Black Mass is the latest cinematic portrayal of the life and career of James “Whitey” Bulger, the gangster who ran roughshod over Boston for nearly 20 years with the odd assistance of an F B I agent whose secret informant he was. Nine years ago, Martin Scorsese’s The Departed merged the plotline of a Hong Kong movie called Infernal Affairs with l’affaire Bulger and came out with a terrific Oscar-winning picture.
Johnny Depp, Mary Klug at home
warner bros. pictures
Black Mass is carefully made and intelligent, and far more somber and serious than its predecessor, but it will not join The Departed in the Hollywood history books. For The Departed understood what Black Mass does not: In the James “Whitey” Bulger story, James “Whitey” Bulger is the least interesting character. Jack Nicholson’s Frank Costello was a supporting player in a larger story about a cop on his tail and the federal agent who had secretly been working for him. It was the cat and mouse game between the two officers of the law (played wonderfully by Matt Damon and Leonardo DiCaprio) that made The Departed so memorable. Nicholson was colorful but minor.
The problem is that the real Whitey Bulger wasn’t colorful at all. He was—and is, I guess, as he’s still alive—a garden-variety homicidal maniac, and Johnny Depp plays him pretty much as an alligator in human form. He’s ruthless and forbidding and humorless, quick to kill and have others killed: all menace and very little charm. In a misguided effort to make him seem more complex, the movie tries to suggest that Jimmy had a bit more charm and a bit less menace before he lost a son to Reye’s syndrome in the early 1970s and then his mother later in the decade. But that’s just Hollywood armchair psychology—not to mention another way to give Depp more screen time.
Two people make the Whitey Bulger story genuinely fascinating. One is John Connolly, the F B I agent who was compromised by their relationship. He is played here brilliantly by Joel Edgerton, who made a sensational debut this summer as a writer-director with The Gift. The other is his politician brother Billy, who was president of the Massachusetts state senate even as his brother was running a criminal syndicate in Boston. Benedict Cumberbatch renders him as a Kennedy manqué rather than the steely-eyed, tough-guy, up-from-street pol he actually was, but he’s good too.
The movie should center on these two. But it can’t really be about Billy, because Black Mass is a true story, and we will never really know the nature of the relationship between Whitey and Billy unless one of them spills the beans before he dies. So, then, it ought to be about Connolly, who begins with the notion of turning Billy into his snitch but instead becomes his snitch’s catspaw. But every time the Connolly part of the tale begins to gather steam, as he works successfully to redirect the attention of other law enforcement officials away from Billy, the director Scott Cooper finds it necessary to refocus his attention on his boring psychopath and the superstar playing him.
Just in case we forgot, toward the end of Black Mass, Cooper and screenwriters Mark Mallouk and Jez Butterworth give Depp two Oscar-bait scenes straight out of other movies. The first, in which Depp stares down a colleague of Connolly after the F B I agent reveals a family secret about how to marinate a steak, is a shockingly lame variation on Joe Pesci’s immortal am-I-a-clown-to-you rant in Goodfellas. The other, in which Depp menaces Connolly’s wife, seems derived from the little-known 1987 picture Street Smart, in which a pimp played by Morgan Freeman (in the performance that made him a star) does the same to one of his hookers. Pesci won an Oscar and Freeman was nominated for one. Depp seems likely to follow Freeman into the final five at the Dolby Theatre next February but unlikely to follow Pesci onto the stage.
Both scenes are embarrassingly phony, and they demonstrate how difficult it has become to offer a portrait of a mobster-monster on screen that is anything but clichéd. After James Caan’s Sonny Corleone and Pesci’s Tommy DeVito, and six seasons of The Sopranos, the string has kind of run out on gangster psychopaths who terrify even the people who commit crimes with them. Playing one is like imitating Ethel Merman: The mannerisms are so well-established that, by now, anybody can do it. Depp has it in him to be a great actor, and he desperately wants to give a great performance here. But there just may not be another great gangster performance to be given.
John Podhoretz, editor of Commentary, is The Weekly Standard’s movie critic.
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