If you haven't yet seen Martin Scorsese's Oscar-nominated "The Departed," turn the page. This story is a discussion of the film's ending and thus is full of spoilers.
February 7, 2007 (Press Release) --
''Wake up and smell the coffin.'' Venomously delivered by Jack Nicholson's character in ''The Departed,'' this line was cut from the film but remains a deadly wake-up call for an unsettling number of the characters. Now that ''The Departed'' is nominated for five Oscars, including best picture, it's worth discussing the most troubling part of Martin Scorsese's morbid crime drama: the ending.
Scorsese finishes his tale of false identities and informants in a sudden, bloody fury, making the deleted ''coffin'' statement the ''definitive line of the movie,'' according to screenwriter William Monahan, who's nominated for best adapted screenplay.
''Nobody gets forgiven in this one. Nobody!'' Scorsese said, reveling in the movie's gory ending.
A remake of the 2002 Hong Kong thriller ''Infernal Affairs,'' ''The Departed'' draws heavily from the original. They both center on mirror-image moles: a crooked cop (Matt Damon) spying for the gang of Frank Costello (Nicholson), and an undercover officer (Leonardo DiCaprio) deeply embedded in the gang.
The final scenes of ''The Departed'' make a notable addition to the denouement of ''Infernal Affairs'' -- adding one more murderous twist to a film already full of them. Then, on the last shot, the camera pans away from the final corpse, catching a lone, symbolic rat scampering through the final frames.
''A lot of people don't like the rat at the end,'' says Monahan, 46, who was a successful novelist (Light House: A Trifle) and journalist (as an editor at Spy magazine) before dedicating himself to screenwriting. ''On the Jacobean stage, you'd have this tremendous bloodbath at the end of a work, and then the next thing that would happen is the clown would come out. And everyone in the theater would laugh and it would take the edge off the intense experience.
''I tell you, people would leave the theater feeling a lot different [about "The Departed"] if it wasn't for that rat,'' he says.
The DVD for ''The Departed'' is due out Feb. 13, including deleted scenes like Costello's ''coffin'' line.
Source: http://www.msn.com
POSTED BY JAKE COYLE
Scorsese finishes his tale of false identities and informants in a sudden, bloody fury, making the deleted ''coffin'' statement the ''definitive line of the movie,'' according to screenwriter William Monahan, who's nominated for best adapted screenplay.
''Nobody gets forgiven in this one. Nobody!'' Scorsese said, reveling in the movie's gory ending.
A remake of the 2002 Hong Kong thriller ''Infernal Affairs,'' ''The Departed'' draws heavily from the original. They both center on mirror-image moles: a crooked cop (Matt Damon) spying for the gang of Frank Costello (Nicholson), and an undercover officer (Leonardo DiCaprio) deeply embedded in the gang.
The final scenes of ''The Departed'' make a notable addition to the denouement of ''Infernal Affairs'' -- adding one more murderous twist to a film already full of them. Then, on the last shot, the camera pans away from the final corpse, catching a lone, symbolic rat scampering through the final frames.
''A lot of people don't like the rat at the end,'' says Monahan, 46, who was a successful novelist (Light House: A Trifle) and journalist (as an editor at Spy magazine) before dedicating himself to screenwriting. ''On the Jacobean stage, you'd have this tremendous bloodbath at the end of a work, and then the next thing that would happen is the clown would come out. And everyone in the theater would laugh and it would take the edge off the intense experience.
''I tell you, people would leave the theater feeling a lot different [about "The Departed"] if it wasn't for that rat,'' he says.
The DVD for ''The Departed'' is due out Feb. 13, including deleted scenes like Costello's ''coffin'' line.
Source: http://www.msn.com
POSTED BY JAKE COYLE
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