20 Years Ago, Scorsese’s Undercover Crime Epic Joined An Incredible Oscars Club
Only four crime dramas have won Best Picture, and The Departed is one of them.
In 1970, the “New Hollywood” movement received its first Best Picture Oscar. Skeezy street drama Midnight Cowboy captured the explicit, down-and-dirty, and modern mood of the post-studio system American wave better than any previous winner, and its Academy Award committed the exploits of two low-level scammers and hustlers to Hollywood history.
Even though crime is an ordinary and unglamorous element in Midnight Cowboy, something about its immersion in a criminal world struck a chord. Three crime flicks won Best Picture in the first half of the ‘70s alone: William Friedkin’s cutthroat drug trafficking thriller The French Connection, and Francis Ford Coppola’s The Godfather Part I and Part II, mafia epics made with a young visionary’s verve and cineliteracy. It would take nearly 30 years for another crime film to win Best Picture, but it makes sense that The Departed would be the one to cinch it. Released 20 years ago, Martin Scorsese’s foul-mouthed, cross-cutting saga of blood and identity is in sync with the cynical, psychologically-tinged crime films that share its Oscar glory.
The Departed takes the paranoia and intensity of a cat-and-mouse thriller and doubles it. Billy Costigan (Leonardo DiCaprio) is a deep cover Boston cop infiltrating Irish mob boss Frank Costello (Jack Nicholson). Elsewhere, Colin Sullivan (Matt Damon) joins the Massachusetts State Police unit to take down Costello, but he’s actually spying on the cops on Costello’s behalf. The Departed has the flair of a thrilling page-turner while immersing the audience in all the fear and guilt that’s an inevitable, but often ignored, side effect of crime fiction.
The Departed does not originate in 1970s America; it’s an English-language remake of Infernal Affairs, the 2002 undercover cop thriller starring acclaimed Hong Kong actors Andy Lau and Tony Leung Chiu-wai. But The Departed opted for a New England specificity that plays to Scorsese’s strengths: profane gangster movies that are as boisterous as they can be lonely, centering Catholic motifs such as grief and sin along the way. While The Departed was an ambitious, entertaining modern canvas for Scorsese, its street-level ferocity is more reminiscent of The French Connection than Goodfellas, and its intimidating mob kingpin is closer to The Godfather than Casino.
The French Connection made waves thanks to Friedkin’s fusion of documentary-tinged realism and stylized, propulsive filmmaking. New York detective “Popeye” Doyle (Gene Hackman) is on the trail of a heroin smuggler (Fernando Rey) who’s poised to smuggle $32 million worth of heroin into the United States — with the stakes so high, Doyle easily justifies his trademark thuggish tactics to bust the drug ring arriving on his doorstep. Friedkin brought an authentic unpleasantness to his cop protagonists, but if the line between cops and criminals is blurred here, in The Departed, it’s downright confused.
The French Connection and The Departed are possessed by the same ugly realism, and their fictionalized stories each remix real American crime history — the former is based on the NYPD who broke up a French heroin ring in the early ‘60s, while The Departed riffs on Boston mobsters like notorious informants Whitey Bulger and the Winter Hill Gang. Instead of being strict biopics, the films suffuse real crime into their demented worlds. Reality seems to have been distorted by the adrenaline coursing through their characters — every slug, gunshot, and chase through scummy stairwells and under subway strip lights feels especially on edge.
Jack Nicholson’s mob boss with Matt Damon’s police mole.
Boston is an odd substitute for Hong Kong, but a perfect update for 1970 New York, and The Departed honors The French Connection’s heightened urban atmosphere with blood-soaked zeal. Bodies hit the ground with thundering impact, handguns act more like artillery, and there’s rarely a punch thrown that doesn’t end in blood sprays or knockouts. As we hurtle through its dense investigation plot, Billy and Colin’s contrary worlds are equally intensified and precarious — which also explains how The Departed, like The French Connection, can pull off such bleak and abrupt endings.
The Godfather paints gangsters in a far more noble, classical light than Scorsese ever did, so it’s easier to read its influence on The Departed as a kind of inversion. Frank Costello is The Departed’s answer to the dignified Vito Corleone (Marlon Brando) — both are feared and revered, both love their subordinates like a father or brother would, and both are played by the most acclaimed leading man of a former Hollywood era. But Costello is the dirtbag answer to Don Corleone; he's a potty-mouthed, unkempt lecher mostly found in the back of grubby Irish pubs.
The films do align with how they treat criminals who become rats. In The Godfather films, mafioso betrayals are painted as a personal and spiritual transgression. Although the world of The Departed is a scuzzy headache with little nobility or classiness, Scorsese borrows the operatic overtones of mob betrayal from his old friend Coppola. To Colin, the discovery that Costello is a protected FBI informant is tantamount to finding out his father has another wife.
Scorsese didn’t set out to make a Best Picture winner, but the commonalities between his acclaimed crime film and its game-changing predecessors — all of which were released when Scorsese was beginning his career — are striking. The Departed draws on what made The French Connection and The Godfather films feel new and remarkable. Great crime movies redefine the boundaries of morality and lawlessness, and The Departed ensures that even its most principled cops and criminals are constantly knocked off-balance.
