Issue Date: March 18, 2007
"The Departed"
A Boston crime columnist takes on Martin Scorsese's Oscar-winning Irish mob flick.
"The Departed," out now on DVD, won four Oscars, including Best Picture and Best Directing.
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The Plot Martin Scorsese took home his first Best Directing Oscar for this crime thriller set on the mean streets of South Boston, where the protégé (Matt Damon) of an Irish mob boss (Jack Nicholson) grows up to be a mole working for the state police. Meanwhile, a cop (Leonardo DiCaprio) begins working undercover as part of the gangster's crew. Loyalties shift, violence explodes, and the result is another high-body-count classic from Scorsese.
Our Insider Michele McPhee is police bureau chief and columnist for the "Boston Herald." Previously, she covered the crime beat at the "Boston Globe" and the "New York Daily News." Author of "Mob Over Miami" and two forthcoming true-crime books about infamous Massachusetts murder cases, the tough-as-nails reporter even was roughed up at gunpoint for nosing around in some unwanted places.
OVERVIEW "It's always been difficult to capture Boston. Most movies never get the place right. People label Southie [South Boston] or the city overall as a racist backwater, but we are segregated by class more than race. The movie was excellent because the screenwriter lived here, and Scorsese came away with the real deal. When one of the characters talks about distinctions between lace-curtain Irish and triple-decker Irish, they got it down perfectly."
NAILING THAT ACCENT "Matt Damon is from Cambridge, while Mark Wahlberg [who plays the sergeant] is from Dorchester, where the movie mostly took place, so no problems there. Leonardo DiCaprio and Jack Nicholson both were believable. The only one who made me wince was Vera Farmiga, who played the psychiatrist. Whenever she opened her mouth, I shut my eyes and said, 'Yecch!' Another big movie that took place near here, "The Perfect Storm," had horrible accents. You wanted to shoot the screen!"
BOSTON BOP "I was impressed by the little touches Scorsese put in. For instance, the soundtrack: It was ballsy of him to use the Dropkick Murphys, a terrific local punk band with real punch. The script was peppered with real Beantown vernacular, like when one character says, 'I'll meet you down L Street.' That's a very Bostonesque term."
COPS AND ROBBERS "I'm on the police beat, so the sergeant played by Wahlberg was my favorite character. I've been around cops my whole life, and he seemed completely realistic. He had that edge where he's just a hair away from being a criminal himself."
REAL-WORLD COUNTERPARTS "Several scenes from the movie probably resonated here in Boston more than in middle America. [Spoiler alert:] The gangster played by Nicholson stunned everybody when it turned out that he was an FBI informant. That's exactly what happened with Boston mob boss Whitey Bulger, who flooded the city with drugs and ratted out his friends to the FBI. His persona was huge around here. But Whitey was incredibly paranoid and always grimacing; Nicholson's animated facial expressions seemed a little over-the-top." -- Jeffrey Ressner
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