Has
Hollywood given up on drama? Film-makers
there seem to be going for spectacle and elegy, recently
with Spectre
and now with
Black
Mass, a
slow-paced narrative,
the most memorable
element of which is the strings-based
soundtrack by Junkie XL (as Tom Holkenborg).
The
film seems 'old'. It feels like this type of gangster/cop rivalry and
collusion drama has been handled better in films like Good
Fellas,
Scarface,
Donnie
Brasco
and many others.
It's
not clear if Jimmy 'Whitey' Bulger, played by Johnny Depp, is the
protagonist or the victim. Bulger never seems to set against anyone
or anything. The FBI and policing services are his allies, not
antagonists. The Italian Mafia are the enemy but are never seen close to the action, apart from a killing in which mixed ethnic messages
are given by a motorcycle with Italian (Moto Guzzi) and British
branding (Triumph).
Johnny
Depp is mis-cast, though it may simply be the problem of being The
Johnny Depp. A sense that his mask and hair line could ping off at
any time persists. Slick though it obviously is, that it doesn't ever
become ruffled creates a vivid impression and a mystery.
There
are no African Americans in the film, except perhaps in street scenes
or far back in an office scene. Was South Boston so homogeneously
white through Whitey's reign? This adds to the sense that the film is
'old', dated rather than historic.
Women are secured to the kitchen sink. Bulger dotes on his aged
mother. He and his crew help a little old lady with her shopping.
Young women are mothers or victims. Marianne Connolly rages that her
husband could bring Bulger and his associates into their home for
beers and barbecue. She screams that they shouldn't be in her
kitchen. She later endures a murderously sexual groping from Bulger,
one of the more chilling scenes in the film.
It
is chilling because it is not blatant or predictable, as the many
back-of-the head gun shootings or the strangulations are. They are
not chilling. In a world full of images of beheadings and killings by
drone-delivered weaponry, Bulger's atrocities are disengaging.
Instead of feelings of shock and horror, discomfort and outrage,
feelings of boredom and disconnection prevail.
If
Johnny Depp is miscast, Kevin Bacon, FBI officer Charles Maguire, and
Benedict Cumberbatch, as Jimmy's politician brother Billy, have very
little to work with. There's a scene of a spat in the FBI office when
Charles Maguire seems on the verge of uncovering the duplicity of his
star investigator, John Connolly, played very well by Joel Edgerton.
It has the low-energy huffiness of a faux-fight among Ivy League dorm
mates, pretending to be 'street'.
The
elegy rolls along as a series of voiced-over testimonies by
individuals involved in the story, told in a time-line manner which
grounds the storytelling in a slow-staccato 'and then and then'
rhythm, to produce a downbeat biopic and, ultimately, a sense of 'so
what'.
There
never appears to be anything at stake for Bulger, the bent cops and
agents or for the people of South Boston. The first character with
agency and urgency is Fred Wysack, the late-arriving DA, played by
Corey Stoll, who's actions begin the ending of the film.
Perhaps
the film-makers reliance on narrative rather than drama comes from
the book. Perhaps they sought to cleave firmly to it and the film
suffers from a reliance on the ordinariness of the grim actions of
Bulger and Connolly, without managing to require audiences to engage
beyond thinking 'right, that's what happened'.
Mystic
River,
(Clint Eastwood, 2003) is set in South Boston and involves vicious
gangsters and cops caught between collusion and conviction to much
better effect. It is based on a book. A novel not a history. Thus it
gives us an affecting drama, not an underwhelming bio-pic. Like Black
Mass.
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