Johnny Depp.
The production values, handsome and polished, are all in place. The cast, headed by an Oscar nominee who's fallen from grace in recent years, is a shrewdly assembled gallery of A-listers and some lesser known names who are pretty darn solid. So how come Black Mass, the highly anticipated James “Whitey” Bulger biopic that marks an unofficial kickoff to awards season for studios, is such a chore to sit through?
Don't go looking in front of the camera for answers. The blame falls squarely at the feet of director Scott Cooper (Crazy Heart) and screenwriters Mark Mallouk and Jez Butterworth (Edge of Tomorrow), who have managed to turn a juicy true crime saga into an inert tale of cops and robbers or, in this case, Feds versus mobsters. It's a guilt-stricken gangster flick bathed in formaldehyde.
(from left): Joel Edgerton, Johnny Depp.
But let's give credit where credit is due. Following the painfully unfunny caper Mortdecai yes, I paid full admission price to catch that stinker at the multiplex Depp's sharply drawn turn as Bulger hints at layers the filmmakers seem uninterested in exploring. OK, so the freaky blue contacts he's wearing are distracting, but just about everything else about his performance is spot-on, right down to the diabolical smirk, which shows some hideous looking teeth, and his body language, which nails the gait of a vertically challenged man who nevertheless feels like the most commanding presence in a room.
(from left): Joel Edgerton, Johnny Depp.
Based on Dick Lehr and Gerald O'Neill's 2001 book, Black Mass is structured around testimony Bulger's Winter Hill Gang cronies give to authorities desperately searching for the slippery fugitive, who was finally captured in Santa Monica, Calif. in June 2011. “I'm not a rat,” says South Boston native Kevin Weeks (Breaking Bad's Jesse Plemons), who then proceeds to sing like a canary to save his own hide. Cooper then rewinds to 1975, when Weeks starts working for Bulger, who's just been released from a stint at Alcatraz. Bulger's a scumbag with anger management issues, no doubt, but around his (predominantly Irish American) neighborhood, he's regarded as an effective caretaker, a vigilant watchdog who truly cares for his residents. Small scenes like the one where we see him play gin rummy with his ma (Mary Klug) hint at the more nuanced character study this could have been. Much more endemic of the movie's pedestrian handling of the material is Bulger's relationship with Lindsey Cyr (Dakota Johnson), the (much younger) mother of his grade school-aged son.
(from left): Benedict Cumberbatch, Johnny Depp.
Cooper and his team, though, aren't really that interested in fleshing out Bulger's domestic life. What appears to have drawn them toward this story is the vicious cycle of codependency that forms between the mercurial mafioso and childhood pal John Connolly (Joel Edgerton), who's been hired by the FBI to clean up Boston of organized crime. Just hear me out, he tells his skeptical colleagues; why don't we use Bulger as our snitch in order to rid the town of the more virulent Italian mob? It's a delicate pas de deux between both men on opposite sides of the law, considering Bulger's brother Billy (Benedict Cumberbatch) is a Mass. state senator who chooses to look the other way.
Julianne Nicholson.
But there's zero intrigue to the ways in which Bulger's life of crime corrupts Connelly, sours his marriage to his wife Marianne (Julianne Nicholson, making the most of an underwritten role), and ever so gradually compromises the lawman's career. It doesn't help that Edgerton and Cumberbatch, their labored gesticulations bordering on caricature, can't quite shake off the notion they're playing Southie dress-up. Not even an over-the-top Peter Sarsgaard, who at least livens things up briefly as a junkie associate based in Miami, is able to fully bring this lumbering narrative to life. (At two hours, Black Mass feels at least a half hour longer.)
Such is the filmmakers' insistence they be taken seriously that they wind up leeching the pulp out of their movie. They're shooting themselves in the foot, because their insight into what makes Bulger tick is limited, to say the least, so they could have at least made it entertaining. (Whitey, Joe Berlinger's absorbing documentary about Bulger and the toll his reign of terror took on his victims' families, tackles the subject matter with well-researched assurance.)
(from left): Dakota Johnson, Johnny Depp.
It's clear what Cooper is after here: the kind of no-nonsense clarity that immediately brings to mind Sidney Lumet's work in the genre (Serpico, Prince of the City). Aesthetically, Black Mass hews closer to Lumet and Mike Newell's direction in Donnie Brasco (which starred Depp as an undercover FBI agent opposite Al Pacino) than it does to genre patron saint Martin Scorsese, a man who knew how to make this material sing. On paper, that restraint sounded like a nifty idea, but the lugubrious Black Mass, which lives up to its title all too well, conspicuously lacks the one element it needed to grab its audience: a pulse.
