Review: Scorsese comes out blazing in brutal, brilliant 'The Departed'

WHERE: Theaters everywhere.

WHEN: Opens today.

RATING: R for strong brutal violence, pervasive language, some strong sexual content and drug material.

RUNNING TIME: 149 minutes.

BOTTOM LINE: Martin Scorsese returns to the mean streets of crime and punishment, and creates a masterpiece in blood.

After making overstuffed epics about Howard Hughes and 19th-century New York, director Martin Scorsese is back where he belongs in "The Departed": getting down and dirty on the thin, blurred line between cops and crooks.

Not since "GoodFellas" has Scorsese hit so hard, so precisely and with such restraint of obvious flash, drawing out the moral dilemmas in the gritty worlds of organized crime and the police trying to bring them down.

Billy Costigan (Leonardo DiCaprio) and Colin Sullivan (Matt Damon) come from South Boston, and both trained, separately, in the police academy to join the Massachusetts State Police. But their careers go in different directions. Costigan, fighting down his family's ties to Southie criminals, is given a tough undercover assignment to infiltrate the syndicate of crime boss Frank Costello (Jack Nicholson). Sullivan becomes a detective in state police's Special Investigations Unit, tracking Costello and his crew - though Sullivan is also secretly working as a mole for Costello, tipping the mobster to the police's every move.

Their ties to Costello, who is as charismatic as he is brutal, aren't the only thing Costigan and Sullivan have in common. Both are making time with Madolyn (Vera Farmiga), a police psychiatrist who becomes Sullivan's girlfriend - even as she becomes attracted to Costigan and becomes suspicious of Sullivan's behavior.

Scorsese, working from a tense script by William Monahan ("Kingdom of Heaven") that adapts the acclaimed 2002 Hong Kong drama "Infernal Affairs," gets us breathing-down-the-neck close to Costigan and Sullivan as they navigate their double lives. Costello's underground is just as labyrinthine, and nearly as deadly, as the circle of state police - Mark Wahlberg as a tough-talking sergeant, Alec Baldwin as a hard-driving SIU captain, and Martin Sheen as Costigan's fatherly captain - through which Sullivan navigates. These opposing sides of the law are but two sides of the same coin, Scorsese suggests, each equally disdainful of "rats" in their ranks and each likely to bend the rules as it suits their goals. As Costello tells the teen Sullivan early on, "Cops or criminals - when you're facing a loaded gun, what's the difference?"

In an ensemble of great actors (including Ray Winstone as Costello's right-hand thug), Damon and DiCaprio make a ferocious double act. They work off each other dynamically, even though they share few scenes together (Scorsese's intercutting is seamless, with all credit to his longtime editor, Thelma Schoonmaker). Both actors generate strong sparks with Farmiga, who should now be able to retire her title as the best American actress nobody's heard of.

The Damon/DiCaprio pairing is so powerful that Nicholson, for a change, has to break a sweat to steal the movie from them. But Costello is too rich a character to be denied, a font of philosophical musings that becomes a geyser of explosive violence.

And Scorsese takes no easy outs in "The Departed." There are no sentimental moments, no sparks of false hope, no sense of relief from the violent worlds in which Costigan and Sullivan must live. Only the title characters, the dearly departed, are likely to know peace in Scorsese's intense cityscape.

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* SEAN P. MEANS can be reached at movies@sltrib.com or 801-257-8602. Send comments about this review to livingeditor@sltrib.com.