Crowd-pleaser.(The Departed)(Movie review)

MARTIN SCORSESE has spent the 15 years since his career high, Goodfellas, making movies that consistently fascinate and just as consistently miss the mark. There are pleasures to be found in nearly every one of his recent films, but they've displayed the mix of hubris and fastidiousness that belongs to an artist working at the height of his ambitions but not the height of his powers. Scorsese has veered from the bloated overreach of Gangs of New York and Casino to the sterile perfectionism of Kundun or The Age of Innocence; his most recent effort, the Howard Hughes biopic The Aviator, was gorgeous, sweeping, and largely pointless, an epic treatment of an inconsequential life.

Now comes another Scorsese-Leonardo DiCaprio collaboration, The Departed, a remake of the Hong Kong classic Infernal Affairs, with the original's dueling double agents--one an undercover cop who's infiltrated the mob, the other a mob mole embedded in the police department--transplanted from Asia to Irish Boston. There's a moment, before the opening credits, when it looks like the movie is going to join the pantheon of Scorsese near-misses. First comes grainy 1970s footage of the Boston busing crisis, with a Rolling Stones song tearing up the soundtrack, and then Jack Nicholson's rasping voice starts in with some hardboiled blarney about how the Irish took over Boston, and how "no one gives it to you; you have to take it." It's a sequence that makes you expect a big, doomed attempt to fashion a Gaelic Goodfellas, a Bostonian rehash of the hash that was Gangs of New York.

But The Departed has something less pretentious in mind, and the result is a movie that's good because it rarely tries too hard to be great. The plot is implausible; the characters are caricatures; Nicholson (playing Frank Costello, a murderous mobster based none-too-loosely on the notorious Whitey Bulger) chews the scenery and the rest of the cast tries to match him; and you never for a moment believe that this is how real Irish-American gangsters talk and walk, let alone how real elite police units operate. But neither do you care. Scorsese is playing the entertainer this time around, not the auteur, and the movie he's crafted here is the thinking man's popcorn film--a summer blockbuster shot with art-house craft, and graced with an Oscar-season script and cast.

DiCaprio and Matt Damon play the doppelganger leads--Leo as Billy Costigan, the hothead son of a baggage handler and a North Shore upper-cruster who gets tapped by the state police to infiltrate the Southie mob; Damon as Colin Sullivan, the crooked cop who feeds the department's secrets to Costello, his childhood mentor, while gazing ambitiously at the State House's golden dome. They're onscreen together only briefly, but they play off each other even so: DiCaprio is all id, a growling live wire who keeps his secrets but otherwise wears his heart on his sleeve, while Damon is the superego gone rotten, his surface charm and self-control hiding a snake's soul underneath.

The movie ...