Camera Work in The Departed

The Departed, directed by Martin Scorsese is a pretty high-quality film, so I thought that it would be a good work to turn to in order to illustrate different camera angles or shots.  In two scenes from the Departed, I'll show how long shots, medium shots, and close-ups are used to serve a function or to convey a meaning of some sort.

The first scene I'd like to address is a one that uses a medium shot and then makes heavy use of close-ups.  You can click here to watch it, as embedding has been disabled for the video.  At the very start of the scene, there is a medium shot that establishes the setting (in a bar after-hours) and how few people there are in this setting.  I believe this medium shot was used to set up the tension of the scene, in which Leonardo DiCaprio's character is interrogated by Jack Nicholson's character, who is a mob boss trying to figure out who the police informer in his organization is (DiCaprio's character is the informer).  As there are no other people in the bar, this medium shot establishes that DiCaprio's character is alone and that he's in a place where something could easily happen to him without any witnesses or help. 

As the questioning in the scene ratchets up the tension, the close-up shots show how stressed DiCaprio's character becomes.  His facial expression varies from intense, worried, or faux-nonchalance as the questions become more pointed and he clearly starts to fear that he may have been found out.  These are minute details that other shots at farther distances would definitely miss, so the function of capturing the mood and incredible tension in the scene through the actors' reactions through close-ups is absolutely essential. 

There is a very good example of a long shot that is used in another scene for which I can't find a video.  The shot shows Matt Damon's character from behind standing on a sidewalk looking up at something in the bottom corner of the frame.  This is a long shot, but the rest of the frame is black, and there is a kind of a circular "peep-hole" effect around Matt Damon, as he is the only thing that can initially be seen.  The hole then quickly opens up so that the rest of the frame is visible, and now it can be seen that Matt Damon is looking at the police headquarters building, where his character had been trying to get to.  I thought that this was a very clever way of doing an extreme long shot with a character without the audience not noticing where the character was.  The police building is very large, and to capture the whole thing in the frame obviously required the camera to be at some distance.  Scorsese could have easily just done the shot without Matt Damon's character in it at all, but I think he also may have wanted to show, by having Matt Damon next to this massive building, that his character (who is infiltrating the police department) is just one man who has to bring down a massive organization.