Film Review: Depp plays Bulger for real in ‘Black Mass’
Martin Scorsese’s Oscar-winning “The Departed” was a fairly faithful, if embellished, remake of the Hong Kong hit “Infernal Affairs.” One of its chief embellishments was the beefing up of the role of the mob boss to accommodate the star casting of Jack Nicholson.
It’s no secret that Scorsese, screenwriter William Monahan, and Nicholson patterned the character after James “Whitey” Bulger, a legendary Boston gangster.
Part of Bulger’s legend was his magical ability to avoid law enforcement. He seemed impossible to bring down. The government spent years gathering evidence to nail him, but he was tipped off right before the indictments were announced and fled at the last minute. He went into hiding and managed to avoid arrest for more than 16 years, when he was finally captured in Santa Monica.
Now, director Scott Cooper (“Crazy Heart”) has cast Johnny Depp as the unfictionalized Whitey Bulger. Depp can be as flamboyant as Nicholson, but here he plays it much more internalized and restrained.
The film is structured as a series of flashbacks, corresponding to the testimony of several Bulger comrades as they are questioned by an investigator. The first is set in 1975, when Bulger ran the rackets in South Boston, aka Southie, which has the most concentrated working-class Irish-American population in the greater Boston area. He’s clever enough and brutal enough to maintain his power, but most of the city is under the control of the Italian-American Cosa Nostra. A war is brewing: Bulger believes that the Italian mob is going to intrude on his turf. As tough as he is, his organization is smaller, weaker and more vulnerable.
And then John Connolly (Aussie actor Joel Edgerton) shows up. Connolly grew up in the neighborhood, looking up to the slightly older Bulger. Now he’s an FBI agent, obsessed with bringing down the Italian mob in Boston. The two men work out a perfect symbiotic deal.
Whitey will give Connolly underworld intel to help him nail the Italians; and the FBI will turn a blind eye to any crimes Whitey commits short of murder. It’s a double win for Whitey: The FBI does the hard work of wiping out his rivals, while allowing him free rein to take over the city’s rackets.
Cooper shot in Boston, and it looks, feels, and sounds authentically like Boston — which is not a forgone conclusion. But it feels divorced from the reality of that particular time in that place.
Forced busing was introduced in Boston in 1974, and nowhere was it less welcome than in Southie. In 1975, South Boston’s virulently racist reaction still cast a pall over everything. At least the subject is mentioned in passing in one scene. Perhaps you had to be living in the city at that exact moment — I was — to be discomfited by its absence.
There’s no real protagonist in “Black Mass,” which may be the cause of the film’s least successful aspects. We see through the eyes of the testifying characters, of Whitey, and of Connolly. The latter is the closest thing to a unifying perspective.
Depp’s Whitey is scary. (No thanks to his odd, unconvincing makeup, which makes him look more like Hunter S. Thompson than he did in “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas.”) He glowers and turns murderous without warning.
In one particularly unpleasant scene, Cooper takes his time showing Whitey strangle an appealing but way too talkative prostitute (Juno Temple), while her stepfather/lover watches, unable to say a word.
Depp is (as usual) good or better. But, while the film revolves around him, he has no real arc. Whitey is a narcissistic psychopath. He can’t change; in fact he may be the only significant character in the film who doesn’t.
Hence, the movie relies more on Edgerton’s performance, which has echoes of Harvey Keitel’s work for Scorsese. (Jeremy Renner would have been a way more obvious choice.) Luckily Edgerton delivers; we see Connolly’s soul getting progressively soiled from contact with Whitey. Connolly seems really at home with his own metastasizing corruption; there’s even a hint that, having grown up in the mean streets of Southie, he is destined to revert. His education and morality are a thin veneer on his basically criminal nature.
--
ANDY KLEIN is the film critic for Marquee. He can also be heard on “FilmWeek” on KPCC-FM (89.3).