Is It Payback Time?

His two films since then -- "The Aviator," his highly praised bio of Howard Hughes's struggles to make "Hell's Angels" (which perhaps reminded him of his own struggle on "Gangs") and now "The Departed" -- both have been mainstream entertainment and star-driven, both have been made quietly, competently, professionally, and neither has really expressed the Scorsese personality in the way that the earlier, better movies did.

The filmmaker was a Little Italy kid through and through, but a childhood of ill health reportedly kept him sealed off from the normalcy of boyhood culture. After high school, he went to seminary; the passion of commitment to a higher order burned within him. But after a year, he quit, and went to New York University's film school. His devotion to the art was almost as pure as the ideal priest's and he seethed with the need to save the movies from themselves.

His breakthrough film, "Mean Streets," in 1973, jangled with this energy. It was the story of a young Mafioso torn between his ambitions to be a good hood but also to save his less stable friend, whose survival he sees as a kind of religious salvation. That part -- Charlie -- was played by Harvey Keitel, but the role that was to provide the basis for most of Scorsese's later work was Johnny Boy, played by Robert De Niro. What was Johnny's problem? Well, he was just angry, volatile, spilling toward self-destruction at every turn, unwilling to pay back his debts or show respect to his elders. He's on a one-way ride to hell and we know that he will bring everybody along for the ride.

With rare exceptions ("Taxi Driver"), that became the ur-tale for Scorsese: A responsible male tries to keep an irresponsible male from destroying himself.

That's true in "Raging Bull," where De Niro's Jake LaMotta makes war on the world while his brother, played by Joe Pesci, tries to rein him in. It's certainly true in "GoodFellas," where Pesci plays the bullgoose crazy one, and it's Ray Liotta who is the ameliorating factor. In "Casino," again Pesci gets the crazed, depraved role, probably the most violent punk Scorsese has ever put on screen; it's his pal, De Niro, who talks him down, tries to rescue him.

That's another reason "The Departed" seems to have been made by a Scorsese imitator, not Scorsese himself. There's almost no sense of comradeship in the movie. It's totally each man for himself and the most shocking moment comes when expectations of loyalty are dashed.

The film, based on a Hong Kong movie of surprising restraint and complexity called "Infernal Affairs," tracks the progress of two moles -- one in the police department (Matt Damon) and the other in the mob (Leonardo DiCaprio), who learn about the existence, but not the identity, of the other. Each is assigned to locate the other.

The situation itself is nothing like Scorsese. It lacks his signature obsessions and it's so intricate that it requires a felicity for detailed storytelling that he's never shown before (which is why it occasionally loses its way). His movies have never been overplotted; they're so obsessed with the moment and the psychological state of the protagonist that they instead discover and stick to very basic situations.

It's also guilt-free. The truth is, these are probably the least interesting characters Scorsese has ever covered. None of them seems haunted or torn, no one has issues. Instead, they're so consumed with the nuts-and-bolts of complex professional obligations, that's all there is to them.

Then there's milieu. Boston? Boston Irish ? Scorsese doesn't have the feel for the Irish he seems to have for those New York Italians, even if so much of his cast (like Damon and Mark Wahlberg) can claim a Boston heritage.

A deeper issue is the relative mental health of everybody. Most of Scorsese's great films depict men in the grip of an obsession that completely defines their personalities and their actions. He's not Howard Hawks or John Ford, who preferred to study cool professionals in action, he's more like the great film noir directors -- Rudolph Maté in "D.O.A." comes to mind or Raoul Walsh in "White Heat" -- who showed men in extreme states. Thus all the intricate plotting in "The Departed" and the lack of deep psychological states make the film feel weirdly apart from the classic Scorsese canon.

Which brings us to this: Is the argument that he will win the Oscar for "The Departed" but doesn't deserve it? Hardly. The truth is, as anyone who's ever won a major national award can attest, whimsy often has more to do with the results than justice. The people who give awards give them for their own reasons, not the recipient's: to look good, to make up for past failures, to make a comment, to feel virtuous.

The award that Scorsese may get in February will be savored but doubted; it will feel more like a career salute (Scorsese has already won an AFI Life Achievement Award) than a particular embrace of a particular film. And so what? That's the way awards work, and who else are they going to give it to -- a second one for Clint Eastwood? Or a first one for the two brilliantly talented Mexican directors who are sure to be around for a long time to come? Good Lord, they've already given one to Robert Redford, Roman Polanski and Barry Levinson.

Yet one can't help but think that Hollywood waited until it was comfortable with Martin Scorsese before conferring the gold statuette upon him, waited until he morphed into something more bourgeois, more system-oriented, mellower, more professional. His earlier films -- his great films -- were savage examinations of hearts of darkness, of deviant behaviors, of misanthropic loners. They asked, defiantly: You talkin' to me ?