Paleo Retiree writes:
I sat all the way through Martin Scorsese’s 2006 movie even though I never felt more than half-involved with it.
It’s a remake of the Hong Kong thriller “Infernal Affairs,” and it’s in Scorsese’s exuberant, burning-in-hell, “Goodfellas” mode. It’s set in Boston with two contrasting heroes: Matt Damon as a young cop with crime connections (to boss Jack Nicholson); and Leo DiCaprio as a good-family’s rebel who goes undercover, taking up with Nicholson’s posse. Matt and Leo have contrasting divided souls and loyalties too.
It’s an odd jumble. Despite the gritty Boston Irishness on display, the material is really just a diagrammatic excuse for a lot of action and faceoffs. But Scorsese fills the screen with anguish, torment, and bravado anyway, and he goes on for 2 hours and 20 minutes. Why?
Still, there’s fun to be had watching the actors strut, agonize, do accents, wear bad hair and clothes, and blow each other away. And Scorsese delivers a more alert directorial performance than he did in “Casino,” his last effort in this vein. Plus I enjoyed the way he made fun of that wildly ugly Brutalist atrocity, Boston City Hall. Still: Didn’t love it, didn’t hate it.
Fast-Forwarding Score: An eighth of the movie
Blowhard, Esq.
Callowman
Sherbrooke
Eddie Pensier
Enzo Nakamura
Epaminondas
Fabrizio del Wrongo
Fenster
Brundle Guy
Glynn Marshes
Paleo Retiree
Atypical Neurotic
Question Lady
Sax von Stroheim
Sir Barken Hyena
The Mistaken
Uncouth Reflections 
A pretty enjoyable ride, I thought. Leo does a credible Southie accent. Martin Sheen’s is Dick van Dyke as a cockney chimney sweep level atrocious.
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Scorsese seems to make movies to fulfill his idea of himself as Martin Scorsese. I guess maybe most artists end up doing that. But Scorsese’s idea of himself is so enormous and puffed-up and faux tough-guy that every movie ends up feeling like a strenuously piled-up monument. My take on “Departed” was similar to yours — a nice pulp idea inflated with a lot of hot air and larded with phoney-baloney themes centering on CORRUPTION. The HK original was at least lean and kind of slinky-sexy. This one thuds.
Isn’t it kind of funny that Scorsese’s stock in trade has become movies about swaggering tough guys and thugs? “Mean Streets” and “Taxi Driver” took a guilt-ridden, anguished approach to that milieu — Scorsese was staring into the void, reckoning with it, and it was scary-exhilirating. But “Goodfellas” and “Casino” (and even “Raging Bull”) seem like attempts to out tough-guy the tough guys. I suppose it’s way too pat to say this skinny little Italian dude has some kind of Napolean complex, and that he’s trying to compensate for something, but there it is.
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@Fabrizio Lionel Trilling once wrote something to the effect that, if you identify with the hero of a novel, fine, but if you want to be the hero, the novel is rubbish. This distinction may apply to Scorcese and the difference you see between the early movies and the later ones.
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>>Lionel Trilling once wrote something to the effect that, if you identify with the hero of a novel, fine, but if you want to be the hero, the novel is rubbish.
Going off that, I was at a James Ellroy reading/book signing once and someone asked him about Raymond Chandler. Ellroy said he preferred Dashiell Hammett. Paraphrasing, he said, “Chandler writes about who he wishes he was, Hammett writes about who he’s afraid he is.”
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For me a lot not to like about this movie. For one I agree it pales in comparison with the HK original, the earlier being mean and lean. Kind of like comparing Peckinpah’s lean and mean Getaway with the needlessly pumped up 1994 version with Alec Baldwin.
Nicholson once again way over the top. And here is it not only his hammy tendencies that are the problem–it is also a function of Scorcese’s baroque style–“I can’t help it I’m Italian!!!”
Consider Nicholson’s name: Costello. Just about the only name you can find that can be either Irish or Italian. The character is supposed to be based on the ultra-Irish Whitey Bulger, but anyone who knows Boston knows that Whitey and the whole Irish goon scene is the opposite of baroque–it is in fact mean and lean. You live in the old neighborhood, no frills, no fancy-shmancy stuff. Yet this “Costello” appears to be the epitome of the Italian mob stereotype, down to the expensive robe, fine wine and grand opera. Whitey Bulger and grand opera? I think not.
Less would have been more.
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Every time I look at Boston City Hall, I get angry. Wikipedia notes it was the winning design out of 256 entrants. I’d love to see the rejected ones.
Here’s Ada Louise Huxtable writing about it shortly after it opened: “Boston can celebrate with the knowledge that it has produced a superior public building in an age that values cheapness over quality as a form of public virtue. It also has one of the handsomest buildings around, and thus far, one of the least understood…. It is a product of this moment and these times…. The result is a tough and complex building for a tough and complex age, a structure of dignity, humanism, and power.”
Barf.
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More from Wikipedia: “After we won the City Hall competition, we were walking along Madison Avenue, and we spied [Philip] Johnson coming towards us, waving his arms in typical Johnsonian fashion. ‘Ah! I’m so happy for you two young boys who have won this competition. Absolutely marvelous. I think it’s wonderful. And it’s so ugly!’ We thought that was the greatest praise we could get.”
Ugh, what assholes.
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I found that Scorsese has been suffering lately precisely because he’s seeing himself as a master craftsman who can impersonally make a great movie out of any subject matter. This is a terrible flaw on his part because if anything he is the most personal of all great directors. Where this film suffers is that he applies say the passion that went into Mean Streets on something really impersonal. He’s transferring his style to muck.
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