The Departed (2006)

To those who know me at least peripherally, it shouldn't come as a surprise that I chose Martin Scorsese's 2006 Oscar-winner (finally) The Departed to be the inagural review. After all, it de-throned The Empire Strikes Back on my list of the best movies of all time. The Departed is, simply put, the best movie ever made. And I will fight to the death on that one. It's that good.

It used to be that Martin Scorsese was the precocious salutatorian of the Academy Awards; his achievments in film (Goodfellas stands out the most) were commended but received little more than a pat on the back and a "Keep up the good work" while movies like Dances with Wolves (ugh) took home the gold. Heck, The Three 6 Mafia won an Oscar before Marty.

The Departed changed all that and deservedly so. It goes without saying that this is Scorsese's magnum opus, it having been already established that this is the best movie ever made. I seldom level the label of "perfect" on a movie, but if ever oh ever a perfect movie there was, The Departed is one because... well, it has everything. One of my favorite quotes about cinema comes from Jean-Luc Godard: "All you need for a movie is a gun and a girl." Well, maybe that's true and maybe it isn't, but The Departed has all that and more.

I hate to tell too much of the plot, since The Departed surprised me at every turn in a way movies normally don't - but should. The basic premise here is a mob story, with Jack Nicholson heading up the Boston Mafia as Frank Costello. Costello's mob has an informant in the Boston State Police - Matt Damon's delightfully scummy Colin Sullivan. Yet what almost no one in the film knows is that the cops have a man inside the Mafia - Billy Costigan, as portrayed by Leonardo DiCaprio, in the role that convinced me he had more depth than the waters into which he sank in Titanic. A tangled web of betrayal ensues, and if you see any of the last half-hour coming, James Randi has a prize for psychics like you.

Though the movie is based on the 2002 Hong Kong crime thriller Mou Gaan Dou (or Infernal Affairs), The Departed is so decidedly American that it seems a disservice to Scorsese and screenwriter William Monahan to call this a remake. Re-imagining might be a better word for it, since there's so much more flavor here. Scorsese's flair for directing and coaxing stellar performances from his players (did anyone know Kangaroo Jack alum Anthony Anderson could act?), editor Thelma Schoonmaker's intuitive method of editing the visuals, and a killer soundtrack are things that the original from Hong Kong was missing, things that guide your enjoyment of the movie without you even realizing it.

The old joke about Martin Scorsese is that all his movies have to include "Gimme Shelter" by The Rolling Stones. But I dare you to watch The Departed and listen to "Gimme Shelter" the same way again. If Tarantino changed the way we listen to non-diegetic music, he was plagiarizing from Scorsese. The music here is almost a character in itself; The Dropkick Murphys track "I'm Shipping Up to Boston" has achieved the public recognition that Pulp Fiction gave to Dick Dale's "Misirlou." The nifty thing about the soundtrack here is that you can notice it as an entity in and of itself, or you can let the movie wash over you like a tidal wave of cinematic perfection.

This is a perfect movie to watch with someone who's never seen it before, because the surprises in the movie are at least on a par with the shower scene in one of my favorite Hitchcock films, Psycho. Not that a main character gets killed in the first half, but there are quite a few moments that will challenge your conventions of how a movie should behave. Take for example the first twenty minutes. Just when you think the film's done a cold open and omitted opening credits, The Dropkick Murphys kick on, cue title card, and you know you're in for a whole lot of awesome. And it doesn't let up - from the omni-profane Alec Baldwin as the scene-stealing Captain Ellerby sparring with equally fascinating Sgt. Dignam (Oscar nominee Mark Wahlberg) to the freeze-frame that closes the film - this is 151 minutes of cinematic perfection.

Act accordingly.