Scorsese in Sula

There is always something odd about watching a quintessential U.S. American movie in a ridiculously overdone movie theater in a foreign country, even in a nation as shamelessly imitative and adoring of gringolandia as Honduras. City Mall Cinema features, in each of its six individual theaters, a screen at least three stories tall, plush reclining seats with broad armrests and more legroom in front than in the business class section of British Airways, and diminutive, furtive ushers who patrol the aisles and cheerfully bust careless patrons for tossing their empty popcorn cartons and candy wrappers on the floor (a rare instance of no-litter enforcement in Honduras).

The latest Martin Scorsese flick, "The Departed," was shown there for a two-week run, and when I first noticed this fact listed in the right-wing but widely available national newspaper "La Prensa," I practically yelped with joy. Cinemas in Honduras generally only show the most vulgar, shallow, crassly entertaining for entertainment's sake Hollywood blockbusters, indicating that Honduran moviegoers are just as lowbrow as U.S. ones. I had heard "The Departed" features a bitingly seedy script, ace performances by a slew of mainstream male actors, a strong sense of place with its kaleidoscope of Boston locales, and, well, it was a Scorsese flick. I have always told myself that every movie he makes is at least worth watching once. Some of his films, most notably Taxi Driver, Raging Bull, and Goodfellas, count among the landmark works of 20th Century American cinema (although my favorite two Scorsese flicks, "The Color of Money" and "Bringing out the Dead," received scant critical and popular attention).

Seeing "The Departed" in Honduras could make my life complete, I had no doubt. So, one afternoon I caught the express bus (or rapidito) for the always visually compelling forty-minute ride to SPS, with my amigos Jon Barber and Fermin. Both knew little about the movie and thus had no foreshadowing of the gritty, invective-laden bloodbath they were about to witness. I was just thankful that our little group was all guys, because this sounded like it would be the ultimate "dick flick."

The best movies are so hypnotic during the viewing of them that you can completely lose your sense of place and be transported utterly to the ephemeral realm that the movie represents. From the first scene of "The Departed," in which Jack Nicholson's savage mob boss ignorantly declares, on top of documentary footage of seventies race riots in Boston, that black people have never learned that if "you want something in America, you have to just take it," I was hooked. For the next two and a half hours, I learned to appreciate Leonardo DiCaprio more than I ever had-there is a powerful actor underneath that pretty boy facade. My favorite character, one of the few who stayed clean amidst the enveloping moral cesspool all around, was Mark Wahlberg's pugilistic, tauntingly witty detective. Watching cops trade insults about each other mother's back and forth, using real-sounding Bahston accents, was great fun. The violence in this movie was so pervasive that it was almost over the top, and with any director other than Scorsese at the helm, it would probably have started to seem gratuitous. But the man is making a larger point with all the point-blank assassinations and sudden lunges with fists flying-that men are essentially always just a step away from letting their basest impulses take over.

The main characters in my favorite Scorsese flicks are men caught in the throes of a nagging moral dilemma, trying to define, in the terms dictated by their life circumstances, what it means to do right. They torture themselves with this inner battle in some cases and come to no firm resolution; in others, the decision is made definitively at some point, and there is no turning back. Scorsese's heroes and villains are generally either perpetrators of horrific violence, or else mired in an atmosphere of violence (including the Dalai Lama in "Kundun," fleeing the violent invasion of Tibet by the Chinese army). The mobsters in "The Departed" kill because they have evil in their hearts, because the temptations of reckless greed have ruined their souls. The cops in the film (except for Matt Damon's mole) kill because they believe that action will help set the world right again- after all, who would miss a character like the one played by Jack Nicholson, a rogue whose mother would not even love him? The action and pacing of "The Departed" are so edge-of-seat chock full of unexpected twists and turns that it is not until the last scene that the madness let loose in the narrative is put to rest, for good. And even though the last scene is a gory murder, you will find yourself cheering (of course I am not going to give the ending away here).

Go and see "The Departed." When I came out of the theater and into the glittering artificial lights of overpriced boutiques, surrounded by Hondurans dressed way better than those I know in Cofradia, I felt a bit disoriented. And, after seeing so much violence on screen, when walking towards the bus stop down dark, vaguely menacing boulevards, I kept turning my head and looking back over my shoulder, expecting some Irish gangster assassin to jump out from behind a closed baleada restaurant and put a couple of slugs behind my ear...