Black Mass

Director: Scott Cooper
Screenplay: Mark Mallouk and Jez Butterworth (based on the book by Dick Lehr and Gerard O’Neill)
Stars: Johnny Depp (James “Whitey” Bulger), Joel Edgerton (John Connolly), Benedict Cumberbatch (Billy Bulger), Dakota Johnson (Lindsey Cyr), Kevin Bacon (Charles McGuire), Peter Sarsgaard (Brian Halloran), Jesse Plemons (Kevin Weeks), Rory Cochrane (Steve Flemmi), David Harbour (John Morris), Adam Scott (FBI Agent Robert Fitzpatrick), Corey Stoll (Fred Wyshak), Julianne Nicholson (Marianne Connolly), W. Earl Brown (John Martorano), Bill Camp (John Callahan), Juno Temple (Deborah Hussey), Mark Mahoney (Mickey Maloney)
MPAA Rating: R
Year of Release: 2015
Country: U.S.
Black Mass
Black MassJohnny Depp has always been a chameleon of an actor, a movie star who has spent his career running from the conventional movie stardom he was seemingly born to live, so it’s no real surprise that his turn as notorious Boston gangster James “Whitey” Bulger in Scott Cooper’s Black Mass is not exactly conventional. Embracing a menacing, make-up laden aura that seems descended from Lon Chaney, the silent-era “Man of a Thousand Faces” who specialized in deformed, internally tormented characters conventionally described as “monsters,” Depp makes good on the film’s horror-sounding title by playing the character as a grotesque fiend of the highest order.

Depp wears steely blue contact lenses that make his eyes even more piercing, especially when they appear to be glowing from behind his yellow-tinted glasses, a rotting front tooth, and a slicked back, receding hairline that bulges around the temples, which gives his head a bulbous, light-bulb-shaped appearance that manages to dwarf those famous cheekbones. In so nakedly conveying inner rot via external ugliness, Depp distances himself from the roles he played in previous gangster movies: the young undercover agent in Donnie Brasco (1997) and the suave, cunning John Dillinger in Public Enemies (2009). Those were some of Depp’s “prettiest” and most conventional roles to date, an approach he rejects in playing Bulger, who ruled South Boston for two decades as the ruthless leader of the Winter Hill Gang, a stark contrast to his brother, Billy (Benedict Cumberbatch), a respected state senator. The screenplay by Mark Mallouk and Jez Butterworth (from the book by Dick Lehr and Gerard O’Neill) finds a few moments of humanity for Bulger, but mostly he is just a monster, consolidating power and slaughtering anyone who dares to cross or—worse—betray him.

The problem with Black Mass, which is set primarily in the late 1970s and early ’80s, is that it is not entirely Bulger’s story. Rather, the protagonist is arguably John Connolly (Joel Edgerton), an FBI agent who grew up in the same South Boston tenement as Bulger and convinces him to act as an FBI informant in exchange for protection, a relationship that Bulger exploits by using the FBI’s willingness to look the other way to orchestrate a massive power grab while feeding the feds minimal information, most of which they were getting from other sources. The film’s dramatic conflict doesn’t lie with Bulger—his monstrosity is in evidence in the film’s opening scene, which means he has virtually no character arc as the classic “tragic gangster.”

That leaves us with Connolly, who appears at first to be a dedicated agent of justice who sees in Bulger a rare opportunity to get inside information that will allow the government to crush the Italian mafia, which was operating virtually unchecked in North Boston. He seems like a golden boy, but as the film progresses, his loyalties come into question. Is he protecting Bulger for the larger good, or has he become too enamored with his childhood friend-turned-gangster and the slick lifestyle he leads (at one point in the film, Connolly’s beleaguered wife, played by Julianne Nicholson, notes that he has started walking differently in his sharper suits and gold watch). There is a lot of talk about codes and loyalty, and we have to wonder whether Connolly’s Southie roots are more compelling than his commitment to the his role as an enforcer of the law.

On paper, this is a compelling stuff, but it never quite comes through in Black Mass because Connolly remains such an enigma. Edgerton is an excellent actor (something he has demonstrated most recently in The Gift, an unnerving thriller he also wrote and directed), but his character feels dramatically inert and too opaque. There is little to suggest any kind of internal struggle, and it’s difficult to discern whether Connolly is a willing participant in his own moral collapse or just Bulger’s pawn. Perhaps the point is that he doesn’t know either, but that confusion is not dramatized either. Instead, we get numerous scenes of Connolly arguing with his FBI superior (Kevin Bacon), who becomes more and more skeptical about Bulger’s usefulness as an informant.

Whenever Depp is on screen, though, Black Mass has a wicked, hypnotic quality that verges on the edge of horror movie territory, a generic shift suggested by the title, which has no real bearing on anything that happens in the film itself, but does evoke such horror movies as Mario Bava’s Black Sabbath (1960) and Bob Clark’s Black Christmas (1974). Depp talks in a low, menacing Boston drawl, and he has a physical stillness that makes his sudden, furious explosions into violence feel all the more intense; the look on his face when he strangles someone—which happens more than once—is utterly psychotic. Director Scott Cooper (Crazy Heart, Out of the Furnace) lets Depp do his thing, and he surrounds him with a grungy mise-en-scene and cast of character actors with mugs that look like they’ve been carved out of stone, which gives the film a sense of physical presence that is compelling in and of itself. It’s too bad, then, that the dramatic core of the film is so flat, which makes it feel more derivative than devastating.

Copyright ©2015 James Kendrick

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Overall Rating: (2.5)




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