Jack Nicholson wears a Nike Big Al D-Line

In the final confrontation of Martin Scorsese's The Departed, Jack Nicholson's Frank Costello is dressed less like a Boston crime lord than like an aging suburban dad running weekend errands. The tailoring is gone. He wears a light-gray heathered T-shirt printed with a green shamrock and the word IRISH, a black windbreaker over jeans, leather sneakers, a navy cap. On his wrist is a Nike Big Al D-Line, a rectangular sports watch with a green-figured analog display flush against silver aluminum links on an expanding black urethane band. It is the inverse of the usual mob-boss flex. The man who controls half the city is not wearing a gold Rolex; he is wearing a sub-luxury watch from a sneaker company that dabbled in timepieces for a few years around the turn of the millennium and then quietly walked away.

That choice is the costume talking. Costello was loosely modeled on Whitey Bulger, the South Boston boss who doubled for decades as an FBI informant, a man whose whole survival depended on not looking like what he was. A Nike watch on a wrist that could buy the watchmaker outright reads as either tactical anonymity or pure indifference, and in this scene it hardly matters which, since the gunshot wound to Costello's gut says his luck has finally run out. The Departed, William Monahan's remake of the 2002 Hong Kong thriller Infernal Affairs, won Scorsese his Best Picture and Best Director Oscars and gave Nicholson a long improvisational leash, and the watch is one more small, unscripted-feeling detail in a performance built from them.