The Departed and Last King of Scotland.
The Departed, 2006. Directed by Martin Scorsese, written by William Monahan. Starring Leonardo, Jack, Matt, Marky-Mark, Charlie Sheen’s Dad, Ray Winstone, one of the Baldwin brothers, Anthony Anderson, Kevin Corrigan, and the winsome Vera Farmiga.
Now showing pretty much everywhere.
Having failed to garner much in the way of Oscar glory with Gangs of New York and The Aviator, M. Scorsese has turned his camera back to the subject that seems to suit his temperament: the underworld. Hoping to score at least something in the way of a box office success (it’s unlikely this thing will garner many awards), Scorsese has taken the Hong Kong action hit Infernal Affairs and remade it into his new thriller, The Departed. While it might be cynical to assume that a man like Scorsese is thinking in these terms, his track record suggests that he’s desperate for some traction in the cruel city of Hollywood. Look at his past five features (not including his masterful No Direction Home, made for television): Kundun, Bringing Out the Dead, Gangs of New York, The Aviator, and now this. Not a success in the bunch, critically or financially. With The Departed, an unholy mess of a movie with some of the most indulged and overwrought performances in recent memory, we see a director spinning his wheels, desperately trying to rekindle old magic. And failing miserably.
The Departed is the story of a young cop with a troubled past, one William Costigan, played by Leonardo DiCaprio, Scorsese’s new muse. Costigan is a brooding fellow, whose motivations are never entirely clear: in the course of the film it becomes apparent that he’s brilliant, should be going to law school or Harvard, and is tough, dedicated, and can actually screw the cute chick in the film. Contrast this with Colin Sullivan (Matt Damon). Sullivan has been in the employ of devilish Frank Costello (Jack Nicholson), the gang leader upon which whole film hinges. Costello is the film’s bad guy, and Nicholson looks as if he’s having fun, growling and ranting, even wielding a giant purple dildo at one point. His boy, Sullivan, trains to become an elite cop, desperately wishes he were a yuppie and well educated, is a charmer, and finally seduces, but can barely have sex with, the police shrink Madolyn (that’s spelled correctly, thank you), played with dull charm by Vera Farmiga. In fact, at one point it becomes clear that Sully is impotent or a premature ejaculator, we’re never sure except that he’s reassured, post-coitally, that whatever it is happens to a lot of men. So when Madolyn is pregnant, we’re also never certain whose baby is in her toned belly. Along the way it becomes apparent to Vera that her man Sullivan is a rat in the police department; Costigan is an insider within Costello’s group. One has to find the other. The chase is on.
And it could have been a good chase except that Scorsese and scriptwriter William Monahan have it in their heads to be Important. They also seem to think that what made their past movies so good was a confusing plot and barrels of macho humor, most of which, here, falls flat on its face. They should have looked at his best films–like GoodFellas most recently–and determined that their strength lay in startling performances from small actors (like Ray Liotta), swift and economical plots, and simple chemistry. That is enough to create a masterpiece, but here the men decided to fill this bloated flick with a top notch cast that’s weighed down with some of the most hilarious New England accents I’ve heard. From Alec Baldwin to Martin Sheen, this crew seems utterly out of its element, almost ducking as Scorsese’s camera whips around the room. Mark Wahlberg stands out with a performance that veers on embarrassing, and only Ray Winstone emerges unscathed. There are countless tough-guy jokes thrown around, so many that one begins to wonder if that’s all the police department is capable of, flipping off everyone and questioning each other’s manhood.
It used to be that every gesture in a great Scorsese film was fraught with menace. The Departed relies on gunshots and statements of intent to ratchet up the tension, and the result is a seriously tedious work. This is a surprising misstep for the director: The conversations in GoodFellas were almost unbearable for their edginess, and even a scene of a dark hallway was limned with the possibility of violence. Raging Bull seemed ready to blow up at any moment and even his somewhat derided (but wonderful in my mind) After Hours was so frantically insane that one almost had to burst out in nervous laughter just to endure that picture. But The Departed suffers from assumptions and personality: Scorsese appears to believe that Jack Nicholson is enough to make you grip your armrests. Edited haphazardly by the usually sharp Thelma Schoonmaker, it juggles your attention so that moments of conflict fall flat. There is no narrative force to this film as backstory is shoehorned in at inopportune moments, stalling whatever pace Scorsese had tried to achieve. To make matters worse, the plot is also thoroughly baffling. “Where’s the rat?” Costello roars, while the former cop, informant, and obvious suspect Costigan, who is forever text-messaging at key moments (!), is overlooked. Sullivan’s spy in the police force is also forever on his cell, calling his “father” while bewildered special forces officers look around the room wondering where the mole could be hiding. Apparently it is customary for cops and criminals to hold their phones conspicuously at their sides during drug deals, stealing glimpses at the display to make sure contact has been made. In the meantime, Costigan needs to see a shrink, so of course he coincidentally runs into Sullivan’s girlfriend Madolyn. At a the climax, Costigan sends her a disc that implicates Sullivan–to the house they share, with Costigan’s return address (and name!) on the envelope. I guess Sully never checks his mail. And perhaps for the first time, Scorsese gets hung up on a McGuffin, a side story about selling microchips to the Chinese that is of no interest and results in a monumentally silly stand-off between Costello and a pack of Hong Kong thugs. And so on and so forth, until, in a ridiculous climax, everyone is taken down in a way that makes you wonder why the cops didn’t just blow Costello away in the first place.
In better times, Scorsese would have cast Ray Winstone in Nicholson’s role, for Winstone is a man whose gravity seems to pull everyone toward him–he is outstanding in this film, and one really wonders why his character would take any gaff from Nicholson’s Costello. Scorsese also used to excel at giving us the tight society of the underworld: consider the mob’s attempt at saving Ray Liotta’s marriage in GoodFellas. Here, the Irish gangs seem like nothing more than a series of endless cliches and silly brogues. Scorsese is a big man, a player, and he can get his stars to shine bright over a limp screenplay, and ignore the small miracles that made his past films so thrilling… and beautiful. This stretch for credibility is his loss, and ours, too.
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The Last King of Scotland, 2006. Directed by Kevin McDonald, written by Jeremy Brock. Starring Forest Whitaker, James McAvoy, Kerry Washington, Simon McBurney, David Oyelowo, and Gillian Anderson (and this question: why the hell is Gillian relegated to ten-minute parts while Duchovny gets to write and direct his shit?).
Now showing at the Uptown Theater.
Yet another story of an African nation through the eyes of a white protagonist (see last year’s Constant Gardner), The Last King of Scotland is redeemed through the thrill of watching some very good actors strut their stuff, and a director and screenwriter who realize, for half the movie, that this could simply be a good popcorn flick. Forest Whitaker, who is brilliant, and James McAvoy, who is sexy and fun, carry this often times routine thriller on their shoulders, playing at times like a deadly comic duo.
The Last King of Scotland is the story of a young doctor named Nicholas (McAvoy) who decides to utilize the age-old cliche of spinning a globe in order figure out to where he’s going to escape. A lad from Scotland, freshly educated and bored to tears, desperately wants to abandon his stew-eating family for some foreign action. Well, he finds it, both medically and sexually, in Uganda. Through a strange coincidence, Nicholas meets and befriends the evil Idi Amin, played with titanic moxie by Forest Whitaker. From there our doctor falls deeper and deeper into the madness of the Amin regime, until at last everything he cares for is corrupted. Or killed.
The Last King of Scotland starts out as one hell of a fun ride. With its 70s Ugandan rock filling the soundtrack, and our hero screwing everything in sight and driving like a maniac (not to mention loving the largess he receives at the hands of the Amin administration), Last King appears to have taken the old saw of the white man’s burden and shown it for what it is: a time for whites to either party or exercise their righteous morality on a country that deserves neither. We’re not meant to sympathize too much with McAvoy, who is spot-on as a kid in over his head and loving every minute of it; Whitaker is just amazing as Amin, appearing to have taken his cue from Brando’s Godfather, refusing simply to mimic the dictator, instead choosing to make his character utterly his own, hilarious, real, and terribly frightening.
As a popcorn movie, The Last King of Scotland succeeds for a good hour and a half, until it devolves into the usual uptight hysteria, trying to cram in any number of messages about race and corruption into its often ridiculous finale (where the great soundtrack has been replaced by a hackneyed score). Again, it becomes simply the story of a poor, righteous white guy in Africa, leaving one wondering why his story is more compelling to the filmmakers than, say, Amin’s wife or the Ugandan doctor who saves our hero at the expense of his (the Ugandan doctor’s) life. Finally, our hero gets a Mel Gibson-like comeuppance, and I mean the Gibson of the Christ, not the drunken anti-Semite, and by this time the whole movie has fallen apart. See it, though, for its performances, especially Whitaker’s, and enjoy its entertaining first half.
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