Daily Archives: Wednesday, December 23, 2015

  • Black Mass

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Scott Cooper (2015)

    In Black Mass, Johnny Depp plays a real-life criminal, James ‘Whitey’ Bulger, for many years the leader of the Irish-American ‘Winter Hill Gang’ in South Boston.  (The film moves from the mid-1970s to the mid-1990s with a postscript in 2011.)  I’d never heard of Bulger but it seems he’s a big infamous name in America.  According to his Wikipedia entry, the character played by Jack Nicholson in The Departed was loosely based on Bulger and he’s also been the ‘inspiration’ for gangland Mr Big figures in several American TV dramas.  It’s often problematic when audiences in a film’s country of origin are much more au fait with the protagonist of a based-on-a-true-story movie than audiences elsewhere. (In this particular case, there’s the additional wrinkle for British viewers that the name James Bulger has a very different and distressing connotation in the annals of national crime.)  Something tells me, though, that Black Mass is unremarkable not because a British viewer can’t ‘get’ Whitey Bulger but because Scott Cooper’s film breaks no new ground in the gangster movie genre.  The script by Mark Mallouk (an American) and Jez Butterworth (a Brit) is so weak that the picture verges on parody.

    The central relationship in Black Mass involves Whitey Bulger (Johnny Depp) and John Connolly (Joel Edgerton), an FBI agent.  Connolly has known Whitey and his younger brother Billy (Benedict Cumberbatch), now a powerful local politician, since all three were kids in South Boston.  Connolly, after building his FBI career elsewhere, returns to the city and uses his acquaintance with the Bulger brothers as a way into investigating and bringing to book the Angiulo Brothers, Boston’s leading Italian-American crime outfit.  Whitey initially resists the idea of becoming an FBI informant but quickly perceives how he can exploit such a position.  He starts to use Connolly’s ‘protection’ as a cover for the Winter Hill Gang’s criminal activities.  This story is presented as a series of quasi-flashbacks, framed within police interviews with Whitey’s former henchmen, who eventually turned state’s evidence against both Whitey and Connolly.  The fact that Connolly and the Bulgers go back a long way might have been dramatically fruitful but Scott Cooper and the writers waste it.  Someone observes near the start that kids from the same South Boston neighbourhood play at cops and robbers then grow up into the real thing.  We know immediately that the film is going to demonstrate this moral of the story in what follows, instead of giving us the opportunity to infer it.

    Just about everything in Black Mass feels recycled and, in spite of the movie’s real-life basis, inauthentic.  The Boston setting is a problem, for a start:  the city has in recent years become typecast as the centre of the universe of organised crime on screen (Mystic River, The Departed, Gone Baby Gone, The Town and so on[1]).   The Bulger brothers’ respective lines of work mean that, as often before, mobster rule and local government work hand in glove.  Whitey Bulger’s Catholicism and perverted code of honour (better for Boston to be ruled by the Winter Hill Gang than by a Mafia group) are treated as items on a checklist.  The clichés extend from basic elements of the set-up to character details.  Early on, Whitey and three other gang members are hanging out in a bar; Whitey reprimands hitman Johnny Martorano (W Earl Brown) for the unhygienic way he’s scoffing from a bowl of peanuts on the table.  This display of concern for public health on Whitey’s part is familiar black-comedy characterisation of a villain – it’s like showing a serial killer who’s outraged by queue-jumping.  Mallouk and Butterworth’s dialogue is very tired:  the viewer often knows the words by heart.  When one character says, ‘I had no choice’, the rejoinder, of course, is ‘You always have a choice – you made the wrong choice’.  (To be fair, though, the writing is sometimes lame enough to take you by surprise.  A new broom FBI attorney Fred Wyshak (Corey Stoll) can’t understand why Whitey hasn’t already been arrested.  ‘What’s Bulger done?’  John Connolly asks uneasily.  I thought Wyshak was bound to reply ‘What hasn’t he done?!’  The writers avoid the obvious through the imaginative variation ‘What’s he done?  Everything!’)  Even potentially distinctive elements are so poorly developed they seem part of the gangster boilerplate.  The narrative thread involving Bulger’s dealings with the IRA, for example, is crudely constructed and executed.

    Even allowing for Bulger’s celebrity-notoriety in the US, it seems doubtful this film would be getting attention if Johnny Depp wasn’t playing the lead – to be more precise, if someone hadn’t decided his performance in Black Mass might bring Depp the Oscar which many feel is overdue.  He wears make-up and prosthetic, as if to confirm he’s a serious awards contender; and it does take talent to do what Depp does in Black Mass.  Playing a monotonous prolific killer, he has the sense and confidence to vary the volume; he makes Bulger scary when he’s quiet and more menacing through occasionally withholding physical violence.  (This is especially so in an episode at the Connollys’ home, first with Connolly and others at the dinner table, then with Connolly’s wife, Marianne (Julianne Nicholson), who’s alone in her bedroom.  She’s pretending to be unwell although she is genuinely sickened by the criminal company her husband is keeping.)  Scott Cooper has already directed one Academy Award winner (Jeff Bridges in Crazy Heart) and Black Mass is set up to showcase Depp:  because Whitey Bulger isn’t interesting, your attention is drawn less to the character than to what the actor playing him is doing.  At the moment, though, it looks odds against Depp winning the Oscar – largely because Leonardo DiCaprio is being promoted for The Revenant on the same high-time-he-won ticket.

    Johnny Depp is supported by plenty of people who’ve proved themselves good actors in other roles.  You wouldn’t guess it from some of the performances here.  A sense of John Connolly’s becoming too large a part of the story is magnified by Joel Edgerton’s obvious playing:  he doesn’t seem to get inside Connolly at all.  The same is true of Benedict Cumberbatch as Billy Bulger although it’s less of a problem because the role is smaller, and Cumberbatch’s approach is blatantly satirical.  Although I can’t pinpoint what’s wrong with these non-Americans’ Boston accents, the voices of Edgerton and Cumberbatch sound different from those of the natives in the cast.  Julianne Nicholson does well to give some substance to the weak role of Marianne Connolly.  Among the Winter Hill brigade, Peter Sarsgaard’s loose cannon and Jesse Plemons’s gangland rookie are the best.  It’s adding insult to injury, however, that the most vivid performers in evidence – Sarsgaard and Juno Temple, as a prostitute – get killed off quickly.  The plentiful violence is as mechanically unpleasant as most of the rest of the movie.  Shooting is the preferred homicidal method here with some strangulation and garrotting thrown in for good measure.

    In spite of the mayhem, Black Mass is handsome to look at.   The palette of the cinematographer Masanobu Takayanagi is bleak but the blues, fawns and greys are subtly graded and more emotionally expressive than might be expected.  In a story that spans several decades, the costumes, hairdos and other accoutrements always look right.  Junkie JL’s score fits with the film’s title but also with its hollowness.  Whitey Bulger went on the run in 1994.  Knowing nothing of his biography, I was briefly horrified in the closing stages of the film that we were going to find out he’d never been tracked down; it was a relief to learn that he was eventually arrested in 2011.  He is now – at the ripe age of eighty-six – serving consecutive life terms in Sumterville, Florida.  The wordy closing legends on the screen note the relatively light sentences received by Bulger’s former associates who turned state’s evidence.  The tone is weirdly querulous, as if the film-makers feel that testifying against Whitey was rather bad form.

    30 November 2015

    [1]  There’s an amusing, exasperated piece on the subject at http://gawker.com/5981792/please-god-no-more-boston-gangster-movies.

  • Brideshead Revisited

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Julian Jarrold (2008)

    It’s no surprise that admirers of the book and the television adaptation deplore this film but I was prejudiced in its favour, largely because it lasts 133 minutes compared with the 659 of the Granada serialisation and the more than four hundred pages of the Evelyn Waugh original.  The screenplay by Andrew Davies and Jeremy Brock simplifies and coarsens the texture of the novel.  It concentrates on falling in love and religion and alcoholism at the expense of social and spiritual nuances.  In the movie’s latter stages especially, Davies and Brock’s reductions make some things hard to understand:  Charles Ryder’s marriage to Celia becomes so marginal that it barely registers at all – you get no sense of how it could have occurred in the first place.  It’s not clear how Charles finds Sebastian Flyte in a hospital in Morocco.  Charles’s conversation with Lord Marchmain, who returns to die at Brideshead, suggests they’re close friends when, as far as the viewer knows from the movie, they’ve met only once before.   The climax is clumsy: the dying Lord Marchmain’s sign of the cross is stagy and his daughters, looking on, anticipate it.  The ending in the Brideshead chapel is weakly ambiguous.  Adrian Johnson’s music is rather obvious.  But some of what the scriptwriters jettison is welcome – including nearly all the stuff in Oxford – and Julian Jarrold doesn’t simply luxuriate in the beauty of physical worlds in which the story happens.  The tensions and corrosions of human behaviour and parental influence are a strong counterpoint.

    I don’t know much about the nature of Evelyn Waugh’s religious belief but the novel Brideshead Revisited was certainly too Roman Catholic for some contemporary critics’ liking.  Edmund Wilson described the finale as ‘extravagantly absurd, with an absurdity that would be worthy of Waugh at his best if it were not – painful to say – meant quite seriously …’  The film-makers are uneasy with this too;  there’s not much more than recognition of the unarguable power of the Catholic faith for members of the Marchmain family.   Jarrold, Davies and Brock are more comfortable with showing the pernicious effects of Lady Marchmain’s personality on her children and these are in effect blurred with the pernicious effects of religion. The poster for the film which appears in the Wikipedia article on it is eloquent about this Brideshead Revisited.   Emma Thompson, who plays Lady Marchmain may be the largest figure on the poster simply because she’s the biggest name in the cast but Lady Marchmain dominates proceedings in a way that’s not quite right.  Thompson is technically very impressive but she is immediately formidable:   Lady Marchmain is more disturbing, and dramatically effective, if her exterior is softer.  Emma Thompson is a shade over-eager.  Her understanding of the character of Lady Marchmain may have led her to pre-interpret it.

    Of the three principals in the story, I rate only one of the performances in the Granada TV adaptation whereas all three are good in this version.  Ben Whishaw as Sebastian is way ahead of Anthony Andrews, especially in the early stages.  Sebastian’s fawn-like vulnerability when things aren’t going badly is touching, because of what you know is to come; Whishaw’s physical delicacy is matched by an emotional gracefulness and acuity.   The intimacy between Charles and Sebastian (I don’t mean the kiss) is sharp and convincing:  it’s as if the strength of the bond between them is what causes them to treat it as a secret – even though the bond as such doesn’t require secrecy.   Whishaw’s Sebastian and Matthew Goode’s Charles take pleasure as much in concealing their sense of superiority as in their outbursts of sniggers.  Although the bonds are not the same, Sebastian’s sister Julia is part of this secret society too.   Hayley Atwell’s Julia is poised and shrewd; she’ll never be the woman her mother is, which is just as well.  Atwell is much superior to the emotionally sluggish Diana Quick, who played the role on television.  I wondered if Matthew Goode, a naturally entertaining actor, might be suppressed in the role of Charles; there are some signs of strain in the closing stages but Goode is mostly excellent.  Jeremy Irons’s portrait of Charles in the Granada version was impressive.  He read the extracts from the novel in a way that captured what you accept as the feelings in and behind Waugh’s narrative.  Irons was very good too at listening to, and developing an understanding of, other characters; this quality and the narration combined to create a link between Charles Ryder and the viewer.  Without anything like as much voiceover, Matthew Goode has to make Charles more readable and likeable, and he does.

    Julian Jarrold has strengthened his impressive television curriculum vitae since 2008 – this picture didn’t help his career as a cinema director although he handles the material and the actors well.  Some of the supporting roles were memorably played on television.  The actors here don’t displace those performances but in some cases the characterisations are different enough not to be simply inferior.  Ed Stoppard’s Bridey is not the huntin-shootin-fishin character that Simon Jones created but this actually makes the character more interestingly odd.  In contrast, Felicity Jones’s Cordelia is only mildly eccentric compared with Phoebe Nicholls.  The Marchmain siblings here are more out of the same mould than their television counterparts; this makes sense, given the implied primacy of the maternal-Catholic influence, and works well within the timeframe of the movie.  (It might not work so well in a more extended adaptation.)  As Lord Marchmain, Michael Gambon is superior to Laurence Olivier in the Venice episode so that the family interactions there are much more vividly real.  He’s less good on his deathbed, where Olivier’s enduring physicality was powerful.  Greta Scacchi’s Carla compares favourably with Stéphane Audran’s.  Patrick Malahide wisely doesn’t attempt to compete with John Gielgud’s fathomless sarcasm as Ryder père.  Malahide moves from being mildly cantankerous to something more benign, and it’s good enough.  Joseph Beattie doesn’t, however, get near Nickolas Grace’s lavishly extraordinary Anthony Blanche and Jonathan Cake, in comparison to the insidiously imposing Charles Keating, provides only a thin caricature of Rex Mottram.

    24 May 2013

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