“I Know Nothing About Martin Scorsese”: This is a must-see movie for starters

If you saw Assassins of the Moon in the cinema and it was your first Martin Scorsese film, if you ended up never giving this director a chance or if you think that his films are not for you, I will try to convince you that you should start his filmography with a feature film that will step into his world. I think the best: The Departed, released in November 2006.

If you want to start with the best Scorsese in the audience’s opinion, this is it!

Young cop Billy Costigan (Leonardo DiCaprio), from a poor neighborhood in Boston, has infiltrated the gang of Irish underworld godfather Frank Costello (Jack Nicholson). At the same time, Colin Sullivan (Matt Damon), a member of the special police force responsible for eliminating Costello, is secretly working on The Godfather. But when the latter realizes that his gang has been infiltrated, he asks Colin to find the mole and Billy needs to be more careful…

First, I’ll get the cliché out of the way: yes, it’s very well acted, the casting is incredible, it’s well directed, and Jack Nicholson worked on his character (which was a fortune in those years). You get used to it quickly: Scorsese knows what he wants from his actors and listens to their suggestions.

But why do I consider Scorsese’s best film to be his discovery of cinema? Perhaps because it’s a thriller, a genre in which the director has excelled over the years, but which is less enamored with the underworld than Goodfellas or Casino. On the other hand, we find the usual cold and merciless violence of all his cinema, and if it worked for you in The Departed, it will appear in all his subsequent films.

Then because I’ve never seen Scorsese have so much fun visually. For example, we can repeatedly see the presence of an “X” in the field in the parameter, indicating that the characters are “marked” (as per fate, we mentioned earlier). A motif the film-loving filmmaker borrowed from Howard Hawks’ Scarface, who had already used it.

It is also a film of cynicism and darkness that contrasts with Scorsese’s other feature films. Unlike his other thrillers, where the villains are instantly identifiable, The Departed contains its share of revelations and immerses the viewer in all human complexity, blurring the lines between good and evil, often too stark, especially in American cinema. And what a good feeling!

In Scorsese, darkness is often contrasted with the light brought by religion or the sword of fate. The latter is more prominent in The Departed, but I won’t spoil the plot of the film for you.

The Departed questions the notion of morality, in a world where loyalty and betrayal intertwine, with characters moving from one to the other with a rather disturbing lack of morality or guilt, but makes its world believable and realistic (despite perhaps a slight increase in violence).

I also like that this realism comes from the lack of voice acting, although typical of Scorsese’s thrillers, and even better: it allows you to get more into this somewhat dense plot.

Because yes, some critics criticized the film for having too many subplots: I disagree. The complexity added to a fairly simple scenario makes it possible to give it depth to avoid being another deadpan infiltration movie and gives substance to the characters, allowing us to think we know them before they reveal themselves to us. we.

Scorsese is primarily interested in character trajectories, regardless of whether the initial theme can be summed up in a subway ticket. On the contrary: how to go beyond the marked genre? How to Create a Biopic That Stands Out: Choose Black and White (Raging Bull). How to Rewrite Period Disorder: Through the Eyes of a Man Who Changes (Taxi Driver) and How to Tell an Infiltration Film Another Way: By Granting Multiple Levels of Understanding.

These are all elements that make The Departed, for me, the best Scorsese I’ve ever discovered in his vast and grandiose filmography.