We watched The Departed last night. I thought it was pretty good as far as Hollywood goes, but there was too much “Coincidence: The Movie” about it. A quick check on Wikipedia revealed that it’s a remake of a Japanese movie Infernal Affairs (which strikes me as an awful translation for the title). The most far-fetched part is the love triangle, an aspect which appears to be absent in the original.
The James Joyce references were likewise head-scratching. Okay, first off it rubs me the wrong way when Jack Nicholson’s character is talking about the Catholic church to the boy and he says, “Non serviam” and the boy says it’s a quote from James Joyce. Close. Joyce was actually quoting Milton’s Satan from Paradise Lost but hey, whatever.
And then Marky Mark’s detective is named Dignam; Dignam is the name of the dead friend of Leopold Bloom in Ulysses. How does this blatant allusion work? You know, I can’t say. In the book, the guy’s name tends to come up when Bloom is thinking about mortality. How that fits with Marky Mark’s character, I have no idea.
Finally, there’s the title. Maybe it’s just me, but The Departed comes awfully close to Joyce’s best-known short story The Dead. Are there parallels? Not really. I mean, both the story and the movie have to do with the influences of powers unseen, but I would hate to make a case for that being the rationale for the movie’s title. The Wikipedia entry on the movie has a bit on the importance of father-son relationships, and that’s undoubtedly a main theme in Ulysses, but again, I don’t see any obvious similarities between the two. The father-son stuff in The Departed couldn’t be less like the issues in Ulysses if it tried. The same goes for the ideas about identity; the theme is present in both, but they really have nothing to do with each other.
So what does this all add up to? In my opinion, not much. It seems like maybe Scorcese was trying to make the Dantean Japanese movie into a Joycean, Bostonian one, but if that’s indeed the case, it didn’t work.
Current Mood: Fair | 
2 Comments
I just recently added this movie to my Netflix list from hearing everyone around me rave about it.
So confusing allusions and critical interpretations aside, did you actually like the flick?
Overall, yes. Generally speaking, I’m a tough critic when it comes to movies and The Departed was several notches better than most of the tripe spewed out of Hollywood. There are holes in the story and too much of the plot has to do with cell phone usage, but I can forgive minor transgressions for what was overall an enjoyable movie-watching experience.