Blue collar angst

As he did in I ::Heart:: Huckabees, Mark Wahlberg in The Departed, in a quiet, persistent way, steers the audience's attention away from the younger and better-looking leading men and women. Look at the frame I've selected, emblematic in a way: a ramrod-stiff Leo DiCaprio, his character uncomfortable in the first pair of decent JC Penny's khakis he's ever owned, the actor himself trying to overlook the fact that he hasn't worn pants this mousy since his high school graduation; and, facing him, Wahlberg, shrunken in an equally awful grey tie and purplish shirt, yet so present, comfortable in a way that DiCaprio isn't and may never be. Not for the first time, we wonder whether it had occurred to the talented director to switch roles. Called upon to project how bullishness can shift into a rudimentary moral sense, DiCaprio is as blank as Ray Liotta in Goodfellas. We don't accept him for one moment as a mole. Watch him as he listens to Jack Nicholson's florid arias: Goddamn, he thinks, look what you're allowed to get away with. It's enough, I suppose, that Scorsese cast Matt Damon as his doppelganger -- that other youngish thirtysomething actor whose acting is akin to observing a glass of ice-cold water sweat on a balcony. The friction DiCaprio's priggishness and Damon's almost fey professionalism (abetted by Thelma Schoonmaker's quicksilver editing) trigger odd crosscurrents. Does Scorsese believe that DiCaprio is A Good Man Inside or an ambitious cipher like Damon, who'd gladly give his colleagues the shaft for the sake of a promotion?

Back to Wahlberg: he played what is essentially the DiCaprio part in James Gray's The Yards (2000), the film's hypertrophied realism stifled the arc of his performance; you could feel him wanting to deepen the material beyond its pseudo-mimetic recreation of the blue collar crime world. But you understood that something was at stake. Listen to him snarl, "Who am I? I'm the guy who does his job. You must be the other guy" to a livid DiCaprio* in The Departed; there's a sliver of envy embedded in what is an otherwise pedestrian admission of professional responsibility. Suddenly an abyss opens between the audience and the director's expectations. A mid-level cop, supervising a feckless stool pigeon, whose self-righteousness is no comfort as he becomes aware of the machinations of the careerist (Damon) a few offices away. What a story. It's no wonder that agents prefer casting Wahlberg in movies like Invincible and The Italian Job.

*EDIT: Wahlberg actually says this to a fellow officer, not DiCaprio, as Apa correcty points out. I think the gist of my argument still works: Wahlberg, performing grinding tasks out of the spotlight, cursing loudly and often to create the illusion that he doesn't give a damn.