5 Favorite Performances in The Departed

On last week’s episode of Defector’s flagship podcast The Distraction, co-hosts Drew Magary and David Roth fielded a question from a reader about which A+ list actor has starred in the biggest number of (very bad) movies. The reader cited Alec Baldwin, and when Magary and Roth put the question to their guest Rohan Nadkarni, he posited Baldwin’s co-star from “The Departed,” Mark Wahlberg. Frankly, I’m less interested in the question itself and whether Baldwin or Wahlberg is the right answer then I am in Magary noting that Wahlberg was giving the best performance in Martin Scorsese’s Oscar-winning “The Departed” (2006). He was good, nay, great, and he was the only one of the stacked cast to score an Oscar nomination, but was he giving the best performance in “The Departed?” By way of answering, a list scribbled on a cocktail napkin at the corner bar over a lager and some peanuts.

5 Favorite Performances in The Departed

5. Martin Sheen. His fatherly affect does as much as anything to root “The Departed” to something real.

4. Kevin Corrigan. You wanna talk perfect casting? Kevin Corrigan as the coke-dealing “jerk-off cousin” is perfect casting.

3. Matt Damon. Damon is a tremendous dramatic actor, that goes without saying, yet (not so) secretly, I think he’s an even better comic actor as “True Grit” and “Ocean’s Twelve” and “The Departed” suggest. The language of the last one is almost exclusively talking shit, even his character’s first date with Vera Farmiga’s psychiatrist, and in drawing, I would imagine, from his Boston upbringing (where the movie is set), he talks shit proficiently. I’m not going to stop in the middle of this list and make another list, but if you thought about best first dates in a movie, you would not naturally think of “The Departed,” and yet, the first date between Damon and Farmiga is one of the best scenes in the movie. 

This screenshot does not do it justice.

5B.) In fact, I thought Farmiga wasn’t making the list, but that isn’t fair, especially because of the moment during the date scene when, playing a psychiatrist, remember, she momentarily tries putting Damon’s character on a figurative couch and then puts a finger to her chin just like a psychiatrist would and that little bit of physical behavior cracks me up.

2. Mark Wahlberg. Speaking of talking shit, Damon might be proficient but Wahlberg speaks it fluently. There isn’t a lot to the character, but there doesn’t have to be, it’s a true supporting turn, in many ways making the movie by merely rounding it out, showing up now and again for a profane aria, occasionally even a profane duet, like one with…

1. Alec Baldwin. Wahlberg is hilarious, I don’t dispute it, but Baldwin is mind-blowingly hilarious. It takes a lot to make me literally LOL in a movie theater and Baldwin in “The Departed” made me literally LOL in the theater at least twice. He gets some great lines, and he knocks them out of the park, but it’s more. “The Departed” does not prove all that revelatory, more just a spectacularly entertaining piece of pulp, and that’s great! Yet, if there is profundity, it is less in the themes of self-deception than in Baldwin absolutely embodying the sort of supercilious country club oaf that runs this great American horror show.