A Film Series Worth Seeing |
Films of Alfred Hitchcock: Forget Scorsese's latest disappointment and remember how chilling and fun suspense can be with Winchester Cultural Center's Mid-Week Film Series, now featuring Hitch's best: Rebecca (October 11), Strangers on a Train (October 26), Rear Window (November 9), North by Northwest (November 16), Psycho (November 22) and The Birds (November 30). From Rebecca's tale of a wife driven to madness by the memory of her husband's dead first wife to Rear Window's treatise of the perils and attractions of voyeurism to The Birds' cautionary story of nature run amok, these stories and images (Jimmy Stewart and his camera; that bird splatting into the phone booth) have shaped our expectations of what thrillers can deliver. Sure, you can get most of them on DVD, but suspense is more fun when you can share it. Films begin at 7 p.m. at Winchester Cultural Center, 3130 S. McLeod; cost is: $3. Call 455-7340. |
Based on Alan Mak and Andrew Lau's Hong Kong policier, Infernal Affairs, it spares some initially promising backstory on its protagonist, Billy Costigan (Leonardo DiCaprio), an honest Boston cop internally conflicted over his both lower- and upper- class Boston roots.
Costigan is recruited by secret-investigations cops played by Martin Sheen and Mark Wahlberg to go deep-cover and infiltrate an Irish mob led by Frank Costello (Jack Nicholson). Meanwhile, careerist cop Colin Sullivan (Matt Damon) is also working the Costello caseexcept as a snitch for Costello, whom he's idolized since he was a kid.
What follows is a series of moderately interesting cat-and-mouse games as Costigan tries not to have his cover blown while Sullivannot even aware Costigan existsfoils his every effort by keeping Costello informed.
There are some typically gruesome Scorsese bits herea funny/grisly scene in which Costello absently handles a severed hand in a Baggie during a meeting comes to mindbut the real pleasures come courtesy of Alec Baldwin, who walks off with the movie, Glengarry Glen Ross-ing his way through some chewy bits of racially scabrous misanthropy.
Wahlberg gives terrific loose canon, and Ray Winstone exudes superb menace as Costello's casually homicidal right-hand man. DiCaprio, meanwhile, does what he can with what becomes a single-note character defined by variations on pop-eyed panic; the same with Damon in his given register. Meanwhile, a soapy subplot involving a cop therapist (Vera Farmiga) that both men sleep with just underlines Scorsese' intermittent mystification about what to do with women in his films.
But it's the lack of nuance or even basic information about CostelloNicholson in glower-and-shout modethat makes the film really sag. There's an indication Scorsese realized something was missing with his featured mobster, and hence, perhaps, Costello's one-time voice-over about not wanting his environment to shape him. But that bit of character telegraphy aside, there's no sense that Scorsese understands what drives Costello, unlike his profound understanding of what drove everyone in Goodfellas.
This leads us to another essential flaw. While the accents are rightno surprise considering that Damon and Wahlberg are Boston nativesScorsese has no feel for how this particular city shapes its occupants, and this from a guy who's a past master at such things. And while there's much talk of allegiance to family or some-such, we never actually see said family in motion. Similarly, the Irish mob here is tantalizingly limned as entering the 21st century via sales of missile-guidance microprocessor chips, which sometimes verges on a meta-commentary on amoral globalism but ultimately comes off as a lip-service contempo update on the verge of making that point. But maybe that's the biggest problem with The Departedit seems constantly on the verge of going somewhere but never arrives. When Scorsese indulges his usual crescendo of violence, the effect is more like someone abruptly slamming shut a novel on you just when things were starting to get interesting.