Film: Crowd-Pleaser

MARTIN SCORSESE has spent the 15 years since his career high, Goodfellas, making movies that consistently fascinate and just as consistently miss the mark. There are pleasures to be found in nearly every one of his recent films, but they’ve displayed the mix of hubris and fastidiousness that belongs to an artist working at the height of his ambitions but not the height of his powers. Scorsese has veered from the bloated overreach of Gangs of New York and Casino to the sterile perfectionism of Kundun or The Age of Innocence; his most recent effort, the Howard Hughes biopic The Aviator, was gorgeous, sweeping, and largely pointless, an epic treatment of an inconsequential life.

Now comes another Scorsese-Leonardo DiCaprio collaboration, The Departed, a remake of the Hong Kong classic Infernal Affairs, with the original’s dueling double agents-one an undercover cop who’s infiltrated the mob, the other a mob mole embedded in the police department—transplanted from Asia to Irish Boston.

About the Author

Ross Douthat

Ross Douthat is a former National Review contributing editor.

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MARTIN SCORSESE has spent the 15 years since his career high, Goodfellas, making movies that consistently fascinate and just as consistently miss the mark. There are pleasures to be found in nearly every one of his recent films, but they’ve displayed the mix of hubris and fastidiousness that belongs to an artist working at the height of his ambitions but not the height of his powers. Scorsese has veered from the bloated overreach of Gangs of New York and Casino to the sterile perfectionism of Kundun or The Age of Innocence; his most recent effort, the Howard Hughes biopic The Aviator, was gorgeous, sweeping, and largely pointless, an epic treatment of an inconsequential life.

Now comes another Scorsese-Leonardo DiCaprio collaboration, The Departed, a remake of the Hong Kong classic Infernal Affairs, with the original’s dueling double agents-one an undercover cop who’s infiltrated the mob, the other a mob mole embedded in the police department—transplanted from Asia to Irish Boston.