The Departed.

"The Departed is a wildly commercial project, but let no one imagine it a work for hire," writes J Hoberman in a Voice review that opens with a reminder: "No studio director was a greater hero to the Hong Kong new wave than Martin Scorsese." Further in, Hoberman sees Scorsese "staking a claim to QT's turf" before coming to what will, for many, be a surprising conclusion: "Overwrought as The Departed may be, it's nothing that wouldn't have been cured by losing Jack (and maybe half an hour). Too bad the bottom line meant Scorsese had to sell that hambone Mephistopheles his soul."

"How did America get so small?" asks Tom Scocca in the New York Observer. "Infernal Affairs, a brooding and intricate cops-and-mobsters thriller, set box-office records on its home soil and swept the Hong Kong movie awards. It quickly added a prequel and sequel, expanding into a multigenerational crime trilogy - The Godfather of Hong Kong cinema. That's not quite the same as being The Godfather, but we haven't been making The Godfather over here lately either." Now then: "Martin Scorsese, it turns out, is a great Hong Kong movie director... The Departed is hot-blooded, throbbing with rock music and ethnic rage and scabrous dialogue (written by William Monahan) where Infernal Affairs is cold."

"A white-knuckle potboiler with a surrealistic edge of mania, this propulsive, astoundingly vulgar pop entertainment finds a reenergized Scorsese back on the mean streets he understands better than any other filmmaker," writes Sean Burns in the Philadelphia Weekly. "It's a snarling, magnificent beast."

Matt Dentler: "The Departed is what we hoped Miami Vice would be. But, as this new film proves, Michael Mann is great but he's no Martin Scorsese."

Jim Emerson on the oeuvre at MSN: "Watching certain Scorsese pictures today (Mean Streets, Taxi Driver, Raging Bull, The Last Temptation of Christ, GoodFellas, Casino and others), you can appreciate the ways they both reflect and question the prevailing moral climate in early 21st-century America."

Cinematical's Erik Davis has notes from the press junket.

Earlier: David Edelstein in New York and Andrew Sarris in the New York Observer.

Updates, 10/5: "Scorsese seems to have abandoned his Gollum-like quest for golden trinkets, and the result is the best thing he's done in ages - an exhilarating pulp entertainment," heralds Scott Foundas in the LA Weekly:

Some will inevitably claim that The Departed is nothing more than a kind of greatest hits collection for Scorsese, who is certainly no stranger to stories of urban jungles seething with the ambitions of hot-blooded Guineas and Micks. Even I wouldn't rush to call the movie one of Scorsese's best - it doesn't dig deep under the skin of its characters in the way of a Mean Streets or a Taxi Driver, and as a study of undercover police work, it rarely ventures more than ankle-high into the muddy psychological waters of this summer's Miami Vice. But like the blaring classic rock ballads he has long favored for his soundtracks ('Gimme Shelter' and the electrifying Van Morrison cover of 'Comfortably Numb' are among the highlights here), Scorsese's hits are nothing to sniff at. Indeed, the very vibrancy of this movie is tied to its familiarity, to the thrill of seeing 'Marty' shrug off his yen for enshrinement in some ersatz canon and rekindle the old razzle-dazzle - the pulse-quickening energy, the restless zooms and tracking shots, the explosions of gory violence - that once made every young film student in America want to be him (before they decided they wanted to be Tarantino instead).

"The film remains true to the genre and authentic in atmosphere and details nearly to the end before blowing it all with a few too many bullets to the head," writes Peter Keough in the Boston Phoenix, in other words, more or less in the film's hometown. "Scorsese isn't about plots; he's about people, places, and times, and until he departs from that, this film is a return to genius." Also, Brett Michel listens in on a press conference.

For Eric Kohn, writing for the Reeler, the film "sports Scorsese's flair for technical tomfoolery while betraying his previously stalwart sense of justice. Substance loses footing to style in a big way, creating a gleefully morbid crime story that navigates nearly every turn in the Sopranos playbook."

The Guardian's got a Scorsese quiz.

Updates, 10/6: In the Nation, sounding at first a bit like Woody Allen on the couch in Manhattan, Stuart Klawans opens by comparing the feeling of watching "a sequence of great filmmaking" with other superlative experiences of the arts (substitute Velázquez for Cezanne's apples, and you get the basic idea). Then:

Scorsese introduced this feeling many years ago, in Mean Streets; but since then he has ventured far from the Little Italy that served as a platform for the emotion. He went to Las Vegas and Tibet, 1930s Hollywood and ancient Judea, testing and stretching himself as great artists do. In so doing, he left behind the mood that was initially so striking, and so peculiarly his. I thought it was missing even in GoodFellas. I hadn't expected to encounter it again.

Yet here it is once more, revived for two and a half hours nonstop in The Departed. You might be surprised that Irish Catholic South Boston should have provided the opportunity for this stunning return, but I tell you the range of emotions would be characteristically, authentically Scorsese's even if The Departed were set in Kowloon.

Ed Pilkington interviews Scorsese for the Guardian. The primary focus: directing Leonardo DiCaprio and the crucial turning point on the set of The Aviator. Also, Peter Bradshaw: "Martin Scorsese has got his groove back, or most of it, with what is arguably his best picture since GoodFellas: a big, brash, splatteringly violent mob opera starring Jack Nicholson giving it the full Pavarotti, with an outrageous and outrageously enjoyable performance that doesn't so much go over the top as go over the ionosphere."

Stephanie Zacharek in Salon: "Scorsese didn't need to remake Infernal Affairs, but what he has done with it is a compliment rather than an affront to the original: The Departed reimagines its source material rather than just leeching off it, preserving the bone structure of the first movie while finding new curves in it."

At Cinematical, Jeffrey M Anderson: "[Scorsese] has ceased fighting the personal demons that haunted Taxi Driver (1976) and Raging Bull (1980). Now he's here to demonstrate the sheer infectious pleasure of making cinema, a glorious symphony of motion in the key of violence." More from James Rocchi.

James Christopher in the London Times: "Nicholson's unsavoury grin and seedy menace are a joy to behold... The flurries of unspeakable violence - as much implied as seen - are vintage Scorsese. The way his film plays tricks on the senses long after the final credits roll adds another thoughtful dimension to the gripping magic."

Andy Klein in the LA CityBeat: "For all its links to the Scorsese films cited above, The Departed, as a project, actually seems more in line with his 1991 thriller, Cape Fear. As a star-heavy genre remake, it feels like Scorsese is running for cover after a series of high-profile projects that were commercial failures and only moderate critical successes, at best.... Nineteen times out of 20, I find remakes inferior to their sources. But, like Cape Fear, this is from the other 5 percent."

"Scorsese hands Nicholson so many grandstanding scenes that the film's emphasis is rarely where it should be," complains Ryan Gilbey in the New Statesman. Even so, "It's brave of Scorsese to forgo his stylistic mannerisms for much of The Departed; for once, he doesn't direct as if he were being paid per zoom-shot."

"[S]wiftly crosscutting between multiple subplots, Scorsese's film, for much of its 150 minutes, rocks violently, passionately, urgently," writes Nick Schager at Slant. Nevertheless, he also finds it "alternately scintillating, silly, and distended."

Kenneth Turan in the Los Angeles Times: "Frequently excessive but never dull, The Departed is a little too much of a lot of the things that define Martin Scorsese films but it's also almost impossible to resist. Too operatic at times, too in love with violence and macho posturing at others, it's a potboiler dressed up in upscale designer clothes, but oh how that pot does boil."

"[M]ore often than not The Departed looks like a movie any of his legion of imitators could have made," harrumphs the Independent's Anthony Quinn.

"If ever a Scorsese film was one for the fans, The Departed is it," proposes JR Jones in the Chicago Reader. "You can just imagine him lining up the next head-splat gunshot scene, muttering, 'Just when I thought I was out, they pull me back in!'"

Sukhdev Sandhu in the Telegraph: "[E]ven though the criminal milieux and visual tics are familiar (cat-and-mouse chases along steam-filled Chinatowns?), and the storyline unoriginal, Scorsese makes the material his own, injecting it with his own torrential, viscous intensity. Infernal Affairs spawned a couple of sequels; suddenly, The Departed II seems a pretty attractive prospect."

Bradley Steinbacher in the Stranger: "[T]hough the story isn't a particularly deep one - scratch the surface and you'll quickly strike bone - Scorsese and lifelong editor Thelma Schoonmaker have crafted the film with such determination, and move it along at such an impressive clip, that you're constantly catching your breath as you watch it unfold."

The Washington Post's Ann Hornaday finds the film "crackles right along, stopping only long enough for Scorsese's signature bursts of explosive violence. Those brawls feel a bit rote, but what's different here is a newfound playful humor."

Jason M Jackowski suggests that it might have been called A History of Violence: "But, unlike Cronenberg's movie, Scorsese's picture fails to resonate as one of the auteur's greatest works."

That Little Round-Headed Boy rounds up "The 10 Greatest Lines of Jack Nicholson Dialogue."

Updates, 10/11: "Finally and at last Martin Scorsese gives a shit about his indispensable moviemaking talent rather than the Oscars," writes Ray Pride at Movie City Indie. "atch for a shot in a foot-chase scene on a Chinatown side street that holds on a lamp made from vertical fingers of mirror, capturing multiples of DiCaprio’s eyes in foreground while the figure of Damon runs into the distance, in perspective the same dimensions as the long strips of mirror. Dazzling. Just dazzling."

"It's not news that Scorsese is a great director, but it's been so long since you've seen him produce something where he obviously feels so confident, that a fan leaves the theater practically giddy with excitement for both him and the medium again," writes Edward Copeland. "Still, of all aspects of The Departed that seemed most revelatory to me, it has to be Mark Wahlberg's role as Dignam, one of DiCaprio's police supervisors. Wahlberg truly has grown over the years into a fine actor, starting in films that were better than he was (like Boogie Nights and Three Kings) until he gave performances better than the films he was in (as in I Heart Huckabees). With The Departed, Wahlberg finally plays a role at the same quality level as the film he's in."

Slate's Dana Stevens: "It feels like the kind of movie critics might overpraise, if only because it's nice to see Scorsese back in the saddle and a treat to find a cops-and-robbers thriller with some energy and wit. But even so, it's a stylish head rush of a movie that flies by, even at two-and-a-half hours, and keeps turning the knife (and your stomach) up to the final scene."

David Denby in the New Yorker: "The Departed is not one of [Scorsese's] greatest films; it doesn't use the camera to reveal the psychological and aesthetic dimensions of an entire world, as Mean Streets, Taxi Driver, Raging Bull and Goodfellas did. But it's a viciously merry, violent, high-wattage entertainment, and speech is the most brazenly flamboyant element in it."

Online viewing tips. Scorsese, De Niro, the guys in shorts, commercials, parodies and more, rounded up by Ajit at ticklebooth.

For Dave Kehr, The Departed "has a bored, dutiful feeling, as if Woody Allen had been forced to remake one of his 'early, funny ones.'"

"I'd love to join the applause that welcomes Scorsese back, but for [the many reasons he lists and expounds on], I have to sit on my hands," writes David Bordwell. "For me, the inventiveness of the Asian tradition still reigns supreme in the crime genre."

Update, 10/12: Ed Caesar in the Independent on Scorsese and the Catholic Church, the guys, the Academy, Vietnam, women, NYC, trademarks, violence, advertising and his cameos.

Posted by dwhudson at October 4, 2006 12:42 PM