Black Mass
Director: Scott
Cooper
Writers: Mark
Mallouk, Jez Butterworth
Starring: Johnny
Depp, Joel Edgerton, Benedict Cumberbatch, Rory Cochrane, Jesse
Plemons, Dakota Johnson
Rating: Two stars
out of five
Available in
theaters now.
Reality and, by
extension, historical documents require a certain level of sticking
to the facts. Dates, names, and incidents should be kept straight,
particularly when trying to determine guilt or innocence in a court
of law. Movies, on the other hand, even (especially?) those “based
on a true story,” don't have to be so strict. In fact, they are
incentivized by the rules of drama to eschew some of the clunky facts
in order to get to the emotional heart of the message they are trying
to convey, because the fact that something occurred does not make it interesting. Why it happened is the important thing.
Black Mass tries
to get at that emotional heart by sticking to something resembling
the facts, and it does not work.
That
is because it loses sight of motivation, or rather, never understands
why motivation is required. At no point does the film make clear why
anyone, particularly protagonist Jimmy “Whitey” Bulger, played in
garish funeral home makeup by Johnny Depp, would want any part of the
life they have chosen for themselves. The undead look of Depp's
Bulger extends to the tone of the movie surrounding it, as there is
no sense of satisfaction, joy, fun, accomplishment he gets out of
building a criminal empire in South Boston with the help of a
childhood pal (Joel Edgerton) in the FBI. Black Mass does
not need to be Goodfellas,
all celebratory of gangster culture and the go-go fun times of
pulling one over on The Man. But it could learn a thing or two from
the Martin Scorsese classic about point of view and imbuing
characters with desire from the start. “As far back as I can
remember, I always wanted to be a gangster,” are the first words
out of Goodfellas protagonist
Henry Hill's mouth. Black Mass never
gives any clue as to what drives Bulger to do the things he does. He
does them, according to the messages being sent by the movie, just
because.
That
muddled and/or nonexistent reason for being extends to almost
everyone in the narrative, not just Bulger. Edgerton's John Connolly,
the crooked and ambitious FBI agent, says his reason for helping
Bulger is because of how good Bulger was to him as a kid and he is
loyal. But he never says what Bulger did that was good for him as a
youth, and the movie makes a point of him not saying it as if it's a
badge of honor and something the audience can not possibly
understand.
The
script shortchanges so many fine performers, including Depp and
Edgerton, but also Benedict Cumberbatch as Bulger's younger brother,
a Massachusetts state senator who (wink wink) may or may not have had
a hand in protecting Jimmy over the years, Dakota Johnson as the
mother of Bulger's son, and the two main henchmen characters played
by Rory Cochrane and Jesse Plemons.
The
Plemons character particularly makes no sense, as the film opens with
him narrating via plea deal about how he got started with the Bulger
gang. It appears he will be the viewer's surrogate for the duration,
but after a quick and violent introduction – again with no mention
of what drives him to want this position – he fades to the
background, never to return in any resonant or logical way. He gets
the brunt of the “reveal” that Bulger has been informing for the
FBI in exchange for protection, but not 20 minutes of screen time
earlier was Plemons's character present on a working vacation with
the corrupt FBI agents in cahoots with Bulger.
Cochrane
represents Black Mass's
one opportunity to instill anything resembling a motivational push,
as he gets an onscreen emotional betrayal. It is hastily and clumsily
set up, as the impetus of the betrayal is only mentioned a couple
minutes before the incident occurs, but there's a nugget of
intriguing, connecting empathy contained within it. Cochrane's
character is the one who should form the narration skeleton of the
movie because of the double-cross, but is replaced by Plemons for
seemingly no reason other than maybe that's the order it happened in
the real investigation that led to the crackdown on Bulger's gang and
sent ol' Whitey on the run for decades.
Director
Scott Cooper at least shoots Black Mass in
a fairly handsome fashion, using slow dolly push-ins and pull-outs to
act as fly-on-the-wall intrusions on the inner workings of a criminal
enterprise. Cooper knows how to compose a shot and telegraph a
sequence as a competent craftsman, but the interior reasoning that
should be generating the visual drama is not present. It is
surface-level and too quick to get to the “good stuff,” the
shootouts and stranglings, without turning the screws of tension long
enough to make those moments land with any real impact. Part of the
lack of visual connection lies in the overdone makeup on Depp, making
him look like a greasy and balding snow zombie. The contact lenses he
wears are seas of empty blueness, as if the black of his pupils don't
exist. He's a nightmarish German Expressionism villain plopped in a
world of dumpy character actors who look exceedingly like the
unhinged barflies they are portraying. It's a juxtaposition that goes
a step or 30 too far, with the exception of one strong scene at a
dinner table when Bulger plays a “joke” on an FBI agent as a
power play.
When
an audience cannot comprehend a history book's worth of characters'
motivations, it makes it difficult, if not impossible, to be
transported by the movie they are in. Black Mass fails
on that front and, despite some surface thrills and a cast trying
their hardest to carry a hulk of pointlessness on their backs, it
becomes a snooze.
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