice a boy to his side.
Deceit of course is the key feature of the film. The film is so engrossed in the examination of this idea that at some point, everyone’s cheating on someone else. When Costigan unknowingly falls for Sullivan’s girlfriend, Madolyn, he repeatedly reminds himself of the fact that she’s with someone else and although he is quite passionately crazy about her, he resists for a very long time; in fact it is Madolyn who makes the move. Costigan is the guy she would have fallen for anyway in a sense. Since Sullivan has stolen his identity, in a warped way Costigan is her true love in any case. Yet, it is still unfaithfulness but of a naïve nature. Much more malicious is the deception of both the police and of Costello by Sullivan. He wants to straddle both worlds by fooling both simultaneously. Sullivan is a pathological conman it would appear – he tricks as a matter of character. He tricks the police into believing he’s an honest cop; he tricks Costello into placing so much faith in him and then using that to bring about his downfall; he tricks Madolyn into sharing her life with him and he tricks Costigan into a transaction of lives. Sullivan’s trickery is quite spontaneous in that while he doesn’t necessarily plan it out, he knows how to spin a web of lies. Even his verbal glibness on his first date with Madolyn reflects that manipulation of the truth to suit his purpose (“What makes you think I want to see you again?”). Comparing this with Costigan’s honest exposure of his feelings to Madolyn even though he’s obviously attracted to her – he storms out of a therapy session when she doesn’t seem to pay attention – it wouldn’t take much to figure out who’s the more sincere of the two. And it is Costigan whom Madolyn eventually loses her heart to.
There is the deadly sin of gluttony which is spoken about here. Again Sullivan wants it all – a respectable life, the allegiance of the mob, a proper family etcetera etcetera…he doesn’t lose much sleep over the means he uses to get those things. In that respect he is very much like Costello. Greedy. Billy on the other hand has a very Spartan, minimalist approach to life and indeed, the job. A broken family and shattered childhood later, all he wants is justice and peace. Towards the end too, he repeats to Sullivan that he just wants his life back. Nothing more, nothing less. He does things according to his potential – as Dignam says, his 1400 SAT score make him a rocket scientist, not a cop – but he could care less about the material profits that garners. It’s all part of the job. He is frugal in his manners, even speaking far less than Sullivan. Costigan is almost a monk forced into the cynical and dying world of which he wants no part, in sharp contrast to the pauper who wants to be the prince in the case of Sullivan.
Sacrifice is also an underlying concept in the film. Queenan’s sacrifice for Costigan; Costigan’s sacrifice for his job; Madolyn’s sacrifice for Sullivan; even Dignam’s sacrifice for his beliefs all become pivotal points in the stories motion. The film teeters on these points and resumes walking only when someone has given up something they hold dear. Costello and Sullivan too in a sense put their lives on the line for one another, even if ultimately their motives are selfish. Costello even tells Sullivan at one point that if he doesn’t catch the mole that the police know has been planted among them (little realising it is Sullivan himself) then the only one who suffers will be Sullivan for failing to do his work i.e. turning himself in. That is of course the right thing to do but of course, Sullivan will never do it. He has sacrificed, in effect, his morality for Costello’s sake.
Power’s mutilation of loyalty is a very interesting assessment the film makes. Slowly Sullivan wants to reject his roots and become a ‘good man’ even though he isn’t one at all. As he gains power of his own, he wishes to throw away the dominance of Costello and become a success on his own. Costigan on the other hand tests loyalty again and again as he loses and gains power periodically within his personal dynamics with everybody else. As the cop pretending to be a gangster, he has no power except that vested in him by the Boston Police; as the second-in-command of Costello, he has dollops of it. So the way his faithfulness is scarred by this fluctuation of authority becomes vital in understanding Billy Costigan – a man clinging to himself while becoming someone else. His allegiance to his own soul is a metaphor for his acceptance of power. As he slips away from himself, he achieves power and as he remains close to who he is, he loses it. With Sullivan it’s the complete opposite. His closeness to his real, repulsive self, his loyalty to Costello, spells the end of any supremacy he might wield. He must dupe his past to build his future.
Redemption and the accessory self-destruction are played out in many ways throughout the film. Sullivan wants a superficial sort of redemption, one that will allow him to forget his dirty past and live happily ever after. He’s driving himself to insanity doing it but get there he will. Costigan wants to live. Period. For him it’s about salvation. Queenan’s physical and metaphorical fall to death from the building jolts him into the realisation of his pathos. He wants this nightmare to end. He’s losing his sense of safety and self. He mentally berates himself over and over for the mess he led Queenan into. Costello of course has long since crossed that barrier, he really does not give two hoots. Sullivan even laughs and asks him about his supposed paternal affection for him when Costello, knowing he’s about to die, wants some kind of twisted reassurance of hope and forgiveness. He wants Sullivan to not kill him and also, in a bizarre way, show that he loves him. That’s his redemption of sorts. But it doesn’t come about.
These and many other facets of the weird but enthralling masterpiece that Scorsese has spun out in the form of a striking dramatic cobweb make The Departed so eloquent, so pungent and finally, so satisfying. Ultimately, Costigan, Sullivan and Costello are all victimised by their own choices and idiocies. What they do and why they do it are immaterial to them…these acts are compulsions. They must be done. The broken landscapes of Costigan, Sullivan and Costello seem to reflect what the psychologist Abraham Maslow once said, “A musician must make music, an artist must paint, a poet must write, if he is to be ultimately at peace with himself. What a man can be, he must be.”
Come Oscar night, one can probably expect the by-now familiar image of our Marty sitting there, nervous, as the camera pans onto him and then, share his momentary disappointment when the envelope opens and his name isn’t announced for the seventh time. The Academy hasn’t ever rewarded his fervour and genius, whether he made small, brutally beautiful films or lush, Hollywood studio pictures. Yet he continues to make great cinema. After all, ‘what a man can be, he must be’.
The chilling effect they had in Martin Scorsese’s latest masterpiece The Departed might have something to do with it. After more than 10 years of period films (save the occasional Bringing Out The Dead), one of America’s most original and fearless auteurs returns to familiar territory, quite literally. A far cry from the opulent nobility of The Age of Innocence and the resplendence of old Hollywood in The Aviator, he returns to the familiar, dingy and stark streets – arteries that pump blood in and out of the sordid deeds of organised crime. This is Scorsese doing what he does best – analysing the murky underbelly of lives lived in the shadow of wrong and taking a voyeur’s delight in doing so. Freud with Panavision, or something like that.
Continuing a cinematic tradition essentially created by himself, Scorsese takes the exploration of ‘the fallen’ to a whole other level. Where Goodfellas convinced and then horrified a whole generation as it navigated from mythicised glamopolis to moral ghetto within hours, quietly carrying an ember of astonishment that blazed up later, Casino presaged the self-destruction of the empire – we’d seen it coming and when it did, our shock, fossilised from the outset, was overwhelmed by a feeling of bitterness and grief. Both these films, of which The Departed is a direct descendant, are eulogies.
In Goodfellas the longing for the charged, dangerous and powerful world on the other side of law is a strong undercurrent, culminating in the final scene which mirrors that of The Great Train Robbery – Henry Hill’s guilt at what he has done is outweighed by his commitment to the romanticised sins of his past, which he would repeat, given half the chance. He has not outgrown the fantasy, unlike the viewers, making the object in a sense, detached from the larger terror of his situation; it is only the spectator with the bird’s eye perspective who sees the extent of Hill’s moral paralysis. It zooms in on the characters and, effectively, allows their condition to magnify itself for us organically. In Scorsesian formulae, the character’s internality is inversely proportional to his or her outer surroundings.
In Casino the threat of collapse hangs like Damocles’ sword over the film and here too is nostalgia, a longing for things to go back to the way they were. Rothstein will forever be haunted by the deaths of Ginger and Santoro and wishes that events hadn’t unfolded in the way they did. His heartache, though, is of a different nature than Hill’s – he wants to rectify his errors and make different decisions perhaps, to alter the course of things so they wouldn’t have ended so badly. But again, even Rothstein’s demons are intensely concentrated and miniature – he doesn’t really regret his choice of career, for example. He just feels bad that his wife and best friend were killed because of it. It is again a situation that amplifies the mind of the characters while allowing everything else to come into slow but sharp focus in the background. And there’s another quality of Scorsese’s films that comes to the fore in Casino – the compression of the narrative; the terse, crisp pacing of the films’ stories captures with great impact its universe. They’re episodic almost to the point of actually being memories. Even with his grander projects like Kundun, Gangs or The Aviator, Martin Scorsese fills up the room, stacks it up with themes and ideas and little elements. Like a butcher, he fattens his films before feeding them to us in bite-sized pieces.
This tradition of composing profane elegies to expansive moral dystopias is continued in The Departed. Although a remake of the mind-blowing Hong Kong classic, Infernal Affairs, the film has Martin Scorsese written all over it. It combines some of the texture of both Goodfellas and Casino, a hybrid of the gradual grotesqueness of Goodfellas and doomed decadence of Casino. In The Departed there is the glitzy sheen of action movie volubility with two beautiful leads wielding guns and spouting fast dialogue combined with the brutal but quite obvious fatality of the whole affair. If Goodfellas was about the demystification of crime and Casino about its actual decay, The Departed is about the descent into the fascinating labyrinths that are the geography of crime and the eventual deadly consequences of that fall. Like I said before, ‘the fallen’ are what arouse most the curiosity of the director.
In literary terms, Goodfellas is a morbid limerick – starting off with a normal idea and then revealing the twist; Casino is a wistful ode – dedicated to a remembrance of things past; The Departed is a dirge – a funeral hymn all the way.
Now concentrating solely on this film, which stars Jack Nicholson, Matt Damon and Leonardo diCaprio, there is a lot to be said about the masterful way it has been put together. Just as a bit of an overview, Nicholson is the mob boss, Frank Costello; Damon his stooge/son figure who infiltrates the police, Colin Sullivan; Leonardo diCaprio, the cop who becomes a criminal, Billy Costigan; Martin Sheen is the avuncular Queenan who takes Costigan under his wing and Mark Wahlberg is the fiery, potty-mouthed Dignam who…well, knows how to ‘take it outside’ in the truest sense.
Beginning with the physique of the film, the use of light and colour, or lack of it, is interesting. Most of the film takes place in semi-darkness – Nicholson’s diabolical Frank Costello always remains in half-lit or even pitch black curtains of menace, almost dissolving into the dark background and becoming one with it. On the other hand Damon’s Colin Sullivan is often in rather verdant, radiant surroundings, right from his first appearance as a 14 year old in a diner where Costello after terrorising the owner, proceeds to buy Colin food and a comic book, as if establishing a sense of ownership, even paternity. Interestingly, the comic book is a copy of Wolverine, another character who has severe identity issues and who is also taken in by an older mentor, Professor Xavier, except in his case, he joins the side of ‘the good’ as it were. Its almost as if by placing the comic with the food, Costello introduces young Colin to his nemesis who is, in fact, so much like him and with whose life his very own existence will become intertwined. The food represents his life and Wolverine is the equivalent of Billy Costigan. Leonardo diCaprio, carrying forth the torch of De Niro as Scorsese’s muse, is the real hero, if anything like that can exist in this miserable place, as the tortured and righteous Billy. Like Costello, Billy’s filmic palette is very grim and gloomy – muddied blues, browns and blacks make up his world. He is an unhappy man, and it shows.
The iconography of the film also speaks volumes about its intent – organised crime versus organised religion. As is a trademark of Scorsese, the religious imagery is predominant. Even the title of the film is taken from a passage in the Bible. As begun in Mean Streets, the battle between gods and godfathers continues to rage and dominates a large area of what the film tries to say. Most prominent in Gangs and the controversial The Last Temptation of Christ which humanises Jesus to the extent of making him almost doubt his divine calling and revert to a ‘normal’ life, is Scorsese’s need to examine faith and loyalty. Here too the topics of guilt, betrayal, greed, belief and trust are discoursed upon. The Bible is a major influence in the works of Scorsese, perhaps because of his own Italian Catholic upbringing, and it shows in his diagnosis of the familiar traumas that afflict all his stories and the people which inhabit them. Jack Nicholson’s insult to the priest in the restaurant lays bare the way he treats his conscience. Within a milieu of godless assholes and spiritual dislocation, his protagonists endeavour to find peace and happiness – things that religion is supposed to provide one with – but they never truly wake their souls up. They know they are lost in some form or the other, be it the eternal divorce from love that Newland Archer comes to terms with in The Age of Innocence or the sacrifice of the diseased but vital human condition by Christ in Temptation. They struggle for a while to lead good lives but ultimately succumb into the black hole of their bad choices. There is a defeatist angle to the Christian hell/heaven question. The simple logic in all his films is: “Life is hell, sure, but I don’t even know if there is a heaven, so why bother?”
Then there is a very distinct use, in The Departed, of elevators. They seem to be a metaphor for the claustrophobia and horrifically easy trade of lives sliding over each other that form the core of the film. We’re all familiar with the oppressive and tense few moments in a crowded elevator, when the walls seem to close in on you, you’re afraid that the one in a million chance of it getting stuck halfway might just happen and you’re in such close proximity to the people standing next to you, you can almost hear their thoughts. The elevator is, it can be said, a microcosm of human drama and identity even. There are a number of totally unrelated and disparate individuals standing there for maybe a minute or two with their fears and problems weighing down on them, a sense of urgency to leave the unnatural atmosphere of the chute through which one is moving and all kinds of emotions heightened by the lack of space. And there is a sense of self encapsulated so unconsciously into those brief moments that you don’t even know it – your history, your future, what you had for dinner, an appointment with the dentist…in the suffocation of the elevator, these things are often pushed to the fore. And these are the very things that make us we. Our definitions are highlighted in the tightness of the elevator.
As has been said before, Scorsese works well in small spaces. By smothering his scenes, filling them up and compressing them, he accentuates the tyranny of the scenario with which his characters are being faced. The Departed basically takes place in a giant elevator which is hurtling with great speed towards a ground zero that everyone in the film has set base in. Sullivan and Costigan are two people who are standing together inside it, as each other. Before stepping into the elevator, they’ve exchanged lives, and now a potent, dangerous silence and humid pressure in a sense, of the walls closing in on them, remains. Costello could be inserted as the crazy lift-boy who decides when to start and stop and Queenan as the Good Samaritan who saw them step in with the crazy guy and wants to help. But ultimately the law and those who break it are all victims of the same ghosts. As Costello puts it, “When I was your age they used to say you could become cops or criminals. What I'm saying to you is this... When you’re facing a loaded gun, what's the difference?” Everybody is part of the dirty game, trying to pull off the same Machiavellian pyrotechnics, trying to get their job done, no matter how.
This insularity is responsible for rendering The Departed one of the most gripping films of the year. As the space makes it almost impossible for the story and thus, the characters to breathe, so does the time. In the warped continuum of the story, the clipped cuts back and forth between two parallel real time stories intensify the action. On a larger level it’s almost as if the film occurs inside a time capsule belonging to the ‘70s. The quality of the films is reminiscent of the Movie Brat era, of which Scorsese was a leading proponent and of which he seems to have preserved a great deal of in terms of spirit. There is no 21st century just-enough-for-it-to-appear-honest-to-our-target-demographic bullshit. These are real people with real fears and honest opinions about their lives and how to live them. Agreed, their situation might be unusual but then, given that kind of a state of affairs, we’d all behave in more or less the same way. Shouting matches, sex and haggles with departmental store owners all happen. Why? Because they happen anyway. The hyper-reality of the positions these characters are in does not devour the basic reality of their being in a place and time on earth. They are traceable dots on a four dimensional map, not twinkling lights in some distant galaxy.
Coming to some of the themes the film addresses, as has been said before, guilt, deceit, greed and sacrifice shape the template for all Scorsese films. Here too, they receive top billing. Of course there is the more adventurous good cop/bad cop dynamic at work here to incubate these ideas within its cinematic electricity. The film’s grammar spells out the polarity in this cat and mouse game and emphasises the nature of the volatile triptych that Costello, Sullivan and Costigan have unwittingly formed. A very grim neurosis permeates the film, criss-crossed by the need for redemption, self-destruction, confusion and what power can do to trust.
Sullivan’s guilt at what he’s doing to the police is assuaged by his success at what he does. Surprisingly, for a mobster, he makes a damn fine cop. But even he knows his true worth and as much as he fools everyone else, Sullivan cannot fool himself. He’s a rat from the gutter, albeit one with a shiny badge. He feels remorseful but not enough to let go of his inner monster. Costigan’s guilt is much more complex – he is amazed at his propensity for violence and doesn’t like very much the person he’s becoming, even if it is for a so-called ‘right’. Cheating on other people isn’t a job that the upright Billy, who wanted to become a cop to spite his family that had ties to the Irish mafia, takes naturally to, unlike Sullivan. He certainly doesn’t revel in it like Sullivan seems to. He’s almost disgusted with himself on certain occasions. Unlike Sullivan who ingratiates himself with everyone and pretends quite readily to be someone else, Costigan can never truly embrace this dank prison of conscience. Sullivan evades his guilt; Costigan wears it like a sock.
Even his first meeting with Costello is markedly different from that of Sullivan. Costello, at presumably the same diner where he met Sullivan, smashes almost to pulp the bandaged hand of Costigan in a perverse sort of initiation ritual. With Sullivan he’d nourished, with Costigan he was bent on destroying.
Conversely, with Queenan, the other father figure in the film, there is a reticence when he meets Sullivan. He mistrusts him and it’s apparent. He refuses again and again to divulge his mole in the mob to Sullivan, even though his dislike or discomfiture is pointedly different from Costello’s malevolent display. His invitation to dinner to Costigan on the night he comes home, however, is surprisingly similar to Costello’s buying of food for Sullivan in the beginning, confirming their equivalent positions in the scheme of things. Queenan’s kindness is unconditional – it is a product of genuine concern for a protégé; Costello’s show of magnanimity is nothing but a bribe to entice a boy to his side.
Deceit of course is the key feature of the film. The film is so engrossed in the examination of this idea that at some point, everyone’s cheating on someone else. When Costigan unknowingly falls for Sullivan’s girlfriend, Madolyn, he repeatedly reminds himself of the fact that she’s with someone else and although he is quite passionately crazy about her, he resists for a very long time; in fact it is Madolyn who makes the move. Costigan is the guy she would have fallen for anyway in a sense. Since Sullivan has stolen his identity, in a warped way Costigan is her true love in any case. Yet, it is still unfaithfulness but of a naïve nature. Much more malicious is the deception of both the police and of Costello by Sullivan. He wants to straddle both worlds by fooling both simultaneously. Sullivan is a pathological conman it would appear – he tricks as a matter of character. He tricks the police into believing he’s an honest cop; he tricks Costello into placing so much faith in him and then using that to bring about his downfall; he tricks Madolyn into sharing her life with him and he tricks Costigan into a transaction of lives. Sullivan’s trickery is quite spontaneous in that while he doesn’t necessarily plan it out, he knows how to spin a web of lies. Even his verbal glibness on his first date with Madolyn reflects that manipulation of the truth to suit his purpose (“What makes you think I want to see you again?”). Comparing this with Costigan’s honest exposure of his feelings to Madolyn even though he’s obviously attracted to her – he storms out of a therapy session when she doesn’t seem to pay attention – it wouldn’t take much to figure out who’s the more sincere of the two. And it is Costigan whom Madolyn eventually loses her heart to.
There is the deadly sin of gluttony which is spoken about here. Again Sullivan wants it all – a respectable life, the allegiance of the mob, a proper family etcetera etcetera…he doesn’t lose much sleep over the means he uses to get those things. In that respect he is very much like Costello. Greedy. Billy on the other hand has a very Spartan, minimalist approach to life and indeed, the job. A broken family and shattered childhood later, all he wants is justice and peace. Towards the end too, he repeats to Sullivan that he just wants his life back. Nothing more, nothing less. He does things according to his potential – as Dignam says, his 1400 SAT score make him a rocket scientist, not a cop – but he could care less about the material profits that garners. It’s all part of the job. He is frugal in his manners, even speaking far less than Sullivan. Costigan is almost a monk forced into the cynical and dying world of which he wants no part, in sharp contrast to the pauper who wants to be the prince in the case of Sullivan.
Sacrifice is also an underlying concept in the film. Queenan’s sacrifice for Costigan; Costigan’s sacrifice for his job; Madolyn’s sacrifice for Sullivan; even Dignam’s sacrifice for his beliefs all become pivotal points in the stories motion. The film teeters on these points and resumes walking only when someone has given up something they hold dear. Costello and Sullivan too in a sense put their lives on the line for one another, even if ultimately their motives are selfish. Costello even tells Sullivan at one point that if he doesn’t catch the mole that the police know has been planted among them (little realising it is Sullivan himself) then the only one who suffers will be Sullivan for failing to do his work i.e. turning himself in. That is of course the right thing to do but of course, Sullivan will never do it. He has sacrificed, in effect, his morality for Costello’s sake.
Power’s mutilation of loyalty is a very interesting assessment the film makes. Slowly Sullivan wants to reject his roots and become a ‘good man’ even though he isn’t one at all. As he gains power of his own, he wishes to throw away the dominance of Costello and become a success on his own. Costigan on the other hand tests loyalty again and again as he loses and gains power periodically within his personal dynamics with everybody else. As the cop pretending to be a gangster, he has no power except that vested in him by the Boston Police; as the second-in-command of Costello, he has dollops of it. So the way his faithfulness is scarred by this fluctuation of authority becomes vital in understanding Billy Costigan – a man clinging to himself while becoming someone else. His allegiance to his own soul is a metaphor for his acceptance of power. As he slips away from himself, he achieves power and as he remains close to who he is, he loses it. With Sullivan it’s the complete opposite. His closeness to his real, repulsive self, his loyalty to Costello, spells the end of any supremacy he might wield. He must dupe his past to build his future.
Redemption and the accessory self-destruction are played out in many ways throughout the film. Sullivan wants a superficial sort of redemption, one that will allow him to forget his dirty past and live happily ever after. He’s driving himself to insanity doing it but get there he will. Costigan wants to live. Period. For him it’s about salvation. Queenan’s physical and metaphorical fall to death from the building jolts him into the realisation of his pathos. He wants this nightmare to end. He’s losing his sense of safety and self. He mentally berates himself over and over for the mess he led Queenan into. Costello of course has long since crossed that barrier, he really does not give two hoots. Sullivan even laughs and asks him about his supposed paternal affection for him when Costello, knowing he’s about to die, wants some kind of twisted reassurance of hope and forgiveness. He wants Sullivan to not kill him and also, in a bizarre way, show that he loves him. That’s his redemption of sorts. But it doesn’t come about.
These and many other facets of the weird but enthralling masterpiece that Scorsese has spun out in the form of a striking dramatic cobweb make The Departed so eloquent, so pungent and finally, so satisfying. Ultimately, Costigan, Sullivan and Costello are all victimised by their own choices and idiocies. What they do and why they do it are immaterial to them…these acts are compulsions. They must be done. The broken landscapes of Costigan, Sullivan and Costello seem to reflect what the psychologist Abraham Maslow once said, “A musician must make music, an artist must paint, a poet must write, if he is to be ultimately at peace with himself. What a man can be, he must be.”
Come Oscar night, one can probably expect the by-now familiar image of our Marty sitting there, nervous, as the camera pans onto him and then, share his momentary disappointment when the envelope opens and his name isn’t announced for the seventh time. The Academy hasn’t ever rewarded his fervour and genius, whether he made small, brutally beautiful films or lush, Hollywood studio pictures. Yet he continues to make great cinema. After all, ‘what a man can be, he must be’.
0 comments:
Post a Comment