(2006) "Heaven holds the faithful departed …" Director Martin Scorsese's Academy Award-winning best picture, from William Monahan's screenplay, pits a rookie cop, Billy Costigan Jr (Leonardo DiCaprio), a mole inside a mob organization run by Frank Costello (Jack Nicholson), against fast-rising, detective officer Colin Sullivan (Matt Damon), Costello's rat on the Massachusetts state-police force.

Be sure to have your transfer pass when you board this rapid-transit movie through a maze of deception and self-deceiving with its intricate twists, turns, and double backing. Like two vehicles racing through streets, often just missing each other at intersections, Sullivan and Costigan (Sorsese's camera taking turns watching each man's reactions to the increasing intensity of the stress - Colin cool and self-confident while Billy becomes more and more agitated) race toward their eventual collision.

Only two men know about Billy's undercover role - Capt Charles Queenan (Martin Sheen) and Staff Sgt Dignam (Mark Wahlberg), whose grilling of Billy ("Why are you pretending to be a cop?") convinces both of his reliability - having the rookie kicked out of the "Staties" as unfit for the force and passed through prison to give his identity credibility.

Once Billy's back in the old neighborhood, he connects with a cousin (with the exception of his parents, both deceased, Billy's uncles and cousins had criminal associations) to deal drugs. Eventually he makes Costello's acquaintance, along with Arnold French (Ray Winston), Frank's most trusted accomplice; they make certain - painfully breaking open his cast on a broken wrist - Billy's not compromised.

"I don't want to be a product of my environment," Frank said to the young Colin, whom he mentored: "I want the environment to be a product of me." Coincidentally, Colin's romantic involvement with "Little Miss Freud," Madolyn (Vera Farmiga), a psychiatrist whose clients are cops and crooks, is Billy's only personal contact (other than phone conversations with Queenan) with anyone not in the mob (part of his parole arrangement, though she knows nothing about Billy's not being a criminal). While Madolyn and Colin move toward a permanent relationship, Billy on the margins (after a threatening outburst during a session, no longer officially under her supervision) holds on to her as a lifeline to the outside.

As Colin with his straight-arrow, clean record - getting special access because events strongly indicate a spy's within the SIU - deftly weasels his way toward finding out who's the plant inside Costello's gang, Billy, desperate for his handlers to make their case, feeling the pressure closing in, fending off suspicions of being the fink with every ounce of street-smarts cunning, discovers Frank's secret of apparent immunity.

While everybody's mouth expels obscenities, the guns expectorate profanities of death, exterminating most of the principal cast.

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Copyright © 2009 Patrick Ivers. All rights reserved.
Reproduced with the permission of the copyright holder.

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