“When you can assume that your audience holds the same beliefs as you do, you can relax a little and use more normal ways of talking to it; when you have to assume that it does not, then you have to make your vision apparent by shock — to the hard of hearing you shout, and for the almost blind you draw large and startling figures.” — Flannery O’Connor, “The Fiction Writer and His Country”

Any time Martin Scorsese unveils a new film, it should be a cause for celebration among cineastes everywhere, although the most frequent reaction is mild-interest-to-indifference. Scorsese is a favorite of critics, who generally (though not always) want to be challenged and provoked, to be jolted out of the comfort provided by the average, cliché-ridden action fest, often at the expense of noting and praising the occasional well-made entertainment. Most audiences don’t want these things from a movie, especially as movie-going becomes more expensive: they want good guys and bad guys, plenty of familiar plot developments, funny dialogue whether it’s motivated or not, and an ending that leaves them feeling good about themselves and the world. 

But Marty don’t play that game, never has, so it’s a bit of a shock that The Departed, his latest masterpiece of twisted loyalties and brutal psychology in the underworld, had the biggest opening weekend of any Scorsese Picture since he started making features thirty-four years ago. In one sense this is good news, because it means Marty will get to make another big ticket movie, but the reason the film opened well was not the Scorsese name in the promos. For the core audience of young people who buy most of the tickets, it was the promise of seeing Leonardo DiCaprio and Matt Damon, two major movie stars just now entering full maturity for all the right reasons, paired together in a knock-down-drag-out action film, and for everyone else it was the promise of seeing Jack Nicholson, wild-eyed grand master of all scenery gluttons, once more enveloping an entire movie in his warm, psychotic embrace and making Over the Top seem like the highest of performance arts.

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