Wicked/Good.
By Jim Vejvoda
“All our wars were merry, and all our songs were sad.” That Irish saying is an appropriate one for the rise and fall of FBI agent and South Boston native John Connolly. As depicted in the brooding true crime drama Black Mass, Connolly certainly found merriment during his war against the Boston Mafia, but ultimately his ended up a very sad song indeed.
And this is Connolly’s (Joel Edgerton, sporting a flawless Boston accent) story more so than that of the higher-profile turn by Johnny Depp as the agent’s prized informant and boyhood hero, gangster James “Whitey” Bulger. Whitey certainly commands plenty of screen time, but Connolly’s fate is the tragic one as his hubris and twisted hero worship of tough guy Bulger blinds him to the painful truth. By the time Connolly realizes the tail is wagging the dog, he’s in too deep and too corrupted to disentangle his fate from Bulger’s.
Back home in Boston with an edict to eliminate La Cosa Nostra, Connolly concocts a plan that will at first make him a rock star among G-Men before ultimately causing his downfall. Connolly forges an alliance with Whitey Bulger, the leader of the Southie (and predominantly Irish) rackets, to help him take down the Italian mob. Whitey’s end of the deal requires him to feed Connolly intel on his enemies in exchange for protection from the Feds.
For Bulger and other mobsters, being a rat is the lowest of the low and the penalty is a gruesome death (which we see Whitey mete out). But Bulger, with Connolly’s prodding, comes to view it as a business arrangement rather than informing, a chance for him to have the FBI eliminate his competition while simultaneously protecting him from law enforcement. And for two decades, from roughly 1975-95, the plan worked, especially in Whitey’s favor as he rises to become the crime boss of Boston with the FBI having eliminated his Italian rivals. To this day, Bulger claims he only paid the FBI for information and that it was a one-sided relationship. However the deal worked, Bulger admits to being in bed with the FBI, who via Connolly and his colleague, Agent John Morris (David Harbour), allowed Whitey to run amok in Boston for twenty years, getting away with drug trafficking, extortion, and murders along the way.
As directed by Scott Cooper (Out of the Furnace), Black Mass — adapted from the book by two Boston Globe reporters who helped expose the Bureau’s devil’s deal with Bulger — is a grim, tense character study that would be a requiem were it any darker and serious. While the film indulges in a few Scorsese-esque flourishes at times (seriously, there needs to be a moratorium on the use of Rolling Stones songs in non-Scorsese gangster movies), Black Mass is closer in spirit, look, and feel to a Sidney Lumet film (particularly the late director’s corrupt cop films Prince of the City, Q&A, and Night Falls on Manhattan). Speaking of Scorsese, much has been made (arguably too much so) of his film The Departed basically being the Whitey Bulger tale. It should be noted that while Jack Nicholson’s gangster was patterned after Bulger, the film itself is a remake of the Hong Kong thriller Infernal Affairs and not a straightforward chronicling of the Bulger/FBI saga. Black Mass is.
Cooper and his cinematographer Masanobu Takayanagi capture the grit and feel not only of blue collar Boston (I’m a native), but also the aesthetic of the late ’70s/early ’80s films that are clearly inspiring them. The film wisely avoids cliche Boston locations and establishing shots, and is at times insular and claustrophobic. But this is a character study and performance piece first and foremost, with Cooper (himself an actor) drawing out of Depp his best performance in years. Coiled, magnetic, frightening and seductive, Depp’s Whitey Bulger is more like the serpent Kaa from The Jungle Book than he is your usual screen gangster. While his makeup sometimes draws too much attention to itself, especially those mesmerizing blue contacts, it nevertheless allows Depp to fully immerse himself in the most understated performance he’s given since Donnie Brasco.
It’s still up in the air whether Black Mass will restore Depp’s commercial standing, but his work here is a critical success for him in reestablishing himself as a serious actor and not the world’s highest-paid birthday party clown or a live-action cartoon character. If nothing else, Black Mass has made people excited to see a Johnny Depp movie again. Depp will most likely land an Oscar nomination for Black Mass, but will he win? It all depends on his competition in the coming months, but Hollywood loves a comeback story and the Depp/Bulger performance will certainly be the element of Black Mass that people will still be talking about most in a few months.
The film doesn’t shy away from Whitey’s evil deeds (anyone fearing the film was going to romanticize him needn’t worry), but it also portrays him as a human being. A bad one, but human. He dotes on his young son and his elderly mom, and is proud of his younger brother Billy (Benedict Cumberbatch, in a smaller role than you’d expect). Like a Shakespearean version of Johnny Dangerously, Whitey becomes the city’s most feared criminal while his kid brother Billy gets an education and becomes the most powerful politician in the state. Yes, the two brothers’ rise to power in their respective circles happen at the same time, but it’s just not known for a fact how much one may have helped the other.
Black Mass at times strains too hard to adhere to the public record (for legal reasons?), leaving Billy a cagey, ambiguous figure, a decision that will frustrate those hoping for a closer examination of the relationship between two brothers whose paths seem diametrically opposed and yet who each profoundly affected their South Boston community for years. (Cumberbatch’s nasally, highfalutin accent with hints of a phony Irish lilt is actually accurate to how Billy spoke, although he’s also about a foot too tall for the role of a politician infamously dubbed “the corrupt midget” by some Boston press.)
Edgerton also seems a likely Best Supporting Actor contender for his nuanced turn as the cocky Fed who becomes more gangster than G-Man. Edgerton looks and sounds like the real Connolly, and he and Depp play wonderfully off each other. Some may find that Connolly himself doesn’t change much from beginning to end outside of his increasingly tailored appearance, but this is a rise and fall story where, like GoodFellas or Casino, the change in the protagonist’s fortunes are the source of the dramatic arc rather than some profound transformation in personality or character.
The film’s stellar cast includes Breaking Bad’s Jesse Plemons as Whitey’s protege-flunky Kevin Weeks; Rory Cochrane as Whitey’s partner and fellow informant Stevie Flemmi; Dakota Johnson in a small role as Lindsey Cyr, the mother of Whitey’s only child; Boston native Julianne Nicholson as Connolly’s wife Marianne; Kevin Bacon as Connolly’s FBI supervisor McGuire (a composite character of several Boston FBI bosses); Deadwood’s W. Earl Brown as stone cold Bulger hit man John Martorano; Ant-Man villain Corey Stoll getting to play the closest thing to the film’s true hero, hard-nosed federal prosecutor Fred Wyshak; Adam Scott as FBI Agent Robert Fitzpatrick, who’s also not buying Connolly’s crap; Juno Temple as Flemmi’s drug addict/prostitute/stepdaughter Deborah Hussey; and Peter Sarsgaard as coked-out hoodlum Brian Halloran, whose involvement in a complicated Miami-Boston-Oklahoma money skim/murder plot will prove to have a long-term and wide-ranging impact on all the players involved.
Some of these cast members fare better than others, with Sarsgaard’s brief but showy role already prominent in the film’s trailers. And while Johnson and Nicholson have the conventional girlfriend and wife roles, respectively, their scenes attempt to show the non-gangland side of their respective lovers. Nicholson in particular gets a few memorable moments, including a frightening encounter with Whitey. Cochrane nicely underplays Flemmi, while Plemons wisely avoids echoing his “Meth Damon” character from Breaking Bad. Some of the cast’s Boston accents are better than others, but for the most part no one embarrasses themselves a la Costner in Thirteen Days. And given the brevity of her screen time, it’s a bit surprising to see Temple in a part that could’ve benefited a local actress instead.
Overall, Black Mass gets far more right than it gets wrong in bringing the lengthy and complex Bulger-FBI saga to the screen. The story compresses timelines, has some events happen later or earlier than they really did, and only employs one or two composite characters, but overall it’s streamlined the crime-riddled story as much as could probably be expected from a two-hour film. Some sequences and characters seen in the trailers have been cut from the final film, most notably all the racially-charged forced busing scenes that showed more of Billy. Cut out entirely are Sienna Miller as Whitey’s longtime girlfriend Catherine Greig, who was arrested with him in 2011; James Russo’s arresting FBI agent; Jeremy Strong as Whitey’s apartment manager in Santa Monica who helped set him up for arrest; and Berglind Jonsdottir as Bulger and Greig’s former neighbor in Santa Monica whose tip led to the fugitive gangster’s arrest after 16 years on the lam. That means with the exception of the very last shots of the film, all of the Santa Monica scenes have been cut.
Black Mass is a dark drama — its moodiness accentuated throughout by Tom “Junkie XL” Holkenborg’s morose, yet tense score — about the blinding loyalty of tribal bonds and hero worship, particularly on Connolly’s part. But this seems a one-sided bromance as Billy is friendly and polite towards John, whereas Whitey never seems to treat him as anything more than a means to an end. Marianne calls her husband out about this at one point when he says how good Whitey was to him as a kid in the Southie projects (“Did he take you trick-or-treating?”), and Bacon’s FBI boss uses far more defamatory language to describe Connolly’s adoration for the Bulgers.
Given its emphasis on behavior and measured pacing, some may find Black Mass too slow and solemn when compared to other gangster films. It’s not going to revolutionize the gangster film genre the way GoodFellas or The Godfather did, and it certainly isn’t meant to be “fun” in the way The Departed was. Indeed, Black Mass is in some ways less a “gangster movie” than a rise and fall story about once small-time players who end up causing a big time mess (deemed the greatest scandal in FBI history).
For those who are familiar with the Whitey Bulger-FBI saga, Black Mass won’t reveal anything you didn’t already know, but those who aren’t will hopefully leave the cinema realizing that monsters can be created, sustained and set loose by bureaucratic agendas, institutionalized apathy, tribal fealty, and brotherly bonds. And that these same vicious, greedy monsters can also love their siblings, children and heritage as much as you do.
