THE DEPARTED

THE DEPARTED sounded like a dream collaboration, Scorcese meets Nicholson. But instead it was a disaster, due to Jack's manic bid for screen presence. It's like Bush Jr's botched attempt to outdo his father with the Iraq debacle. In Jack's case it's to outdo "daddy" Brando in MISSOURRI BREAKS.

That flick was Brando's last as a leading man. Nicholson was the new Brando confronting the master with the edge of youth and a more dominant popularity at the time. But Brando not only blew him and everyone else off the screen, he did it with typical Brando ingenuity. Almost every scene that he's in, he not only dominates with the charisma of his screen presence but with the uniqueness of his choices, including dressing in drag—but unlike any drag we'd seen before as he disappears under the sun bonnet and neck-to-feet drab dress of an old prairie pioneer lady—or perching on the saddle of his horse like he's squatting over a Japanese hole-in-the-floor toilet. Jack's attempts at naturalism seemed pretty bland next to Brando's originality, or like an attempt to salvage the movie in the face of Brando's scenery chewing, depending on your perspective.

Now Jack gets his revenge in THE DEPARTED, which offered him the chance to pull on DiCaprio what Brando pulled on him at similar stages in their careers. And like Bush, he's gonna beat daddy at his own game. But also like Bush, he fails.

According to insiders on the set, Nicholson disrupted the flow of the movie and Scorcese's plans for it by rewriting his lines and scenes as well as trying to rewrite the lines of DiCaprio's character and others to give him, Jack, more screen time and scenery to chew. And it shows, the inconsistencies, the dropped plot points, as the screenwriting-class graduates call them, etc.

Brando may have improvised or rewritten some of his lines and scenes in THE MISSOURRI BREAKS for all I know, but the scenery chomping he does in that film is always consistent with his character's role and motives in the plot and even extending it as a comment on the times (1976) (or the future in the perspective of the flick) and the role of clandestine assassins working for the powers that be (CIA et. al.), while Nicholson's rewriting not only fucks up the narrative of the plot but also blows the point of his character's role in the plot and the real life it is based on, the Irish kingpin of Southie gangsterism, Whitey Bolger, who too was an FBI informant as well as brutal murderer.

Nicholson chooses to do a halfass homage to Brando as the shuffling aging don, mixed with the madman from THE SHINING—"Here's Whitey!" and misses the opportunity to explore another kind of gangster the movies have yet to get right (at least since Cagney), the Irish kind. Picture Richard Harris, with a twinkle in his eye, charming his minions and neighbors alike with his Irish (cum England) charm while carrying out the ruthless cruelty Bolger was famous for. Because Bolger was not just feared, he was lionised, based on clan pride and Irish pol charm, something Nicholson could have pulled off in his younger years, maybe. But he seemed to care less about the character he was playing and more about pulling on his younger castmates what Brando pulled on him in MISSOUURRI BREAKS, but Jack, I've seen Brando, you ain't no Brando.

I know I know, he's everybody's stoned sardonic Boomer's rock'n'roll doper hipster hero actor from the restaurant scene in FIVE EASY PIECES through THE SHINING's Johnny Carson-intro-satire to the aging convert to romanticism of that movie with Diane Keaton. But that still ain't no Brando baby. Even when he blew up to beyond late Orson Welles dimensions, Brando could underplay, get subtle, with the most incidental details in a scene. And he always risked all on the character, even when he seemed to phone some of the last few in. Nicholson suppresses the character under what has become his usual satanic majesty mannerisms.

All that said, there's some great moviemaking and acting going on in THE DEPARTED, despite Nicholson's conscious or not attempt to undermine it. Mark Wahlburg and Alec Baldwin come closest to what those kind of hardheaded Micks are really like from my family, clan and neighborhood experience, doing what they always do, some kick ass acting. DeCaprio makes up for being miscast in GANGS OF NEW YORK as an oldtime Mick, and in THE AVIATOR, where he tried hard and almost made it with some great moments but was just too boyish for any man of that time and place let alone a powerful loner megalomaniac like Hughes. But in THE DEPARTED, representing the credited screenwriter's background, I'd guess, as a Mick with one foot in the neighborhood and the other in preppie-ville, he almost makes the movie work, along with Matt Damon who does his usual competent job. Poor Martin Sheen looks lost in his role of surrogate daddy.

And how did the actress who plays the love/sex interest get profiled in The New York Times Sunday Magazine as our greatest screen actress since Meryl Streep (but come to think of it, Streep was overhyped as the great serious artiste of screenacting too, sometimes missing and sometimes hitting the mark she and her character were aiming for).

Worth seeing for the debacle of Nicholson's ham-ness (would a popular local Irish "godfather" really dis a nun and priests in a public venue, and do it with childish put downs? Yeah, I doubt it too, in fact I double doubt it.) and flashes of Scorcese's usual brilliance, as well as a new found campiness, as in the final shot, so hyper obvious a metaphor you wonder if it was meant to make up for all the murky, vague, confusing, and dropped "plot points" and gratuitous cliche montages (vide the one with the black chick and the cocaine!).