Immediately after seeing The Departed for the first time my impression of the film was very positive. I was not as engaged by the plot as I expected to be, but that was offset by the surprisingly well drawn an interesting characters. Not the best movie of the year, I thought, but a very good one.

Than, after I few minutes, I got this big, silly grin on my face, as several scenes from the movie started popping in my head.

Fifteen minutes after that I already wanted to see the film again.

The film was better the second time. Not only was I happy to see the scenes that I already loved, I also discovered things to admire in many scenes which hadn’t really made an impression in me initially. And freed from the expectations I had brought with me the first time I was able to like the movie for what it was, instead of comparing it to what I thought it was going to be.

The thing is, The Departed has more plot than most of Scorsese’s movies, much of it taken from the original Infernal Affairs, the Hong Kong movie upon which The Departed was based. But the film is not about the plot, it is about the characters. It’s about who they want to be, who they pretend to be and who they actually are. And, of course, about the conflict of these three things.

The movie’s main plot device, having a cop infiltrated in the underworld and a criminal infiltrated in the police, highlights this conflict. The characters of Billy Costigan (Leonardo DiCrapio) and Colin Sullivan (Matt Damon) have to lie and be deceitful constantly in order to maintain the facade they have built for themselves. However, this is a game we all play to some extent, pretending we are someone we are not exactly, hiding the ugly parts of ourselves, perhaps lying just a little bit in order to keep our relationships running smoothly. To maintain “an even keel”, as one character says. So, although what these characters live through is extreme, it’s still relevant to all of us, and we identify with it, to some extent.

The way the two main characters feel about the their ordeal is somewhat different. DiCaprio plays a character that had a poor father and a wealthy mother. They were divorced during most of his childhood, so he had to split his life between two worlds, never being really comfortable in any of them. And although he loved his parents he is not so crazy about the rest of his family, which was composed of criminals, in his fathers side, and of cold, distant and judgemental people in his mother’s side.

The character doesn’t really want to go back to his father’s poor neighborhood and mingle with the kind of people that most of his family were. And once he is in there he lives in constant fear that he is going to be discovered and killed. And all the violence in which he has to participate disturbs him to no end.

So why does he do it? In part because he is lost. He doesn’t know who he is and what he wants to be. In part because of a desire to somewhat clean his family name by being someone better, someone who puts the bad guys in jail. And in part in order to try to live up to the man his father was, the only non criminal in a family that was deep into the underworld.

The Matt Damon character is very different. He comes from the projects and from a poor family, but he doesn’t want to stay there. And Frank Costello (Jack Nicholson) becomes like a family to him at an early age. And even more than that, Frank is someone who tells him he can be something more. He doesn’t have to simply be a product of his environment. If he really is willing, he can take what he wants and make his environments a product of him.

In many ways the Damon character likes the person he is pretending to be better than he likes the person he actually is. He likes the prestige associated with not only being a cop, but being a cop in a elite unit. He wants to get those promotions. He gets a fancy apartment as part of an effort to be a high class citizen. He goes to law school. He look wistfully at the capitol building. And he even considers cutting ties with the underworld, moving to a new city and starting a whole new life.

But he can’t. He at one points says to his girlfriend: “ If we’re not gonna make it, it’s gotta be you that gets out, cause I’m not capable. I’m fucking Irish, I’ll deal with something being wrong for the rest of my life.“. He is talking about his relationship with her, but he could just as well be talking about his ever more dangerous relationship with Frank or about a hundred other things in his life.

Beyond the two main characters we have a plethora of supporting characters that add color to the movie. Every single person in the movie is great. Nicholson gets the most showy role, as a powerful criminal who has perhaps spent too much time in the “business”. Mark Whalberg also gets a meaty role as the constantly mad and offensive Staff Sgt. Dignam. But every other actor or actress is also great, hitting it out of the park every chance they have.

Another aspect of the movie that I feel must be mentioned is that it is very funny, especially because of it’s spicy dialog. More funny than most comedies a saw last year, actually. That is a big difference from the original Infernal Affairs, which was always ultra serious and even melodramatic. And it makes the movie better, in my opinion. It adds flavor and it makes the interactions more real. In that vein the movie also features a lot of obscenities, which make sense (you didn’t expect a bunch of macho cops and criminals to have a very clean mouth, did you?)

There are many other interesting aspects and minor themes running through The Departed which I won’t mention here. This is a film that makes full use of it’s generous running time (2:35) and packs a lot in there. Multiple viewings are almost required to get all of it.

The Departed is a gangster movie, and it is a police movie. It’s a about a cop that pretends to be a bad guy, and about a bad guy that pretends to be a cop. It is deadly serious, and hilariously funny. It’s quiet, and it’s loud. It’s about intimate relationships and it’s about broad violence. It’ about Nicholson being crazy, Leo being afraid and Damon wanting a life that he can’t have, and it’s about everybody being paranoid. It’s, in the end, a big bowl of everything sad and joyous, that makes for last year’s most fulfilling movie meal.