The Departed

I mentioned in my Annie Hall rant that, when my wife and I embarked on our quest to watch every Best Picture winner, there were movies I was dreading for one reason or another. Annie Hall was at the top of this list, and sitting somewhere in the top ten was The Departed. I have made no secret, here or on social media, how much I do not like or respect Martin Scorsese. I think he is a self-important, arrogant, narrow-minded, miserable, gatekeeping jerk. I do not understand his fascination with crime and criminals. I do not understand his "the movies are for art" obnoxiousness. I have not seen a movie of his that got higher than 6/10, and most are below that. I hoped, with the cast, that this movie could somehow be dragged up to tolerable in spite of Scorsese being a shit human being and a shit director. I was very, very, very wrong to misplace my hopes like that. This movie gets a half star because of the under-appreciated radiance that is Vera Farmiga, and that is it. Every other element of this movie can fuck off into the center of the sun. The characters, or I should say, the caricatures, had me making nail marks in my couch for two and a half hours. Leonardo DiCaprio probably has the most depth, and that's still about as deep as a kiddie pool. Everybody else gets much, much less. Everybody is Irish, everybody is perpetually angry and ready to fight at a moment's notice, everybody yells and swears and drops racist epithets like a ticker tape parade, everybody drinks ... it is the most stereotypical portrayal of the Irish I have ever seen. If the Lucky Charms and Notre Dame mascots had a baby, it wouldn't be as much of an Irish stereotype as everybody in this movie. Nobody has an arc, nobody develops, everybody is the same person in the first frame as they are in the last; angry, obnoxious, Irish Bostonians. The script does more circling of the runway than the planes in Die Hard 2. DiCaprio is an undercover cop trying to integrate into the Irish mob. Matt Damon is a member of the mob who has infiltrated the Boston police. DiCaprio is tired of being inside, Damon is tired of trying to stay one step ahead of his fellow police, the cops know there's a mole in their ranks, the mob knows there's a mole in their ranks, lather, rinse, repeat. They keep not discovering each other, having to cover up their lies, and so on and so on. Two and a half hours of the same plot points, repeated into infinity. I've seen more narrative development in a Goofy On Sports short. How many times do I need to watch DiCaprio see something horrific like a beating or a murder and stare wet-eyed into the middle distance, as if he didn't know the mob did stuff like this? How many times do I have to see Damon make a secret call to Jack Nicholson and pretend its his dad with painfully obvious coded language? TWO AND A HALF HOURS WORTH. That's how many times. The editing and the pacing ... good lord. I've never seen a movie where these elements fight against themselves with so much vigor. The editing in this movie is so frantic and hyper, and I don't understand why. No scene is allowed to breathe, for the emotional weight of what has happened to land. Every scene, EVERY SINGLE SCENE, has to slam cut to the next one within frames of the last line, like a hyperactive toddler hitting the channel changer on a remote control. What made this all the more unbearable is that it gave the illusion of a fast-paced movie, but at no point did the actual content of the movie back that up. I felt every agonizing moment of this movie in duplicate. If you told me this movie was actually five hours long, I'd believe you, because it sure felt like it. The editing was in a hurry, but the plot was going nowhere. And since it's a Martin Scorsese movie about crime, that means it spends the run time masturbating to the glory and edification of the criminal lifestyle. Jack Nicholson is cool, a smooth talker, a hero of the neighborhood. Matt Damon literally runs a lifelong (and narratively convenient) con, getting promotions in record time and assigned to the one task force that pursues organized crime, all while being on the take, all because Nicholson bought him some groceries and comic books as a kid. Even DiCaprio, who is ostensibly the hero of the story, is a dangerous hothead, and in the end, is willing to resort to extrajudicial violence and extortion to get what he wants. People die and the cycle continues. Even in the final moments, Mark Wahlburg, who has been an asshole cop up to this point but has been law-abiding and gets suspended because the script needs him to be, decides to throw his career out the window and goes rogue. Crime wins! Yay! How predictable with Scorsese, this predictable hack. Seriously, Scorsese, I'm tired of you and your romanticizing of criminality with your terrible movies. Get a hobby. Get therapy. Get a life. Just get out of Hollywood. You're a worthless tumor on this industry, holding it back with your regressive, toxic trash, and so are your movies. You so obviously wanted to be a hoodlum as a kid, but you didn't have the stones to do it, so now we, the world, have to sit through your self-therapy sessions that you call movies, where you wax poetic about the lifestyle that you wish you could've been part of. I'm tired of hearing how blockbusters is ruining cinema when you spew out garbage like this that makes choosing criminality as a lifestyle seem okay. Everybody is entitled to enjoy the things they love, and to those reading this that like his movies, fine, I don't get it and don't try to explain it. But nobody asked Martin Scorsese to be judge and jury on what is and isn't art; he appointed himself to the job, wholly on the basis of an unearned reputation because of garbage movies like this. Look in the mirror if you want to see who is ruining Hollywood, you pretentious piece of shit. Jump in the sea, and take your terrible movies with you. I hate you, I hated every moment of my life that was stolen by this abrasive experience, and I am so grateful I will never watch another another one of your awful, reprehensible abortions ever again.