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James “Whitey” Bulger mythologized himself as a South Boston neighborhood boy
made good—or at least, “bad good.” Beneath that aura he reached new peaks of
insolence and brutality as a ruthless crime boss. For all his Irish-American
sentimentality about his ties to Southie, he controlled drug traffic on its
streets while practicing extortion and working gambling and other rackets
throughout his city, state, and country. His Winter Hill gang was based in
Somerville, not Southie. He helped fix horse races up and down the Northeast,
and he even muscled in on the jai alai craze in Florida.
Bulger’s behavior had a cunning duplicity. He eschewed ostentation, staying with
his mother in Southie or with a steady girlfriend. He was self-conscious about
keeping fit and looking sharp, rarely smoked and didn’t get drunk, and thought
he proved his ethnic bona fides by trying to smuggle guns to the IRA. He was a
sadist who murdered men and at least one woman with his bare hands. Although he
liked to maintain an image of cold control, what excited him most was unleashing
his vengeance in public.
The story of how Bulger, his partners and their henchmen grew in power and
operated freely for decades sounds like incendiary movie material. But Scott
Cooper’s Black Mass, based on the book of the same name by first-rate Boston
Globe reporters Dick Lehr and Gerard O’Neill, is a misfire: like a defective
hollow-point bullet, it fails to expand when it enters your brain.
Johnny Depp, as Bulger, may have thought he was making a sincere attempt to
portray Bulger as a charismatic kingpin. But with a vampiric pallor and lizard
contact lenses, he enters each scene as if he’s just come from a costume party,
and won. Good Nosferatu Fellas.
The problem isn’t only that the look is distancing; it’s also how the look
directs the performance. True, this is no flouncy Willy Wonka or woozy Capt.
Jack, yet it’s closer to that than Donnie Brasco, the actual human being Depp
played in the gangster picture of the same name. Here, Depp is calculatedly
coiled, so that even his stillness is theatrical. If much of Black Mass
documents the banality of evil – its everyday matter-of-factness – Depp makes
evil (and Bulger) mystical.
You might ask: isn’t Bulger supposed to stand apart? Surely there must have been
something that distinguished the actual Bulger from the other criminals he rose
above. Yes, but consider how Jack Nicholson – playing a Bulger-inspired
character in Martin Scorsese’s
The Departed –
captured criminal eminence: through star-powered insinuation. The charisma and
banality were blended. Depp’s devilishness is outsized and on the surface,
without any interior access to the actual man.
The film’s awkward frame is that the story unfolds from the taped confessions of
Bulger’s closest associates, who tell their tales in tight close-up to a
no-nonsense interrogator. First up is Kevin Weeks (Jesse Plemons), who relates
how he rose from bouncer to right-hand man and evokes how intoxicating it could
be for a young man to bask in Bulger’s aura of command.
The movie suggests that Bulger goes haywire after his only son dies of Reye
syndrome at age 6 and his mother dies at age 80. But his boy died in 1973, his
mom in 1980. Even when the movie collapses the chronology, the twin losses don’t
register as a one-two punch, merely a half-hearted feint at pouring some
feature-story “human interest” into ripped-from-the-headlines melodrama. In
1988, The Boston Globe actually broke the news that Bulger was an FBI informant.
Ever since, he’s been paired in the public mind with John Connolly (Joel
Edgerton), the FBI agent who was supposed to manage him but instead became his
partner in crime. (He was a model for Matt Damon’s role as the law-enforcement
mole for the Irish gang in
The Departed.)
Cooper and company turn Connolly’s “alliance” with the crime boss into the
fulcrum of the movie. Connolly, friends since childhood with Bulger and his
politician brother Billy (Benedict Cumberbatch), convinces his agency cohorts
that Bulger is ideally positioned to help them take down the FBI’s major target:
La Cosa Nostra. At the same time he persuades Bulger that the FBI will serve as
his protection just as paid-off cops function as the Mafia’s. As long as Bulger
enables him to topple New England’s Italian-American crime hierarchy, the agent
will make sure the FBI looks the other way as Bulger’s gang takes control of
Boston’s underworld. Connolly’s one caveat: don’t kill anyone. As soon as their
operation starts up, it becomes clear to almost everyone, including Connolly’s
wife (Julianne Nicholson), that this FBI man isn’t running Bulger, he’s
fulfilling a childhood dream of teaming up with the toughest guy on the block.
And Bulger takes their deal as a license to kill with impunity.
The characters are so smoothed-out and one-dimensional that they don’t set off
any sparks as they skid crazily across the narrow, twisting mean streets of
South Boston. Connolly tells his wife: “Like it or not, Marianne, you married a
street kid. And the streets taught me that you give and you get loyalty from
your friends, and loyalty means a lot to me.” That explanation is supposed to
pair up with Weeks’s earlier declaration: “The truth is, we Irish Southie kids
went straight from playing cops and robbers on the playground to doing it for
real on the streets. And just like on the playground, it wasn’t easy to tell
which was which.” But this film fails to dramatize the pull of childhood and
tribal allegiances, so all the speechifying falls flat, and the historical
reconstruction feels uninhabited.
In Black Mass, that vacancy reduces Connolly to a fatuous rogue agent and Billy
Bulger—president of the Massachusetts State Senate for 18 years—into a cipher.
You can feel Edgerton and Cumberbatch fishing for deeper nuances than
“star-struck lawman” or “political genius in denial,” but even these talents
(and Kevin Bacon, Corey Stoll, and so many others) come up empty.
A couple of actors break through the shallows, notably Peter Sarsgaard, who
merges hysteria and volatility as Brian Halloran, a Winter Hill gang member who
was executed in a restaurant parking lot for trying to inform on Bulger. The
writing and staging of that scene is at once so barbarous and opaque, you may
not realize that the man killed alongside Halloran is a totally innocent
civilian. One of the many virtues of Joe Berlinger’s splendid, illuminating
documentary, Whitey: United States of America v. James J. Bulger, is the
straight-talking rapport he establishes with Bulger’s victims, including the
widow of Michael Donahue, that murdered bystander. Although he could not take
cameras into the courtroom, Berlinger captures its bristling atmosphere with
transcripts and news footage as well as fresh interviews with witnesses and
victims’ families, testimonies from reporters who’d been covering Bulger’s
misdeeds for decades, and, astoundingly, Bulger’s jailhouse phone calls to his
defense team, which reveal more of this criminal’s shrewdness than all the
tough-guy putdowns in Black Mass.
Black Mass struggles to find something new to say about organized crime, the
loyalty between men and how we can never really leave behind the places in which
we’re born. But the only thing the film manages to do is remind us we’ve seen
all this stuff done before — and done better. Bulger’s bizarre life might be
tailor-made for the movies. But Black Mass is so timid and derivative, so
earnest in its attempt to be serious and profound, the film turns him into an
ordinary, garden-variety punk, unworthy of all this attention.
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