Welcome to “They’re in That??,” a recurring column about actors we had totally forgotten were in certain movies
______________
I forgot Anthony Anderson was in The Departed!
Look, I haven’t seen The Departed in a hot minute. I forgot! And as soon as I realized that Anthony Anderson is in The Departed (within the first five minutes), I felt bad for forgetting, because I remember really enjoying Anthony Anderson in The Departed. He’s Leonardo DiCaprio’s buddy, a fellow detective in the Boston Police Department, all the way since the Police Academy, before all the trouble started.
Anthony plays Brown a good cop, one of few Black cops in the department. As Leonardo DiCaprio’s character Billy Costigan Jr. jokes to him in their first scene together, doing drills at the Academy, he’s really at a disadvantage, being one of the only Black cops in Boston. Slightly later in the film, once Brown becomes a detective, he deals with Matt Damon’s Colin Sullivan and he’s suspicious of him. He’s basically the only character who is. Later on, when we see Brown we are reminded that he doesn’t let his personal friendships interfere with his work, but that he also trusts his instincts about people. It would be great if more of this department’s cops had this moral code, I tell ya!
Anderson is great. It’s not a comic role, not even comic relief. But Anderson has chops as a dramatic actor, plus he’s a natural yeller, which is an essential quality for an actor playing a cop in Boston.
The Departed organizes itself in doubles. Matt Damon and Leonardo DiCaprio are our main dual figures, two opposites whose braided stories form the center of the film. That much is clear from the beginning. But then the film begins to flesh out numerous sets of pairs. First, there are sets of friends: Costigan and Brown, Sullivan and his friend Barrigan played by James Badge Dale. Then, there are teams of superiors: we meet Martin Sheen and Mark Wahlberg together, we see Martin Sheen and Alec Baldwin as two versions of one another.
And then, of course, the film lays into its main theme, which is that characters have doubles within them, too: other selves, other identities, other lives that they inhabit. Characters within the film try to figure out if various men are double agents, while the film’s real double-agent is always known to the audience. These police officers are frequently performing other identities Our protagonist, (Leo), is pretending to be a gangster, to embed in the mob, when he’s not, and our antagonist is embedded in the mob while he’s pretending that he’s just a police officer. The only character who doesn’t seem to have a double is Jack Nicholson’s gangster kingpin Frank***, except of course, he is doubling as two characters’ father-figures (Leo’s and Matt’s), making him the most powerful two-face of the whole bunch.
Towards the end of the film, it becomes clear that the two friendships established in the beginning (Sullivan and Barrigan), (Costigan and Brown), are in a race with each other. There is a showdown between partnerships. And, in that race, only one set of friends can come out alive.
