About that “Departed wasn’t Oscar-worthy” thing, it’s because it’s got all the other un-Oscared Scorcese competition, for which this Oscar was makeup (hence the Holy Trinity Spielberg, Coppola, and Lucas presenting it). As has been noted, Scorcese’s off-day gangster movies are still better than most anyone else’s masterpieces.
I was amazed that The Departed was a remake of a Hong Kong film from 2002.
The Hong Kong version was excellent and ended the same way.
The major difference in the HK version, they made it clear that the police department had been infiltrated by many gangsters.
I strongly recommend the HK version.
I’ve thought though this over and over and IMHO the most plausible explanation is that Dingam was another one of Costello’s guys and he knew that Sullivan was getting pinched and the investigation would eventually lead to him as well.
With Costigan and Costello dead that leaves one loose end - Sullivan.
People don’t always act logically in real life. Dignam was a hothead, but loyal to his undercover guys. Who knows? Maybe the evidence wasn’t that good, Dignam knew it, and decided that the Sullivan scum didn’t deserve to breathe another breath either in or out of jail.
As to why the old woman is nervous about Sullivan? - well, it’s probably on the editing room floor, but I imagine that his wife moved out, under extremely bad terms, lots of shoutuing, maybe a police escort? Old women tend to notice these things.
To drastically oversimplify…
If you had a degree from Yale, and then applied for a job as a manager at the local McDonald’s, what would happen?
You might be perfectly well qualified, but you’d never get the job. The owner would wonder, “Why the heck are you applying for THIS job? It’s BENEATH you! Even if you think you want this job now, it’s ineveitable you’ll get tired of it in a short time and quit. I need a guy who actually wants THIS job, who’ll actually see THIS job as a grerat opportunity.”
Being a cop isn’t the same as working at McDonald’s, of course, but the police HR staff would regard overqualified applicants the same way. DiCaprio was too smart and too well educated to want to be a mere state cop. He would never have been hired, EXCEPT that his very mixed background made him perfect for one specific type of police work.
I just watched the movie so I’m reviving the thread.
I feel the ending has some major plotholes. What story did Sullivan put together to explain his actions? I could except that he was just scrambling around in a hopeless attempt to save himself but the scene where he was at Costigan’s funeral indicates he had actually managed a successful cover-up and was still a good cop in the eyes of the world.
But I can’t imagine any explanation he could have come up with that would have overwhelmed the evidence.
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He erased Costigan’s file. But Dignan knew Costigan was an undercover agent. And Sullivan himself acknowledged Costigan as an undercover cop at his funeral. So wouldn’t the erased file have been seen in retrospect as a sign of guilt?
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Madolyn had the envelope and the tape. Sullivan tried to make up a story about how this actually meant Costello was an informant working for him. But that story wasn’t going to hold up to any amount of scrutiny. (When I was watching these scenes, I figured Sullivan was going to kill Madolyn in order to keep the evidence hidden. This would have been another big step in his fall. So it would have worked both thematically and narratively.)
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What story did Sullivan come up with that explained the deaths of Costigan, Brown, and Barrigan and his own survival? Sullivan hadn’t known Barrigan was working for Costello and he had no evidence to back it up when he told people afterwards. Wouldn’t the police have asked questions like “If you and Costigan were both good cops, why were you meeting on that rooftop? Why did Costigan make you surrender your gun to him? If Barrigan was a bad cop, why did he shoot Costigan and Brown but not shoot you? Why did Barrigan show up there and shoot anybody? Why did Barrigan use his own gun to shoot Costigan but then use Costigan’s gun to shoot Brown? Why were the fingerprints wiped off Costigan’s gun?”
Other questions:
Why did Costigan send the recording to Sullivan’s apartment? Did he expect Sullivan to listen to it himself rather than Madolyn? Why would he want to tip off Sullivan about what he knew and the fact that he had evidence? That just gave Sullivan a chance to make a run for it. Costigan should have just sent the recording and copies of his other evidence to the police and let them arrest Sullivan. The obvious explanation is that the movie wanted to have a dramatic one-on-one confrontation between its two leads but the writer should have come up with a justification for it.
Was Delahunt another informant? The police identified him as an undercover cop after his body was found. Costello said that was a lie but was it? Delahunt being an informant would explain why he didn’t tell the others that Costigan was an informant after he figured it out before he died. And there would be a symmetry in Costigan finding out about a second informant right before his death just as Sullivan would later do.
Minor question: Was there some subtle reference I missed about the man and the woman Costello and French killed early in the movie? They were apparently killed as part of the conflict between Costello’s gang and the Providence mafia. But that point would have been clearer if they had killed two people who looked like mafiosi. Did they have Costello shoot a woman in order to make him look more evil at the expense of confusing the plot? Or was there something I missed?
Don’t get me wrong. Overall, I feel it was a great movie. But I wish they had put a little more effort into tightening up the script and eliminating these distracting plotholes.
My only nitpick with the movie is that they didn’t use Pink Floyd’s original recording of “Comfortably Numb”