"The Departed" (2006)

The Departed is a 2006 American crime thriller film directed by Martin Scorsese, set in Boston and featuring the city's landscape, institutions, and criminal underworld. The film stars Leonardo DiCaprio, Matt Damon, Jack Nicholson, and Mark Wahlberg, and it became one of the most widely discussed cinematic portrayals of Boston, drawing international attention to the city's geography and culture. The narrative centers on an undercover police officer and a gangster who have infiltrated each other's organizations, creating a cat-and-mouse dynamic that unfolds across Boston's neighborhoods and iconic locations. Released on October 6, 2006, the film won four Academy Awards at the 79th Academy Awards ceremony in February 2007, including Best Picture and Best Director for Scorsese, his first win in that category after five prior nominations.

Plot

Billy Costigan (Leonardo DiCaprio), a young Massachusetts State Police cadet with family ties to South Boston's criminal world, is recruited by Captain Queenan (Martin Sheen) and Sergeant Dignam (Mark Wahlberg) to go undercover inside the organization run by Irish-American crime boss Frank Costello (Jack Nicholson). Costigan earns Costello's trust over a period of years, living under his assumed criminal identity while relaying intelligence to his handlers. Simultaneously, Colin Sullivan (Matt Damon), a protégé Costello placed in the Massachusetts State Police years earlier, rises through the ranks of the Special Investigations Unit and begins feeding information back to Costello's organization.

When both the State Police and Costello's crew independently discover that a mole exists within their respective organizations, Costigan and Sullivan are each tasked with identifying the other. Both men operate under mounting psychological pressure, each aware that discovery means death. Their paths intersect through Madolyn Madden (Vera Farmiga), a police psychiatrist who becomes romantically involved with Sullivan while counseling Costigan professionally. The film's final act brings the two parallel investigations into direct collision, culminating in a sequence of violent confrontations that resolves the central tension at considerable cost to nearly every character involved.

History

The film's development began when Warner Bros. and Brad Pitt's production company Plan B Entertainment acquired the rights to the 2002 Hong Kong film Infernal Affairs, which served as the source material for the American adaptation. Martin Scorsese was selected to direct the project. Screenwriter William Monahan adapted the Hong Kong source material to fit a Boston setting, introducing references to local organized crime history and incorporating the Massachusetts State Police as a central institution in the narrative. The original Infernal Affairs was set within the Hong Kong Police Force and the Triads; Monahan's principal structural change was to transplant that dynamic into the Irish-American criminal ecosystem of South Boston, grounding characters in a specific regional class and ethnic identity that gave the story a distinct texture. Principal photography ran from October 2004 through January 2005, predominantly in the Boston area, with a reported production budget of approximately $90 million.

The casting process brought together a distinguished ensemble. Leonardo DiCaprio was cast as Billy Costigan, the undercover officer embedded in the Irish-American criminal organization, while Matt Damon played Colin Sullivan, the mole planted within the Massachusetts State Police. Jack Nicholson portrayed Frank Costello, the crime boss who leads the South Boston criminal organization, in a role that drew comparisons to real-life South Boston crime figure Whitey Bulger, though the filmmakers created a wholly fictional character. Nicholson reportedly brought significant improvisational energy to the set, devising props and physical business for Costello that were not scripted, including a sequence involving a dildo and a flashlight that Scorsese retained in the final cut. The supporting cast included Mark Wahlberg as the sharp-tongued Sergeant Dignam, a role that earned him an Academy Award nomination for Best Supporting Actor. Vera Farmiga played Madolyn Madden, the police psychiatrist whose relationships with both protagonists give the film an emotional through-line beyond the thriller mechanics. Alec Baldwin, Martin Sheen, and Anthony Anderson also appeared in substantial supporting roles that contributed to the film's ensemble texture.

The film was released on October 6, 2006. It earned approximately $132 million domestically and $290 million worldwide against its $90 million production budget, a strong commercial performance that reinforced its awards-season momentum. At the 79th Academy Awards, the film won Best Picture, Best Director for Scorsese, Best Adapted Screenplay for Monahan, and Best Film Editing for editor Thelma Schoonmaker. The directing win was broadly received as recognition of a sustained body of work, given that Scorsese had been nominated for Best Director five previous times—for Raging Bull (1980), The Last Temptation of Christ (1988), Goodfellas (1990), Gangs of New York (2002), and The Aviator (2004)—without winning.

Critical reception was strong. Roger Ebert awarded the film four stars, writing that Scorsese "re-engages with crime on a more human level" and describing it as one of his best films in years. The film holds a 91% approval rating on Rotten Tomatoes based on reviews aggregated from major critics, with the consensus praising its performances, direction, and tension-driven screenplay. On Metacritic, the film holds a score of 85 out of 100 based on 40 critic reviews, indicating universal acclaim by that publication's standards.

Adaptation from Infernal Affairs

William Monahan's screenplay preserved the core architecture of Infernal Affairs—two moles working in opposite directions simultaneously—while substantially reworking the cultural and psychological texture of the story. Where the Hong Kong film treated its protagonists with a degree of melancholy restraint, Monahan's script introduced profanity-laden dialogue, explicit class consciousness, and a sustained engagement with Irish-American Catholic identity that has no equivalent in the source material. The Boston setting allowed Monahan, himself a Massachusetts native, to embed the story in a world of specific streets, accents, and institutional grievances rather than a generalized urban environment. Monahan has spoken in interviews about drawing on his own familiarity with Boston's neighborhoods and the city's documented history of organized crime and police corruption to build out details that the original film left abstract.

The ending of The Departed diverges significantly from Infernal Affairs, which closed on an ambiguous note that left the surviving mole's fate unresolved. Monahan and Scorsese pursued a more definitive resolution that critics have interpreted variously as nihilistic and as a form of moral accounting. The choice generated considerable discussion in film criticism circles about the obligations of American crime cinema toward narrative closure and the degree to which the remake improved upon or complicated its source.

Awards and Accolades

Beyond its four Academy Awards, The Departed received broad recognition from other major awards bodies during the 2006–07 season. The film won the Golden Globe Award for Best Motion Picture – Drama and Best Director for Scorsese at the 64th Golden Globe Awards. The Writers Guild of America awarded Monahan its prize for Adapted Screenplay. The film received five BAFTA nominations, including Best Film and Best Director. The Screen Actors Guild nominated the ensemble cast for Outstanding Performance by a Cast in a Motion Picture. Mark Wahlberg's Supporting Actor nominations at both the Academy Awards and the Screen Actors Guild Awards represented a significant career milestone for the Boston-born actor, whose earlier work had not generated equivalent awards attention.

Culture

The film had considerable cultural significance in Boston, presenting a dramatized but immersive portrayal of the city's Irish-American community, organized crime history, and institutional structures. The narrative draws obliquely from Boston's real criminal history, particularly the activities of organized crime figures active in the latter part of the twentieth century, though the filmmakers created fictional characters rather than direct biographical portraits. Frank Costello's character drew consistent comparisons to Whitey Bulger, the South Boston crime boss who ran the Winter Hill Gang and was later convicted of involvement in eleven murders. Bulger's documented cooperation with the FBI as an informant—a relationship that allowed him to operate for decades while law enforcement pursued his rivals—mirrored the film's central themes of institutional corruption and betrayal with unusual precision, adding a layer of real-world resonance for Boston audiences familiar with that history. The parallels were noted widely in Boston media at the time of the film's release, though Scorsese and Nicholson consistently described Costello as a composite rather than a portrait.

The film reinforced certain cultural perceptions of Boston, including its Irish-American demographic composition, the prominence of its police institutions, and the intertwining of crime and corruption within city life. Its dialogue, heavily accented and filled with local colloquialisms, contributed to widespread cultural associations between Boston speech patterns and the broader American understanding of regional accent and vernacular. Not all Boston residents welcomed the portrayal uncritically. Some commentators argued that the film leaned into stereotypes about South Boston and its working-class Irish-American population, presenting a community with a complex history primarily as a backdrop for crime drama, and that the South Boston of the film bore limited resemblance to the neighborhood's actual social texture by the mid-2000s, a period when the area was experiencing significant demographic and economic change.

The film's release generated substantial local media coverage and public discussion. Bostonians recognized numerous locations throughout the film, and the production's release sparked conversations about the city's relationship with organized crime, police corruption, and the historical tensions between law enforcement and criminal organizations that had shaped the city's recent past. The portrayal of the Massachusetts State Police, while fictional, became part of a broader cultural discourse about the institution's history and public standing. The film also influenced subsequent representations of Boston in television and film, with productions including The Town (2010) and the television series Brotherhood drawing on visual and narrative templates that The Departed helped establish.

Geography

The Departed made extensive use of Boston's geographical features and landmarks, with filming locations distributed across multiple neighborhoods and institutional settings. South Boston, known locally as Southie, serves as the primary setting for the Irish-American community and provides the cultural and geographical center for the criminal organization the film portrays. Scenes were filmed in residential areas, bars, and street locations throughout the neighborhood that are immediately recognizable to Boston residents. The neighborhood's working-class row houses, corner bars, and tight street grid gave the film a visual texture rooted in genuine place rather than studio fabrication.

Boston Harbor and the waterfront appear throughout the film, with sequences shot near the Atlantic Avenue corridor and pier areas that serve as backdrops for several significant plot developments. The South Boston waterfront, then still largely industrial, provided settings for confrontations and exchanges that required isolated, open spaces near water—a geography that matched the film's need for locations where characters could meet without witnesses. The downtown financial district also features, its glass and steel architecture contrasting sharply with the residential streetscapes where much of the criminal underworld operates. Charlestown, another historically Irish-American neighborhood with its own organized crime history, appears in additional sequences that deepen the film's geographical immersion. The Bunker Hill Monument and other neighborhood landmarks appear in background and establishing shots that reinforce the film's sense of place within Boston's historical and architectural context.

Cambridge locations, including areas near Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, appear in scenes involving the protagonists' educational and institutional affiliations, establishing the State Police characters as operating within a world of credentialed institutions rather than purely street-level law enforcement. The Massachusetts State Police barracks in Framingham stood in for several interior scenes depicting the law enforcement side of the story. While the film captures the geography of Greater Boston with considerable authenticity, certain scenes were also filmed on sets and in locations outside Massachusetts, including production facilities in New York, for practical reasons related to scheduling and cost.

Attractions

The film's success created new tourism interest in Boston's locations and landmarks, as visitors began seeking out sites featured in the movie. Bars and residential streets in South Boston became points of interest for cinema tourists wanting to experience locations where major scenes were set. The L Street Tavern in South Boston, which appears in the film, became one of the more frequently visited locations by tourists in the years following the film's release. Boston Harbor took on new cultural significance as audiences connected the real waterfront to dramatic sequences filmed there, and tour operators incorporated references to filming locations into their offerings.

The film contributed to a broader recognition of Boston as a capable cinematic location, encouraging future productions to film in the city and prompting increased investment in local film infrastructure. Massachusetts already offered a film tax credit program designed to attract productions, and The Departed's success helped demonstrate the state's appeal to major studios and directors. The state's film tax credit, which offers a 25% production credit on qualifying in-state expenditures, saw increased utilization in the years following the film's release as productions ranging from independent films to studio features followed the path that The Departed had helped establish. Tour operators developed themed experiences allowing visitors to connect multiple locations from the production, contributing to the cultural economy surrounding cinema-related tourism in the city. The film's representation of Boston's architecture—particularly its mix of historic neighborhoods, harbor waterfront, and modern commercial districts—became part of how the city marketed itself to filmmakers and visitors in subsequent years.

Notable People

Martin Scorsese brought decades of cinematic achievement to the project. His involvement elevated the production's prestige and attracted significant industry attention from the start of development. For Scorsese