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.