Let’s state this up front. The Departed is Martin Scorsese’s best movie in a long time. Yes, it depends on how you define “best,” but for me it is his best since the terribly underrated Bringing Out the Dead, which is the last Scorsese movie that feels” like a Scorsese movie rather than some heartless Oscar whoring prestige production.

That being said, here are some qualifications. The middle drags. The final shoot out goes “a body too far” (explanation to follow). And I hated the rat on the rail in the last shot. What the hell did it mean? What does it mean? The film is also more straightforward than most Scorsese movies. And despite what Michael Ballhaus says, there is more violence in The Departed than in Infernal Affairs.Still, it is Scorsese’s “late masterpiece,” as they say in the quarterlies. And surprisingly, it is as good as the source film, 2002’s Infernal Affairs, though there are some key differences. Infernal Affairs may be more psychologically nuanced (the Matt Damon equivalent discovers that he likes being a cop), but The Departed sports a terrific cast, well used, an intelligent script, non-stop music; it is a Scorsese buff’s wet dream.

Yet there is a strange tone of detachment that hangs over the film. It’s that unfelt glossy bloat that afflicted Gangs of New York, supposedly a life long “dream project,” and The Aviator, which felt like a job for hire. Scorsese’s last explicit job for hire, Cape Fear, was an interesting psychological study beneath its suspense surface, but has more in common with The Departed than with Aviator.

An increasingly important figure in Scorsese’s films, at least since Alice, is the unsubtle manifestation of pure irrational evil. This figure of evil, who marches through Scorsese’s films in the form of Keitel as Sport in Taxi Driver, Joe Pesci’s character in Casino, and Cutter Gangs of New York, probably has his roots in the director’s Catholicism, though external evil of this kind is not the focus or concern of the religion. Sometimes the “evil” is the central character’s divided self, such as Jake La Motta in Raging Bull, and even the shaver in the short film The Big Shave. Indeed, a tour of Scorsese’s filmography suggests that his strongest films highlight his interest in or exploration of this ominous figure and the weakest have no villain (Kundun, Aviator). An exception is Bill Cutter in Gangs. Despite Scorsese’s attention to detail, the film still feels (that is, assuming that we have all seen the ideal cut).

Yet, The Departed does go over some of the same terrain as Gangs of New York. Both are tales of a youth (Leonardo DiCaprio) going undercover to defeat a brazenly evil man who, to different degrees, knew his father. And both share an interest, a fascination, a revulsion even, for a figure of absolute evil. Nicholson’s Frank Costello is in line with Scorsese’s earlier portraits of callous gangsters who brook no dissension, be it Keitel’s uncle in Mean Streets, who insists that the epileptic Teresa is “sick in the head, or Paul Sorvino in Goodfellas. Nicholson’s addition to the template is a heightened level of scary wackiness. What’s interesting to contemplate about his character is why people love or obey him in the first place. His top aide, Mr. French (Ray Winstone), is loyal, and Damon’s character is devoted, but why? What do they get out of it, since Costello gets all the money and the girls. And despite his ferociousness, characters like DiCaprio’s, who seem to be in constant jeopardy, talk back at him. There is even an element of the Whitey Bulger case in that Costello, it turns out, is a protected FBI informant, which really pisses off Sullivan, who feels betrayed by this underhanded, behind the back self-insurance.

I was surprised by two things. One, its fidelity to the source film, and how dark some of the early shots were, in defiance of what Ballhaus said in his AC interview. There, you will recall, Ballhaus said that he complained that Infernal Affairs is too dark at times. Yet Ballhaus starts out his film, intentionally of course (to mask Nicholson’s age for scenes set 15 years earlier) with shots of the actor in dark silhouette.

In his script, William Monahan ( Kingdom of Heaven) makes two key changes. In Infernal Affairs, undercover cop Tony Leung sees a police psychiatrist who seems to know that he is an undercover cop, while gang mole Andy Lau marries an aspiring novelist, and whom he met (as seen in 2) when she was arrested for public drunkenness. In Monahan’s version, DiCaprio’s Billy Costigan and Damon’s Colin Sullivan “share” the same woman, psychiatrist Madolyn (Vera Farmiga, whom you all remember from the great Running Scared), which strikes me as a peculiarly American obsession or at least an obsession of movie makers. Second, Monahan changes Sullivan’s motivation. Lau finds that he likes being a cop, and part of the actions he takes at the end, including killing Sam, are designed to insure that he can continue to thrive as a cop.

But these are interesting variations on a great premise. And The Departed proves to be one of the few films released this year worth talking about at this length.

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