About one hour into Scott Cooper’s biopic of Jimmy “Whitey” Bulger, a hoodlum who tipped off the feds gets gunned down by Whitey in a parking lot in front of half a dozen people. This is probably the fourth person Whitey has killed in the movie so far, and the witnesses are shocked by these brutal acts of violence every time.
But the people in the theater have grown practically numb.
Not once does the movie try to be anything it isn’t. The story of the most notorious and most wanted gangster of the past 50 years is full of cheaters and liars, sex and drugs, violence and bullheadedness and just plain awful human behavior. But it never seems out of character, and it never seems fake.
I honestly don’t know if that’s really good on the part of the filmmakers or really bad that everyone else is just so used to it.
John Connolly and James “Whitey” Bulger grew up together on the streets of South Boston, though fate would lead them down different paths in life. Decades later in the late 1970s, they would meet again, but not by accident.
By then, Connolly (played by Joel Edgerton) was a major figure in the FBI’s Boston office, and Whitey (played by a nearly unrecognizable Johnny Depp) had become godfather of the Irish Mob, practically ruling Boston from the underground. All the while, Whitey’s brother Bill (played by Benedict Cumberbatch) remains a powerful leader in the Massachusetts Senate, making both Connolly and Whitey’s jobs very difficult.
What happened between them—a dirty deal to trade secrets and take down Boston’s Italian Mafia in the process—would spiral out of control, leading to murders, drug dealing, racketeering indictments and, ultimately, to Bulger making the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted List.
Except for the overly graphic ways people are knocking each other off and sending them to sleep with the fishes, nothing about “Black Mass” is particularly noteworthy or memorable for being new. No cinematography style, no storytelling method and no technical effects or editing is any different from any other gangster movie of the past 20 years.
However, none of that matters, because the cast devotes their whole selves to their roles. Johnny Depp gives one of his best performances in nearly a decade, and come awards season many others will think the same thing. If you didn’t know it was Depp as Bulger, you’d never guess. Pale in skin and hair, a dead front tooth and a wheezy laugh and piercing blue eyes, Bulger is much scarier than your suave and sexy Al Pacino or Robert DeNiro.
But the way Scott Cooper directs Depp makes him an anti-hero that we both love to hate and hate to love. He’s an awful person, but he’s just so cool. He drinks ginger ale instead of downing shots. He’s loyal to his brother and mother before even his closest confidants. He won’t hesitate to take out a rat who talked to the feds, but he also won’t hesitate to help an old lady in his neighborhood carry her groceries home. It’s a fine line between heartless villain and complex anti-hero, and Depp walks that line perfectly.
Everyone on screen performs their roles the best they can. It’s just too bad no one is worth rooting for. Usually in these movies there is that one FBI agent that you root for the whole way through. Or one of the gangsters is trying so hard not to follow in his family’s footsteps or something like that.
But everyone here has their own selfish agenda for their own personal gain and no one comes off as the good guy. It’s just some bad guys are breaking the law and the other bad guys are fudging the paperwork so they can break the law legally. No one is a real hero here.
Maybe if the story didn’t have so many half-developed scenes and ideas, the characters would have been able to grow and develop more as well.
Unfortunately, time moves so quickly in the life of Whitey Bulger, it goes from 1975 to 1981 in a matter of minutes without any evidence of anyone changing over those six years. Are you really telling me nothing happened for six years in the life of the most notorious gangster in the history of Boston?
“The Godfather” is 2 hours 55 minutes long and both “Goodfellas” and “The Departed” are both 2 and a half hours, but “Black Mass” is barely over the two hour mark. For once, I want a movie to be 30 minutes longer just so I can understand a bit more of what’s going on. Dive into what really makes these character tick.
Show a bit of what happened between ’75 and ’81, and then again between ’81 and ’86. Develop the themes and ideas that get started but never fully blossom. Show me just how dangerous and infamous Whitey Bulger actually is.
The movie is great and Johnny Depp is phenomenal as Bulger—possibly the best male performance of the year so far. But several years from now, few people are going to remember it. I probably won’t watch it again, but I’m glad I saw it once. You will be, too.
Quigley Films Unlimited 