Black Mass Is Just A Collection Of Little Boys Playing Gangster

black mass

If you want to watch a searing cinematic portrait of Whitey Bulger’s murderous reign as crime king-pin of South Boston, then watch Joe Berlinger’s documentary Whitey: United States Of America V James J Bulger, which used the titular 2013 court case to mount a portrait of the lingering effect of Bulger’s crimes on the local community, charting the growing outrage —from both behind and in front of the lens— at the astonishing culpability of the FBI in his every act.

If you want to see said same murderous reign hammered into the gangster-movie template, then watch Scott Cooper’s Black Mass. It seems less based on the book Black Mass: The True Story Of An Unholy Alliance Between The FBI And The Irish Mob, as claimed; more based on repeated viewings of Goodfellas.

Here, Johnny Depp dons the contact lenses and receding hairline, and plays Bulger with the familiar mix of warm humanity and cold menace; bringing the ‘comedy’ in two separate genre-staple scenes where, pranking underlings by pretending vengeful outrage at minor slights, he may as well be asking “how the fuck am I funny?”

Depp’s best scene —and perhaps the film’s best— comes when that cold menace is shot through with human concern. Julianne Nicholson plays the wet-blanket/moral-compass wife of Joel Edgerton, the local-boy turned FBI badge-polisher who’s made a “business” deal with Depp as informant, a theoretically mutually-beneficial arrangement to get the Italian mafia out of North Boston.

Nicholson —as is the way of gangster-movie wives eternal— sees Edgerton as getting too cozy, too comfortable with consorting with criminals; all the cash, prestige, and power changing the man she married into someone she can’t recognise(!). So, with a host of local goons around at their place for a barbecue, she retires to her room feeling ‘unwell’. Brazenly, Depp comes into check on her: feeling for a temperature and swollen glands he knows aren’t there; the seductive intimacy of his gestures a form of intimidation.

It’s in moments like these that Depp gets to take his role to understated, interesting, multi-layered places. It’s a rare nuanced turn from one of modern cinema’s worst mincing face-pullers, especially given how well it holds up when compared to Jack Nicholson’s on-the-nose, over-the-top performance as Bulger-inspired boss in Martin Scorsese’s The Departed.

Like that film, Black Mass is set amongst Boston’s Southy district, features a handful of mangled Baaaah-stan accents, and has a deep cast (here: Depp, Edgerton, Julianne Nicholson, Benedict Cumberbatch, Kevin Bacon, Peter Sarsgaard, Dakota Johnson, Juno Temple, Rory ‘Slater’ Cochrane, Jesse Plemons, Corey Stoll, and Adam Scott!). But, unlike The Departed, Black Mass has no tension. At all.

With Jez Butterworth —who last year alone co-wrote the great action-movie-eats-itself rumpus Edge Of Tomorrow and made an artful mosaic out of the self-reflexive James Brown biopic Get On Up— adapting the text, you’d hope for something more alive and inventive. He folds framing narratives of Plemons and Cochrane giving testimony deftly into the otherwise-linear plot, but finds no way of making this sordid tale of crime and complicity catch. It flows fast and familiar, but never gives you a reason to care, a moment of real fear.

Part of this is due to the true facts on which Black Mass is based. No one’s under cover, their true identity a tentative cover ready to be blown. Edgerton is working with the mob, but he’s doing so in the open, on the books. He’s sure not a hero, but he’s hardly a villain, either; that a fate that most crooked cops —given they betray the moral codes of both law and criminality— are cinematically handed.

Edgerton’s performance depicts his out-of-his-depth lawman as a little boy playing gangster: his naivety astounding, his threats weak, his lies transparent. When things don’t go his way, he hangs his head, and kicks his feet. It’s a great performance, if only because it functions as a great critique of the film he’s in. Black Mass, too, is just a collection of little boys playing gangster; all its wigs and false moustaches and wide lapels and soundtrack cues and brutal whackings the macho dress-ups and tired tropes of a ‘cool’ genre.

macbeth

In the final act of Justin Kurzel’s brooding, at-times brilliant adaptation of Macbeth, a fire burns; an infernal blaze that sends sparks flying, ash drifting skyward. Smoke clouds soon swallow everything, including the titular king in his castle. The light that shines through the haze is, at first, a pinkish hue, before Kurzel pushes it to a surreal, delirious red: the climax depicted in a smoky monochrome, black and white and red all over. There’s scarlet skies, backlit figures turned crimson silhouettes in front of a with screen, horses receding in differing high-key shades of salmony pink; the palette one in which light and dark so often takes the hue of flesh and blood.

This final scene bookends an opening battle, where Macbeth begins as a general: face-painted, screaming, swinging a sword. War is, as always, hell, but as mist, snow, mud, blood, sweat, and saliva are all sent flying amidst the flaying, Kurzel periodically slows the action to near-stillness; war hell, but also beautiful tableau.

Throughout Macbeth, the 41-year-old South Australian —following up his 2011 debut, Snowtown— constantly creates vivid images, his approach to the text primarily visual. He doesn’t so much dispense with the words, but minimise them; they less exchanged dialogue, more floating poetry. Especially when they’re seductively, breathily whispered by Marion Cotillard, the film’s Lady Macbeth. She heads a cast —Michael Fassbender, Paddy Considine, Sean Harris, Elizabeth Debicki, David Thewlis, Jack Reynor— of game, gruff Scottish accents, but no actual Scotsmen.

At first, this approach seems as if it may not work; as if the story —essentially: Fassbender slays his way to the throne, grows paranoid with guilt, dies— may be made too distant, too abstract. But the film ultimately works —and works wonderfully— due to the way Kurzel juxtaposes the artful words and photography with a raw physicality; even its dreamiest turns filled with images of bodies of water and bodies of men; of blackened moors and skies; of flesh tender, vulnerable, torn asunder. Here, stabbings don’t feel theatrical, deaths grand, emotions staged. Instead, when metal pierces skin, there’s a sense of eroticism; when someone dies, a sense of loss. Macbeth is a story of hauntings, Kurzel’s adaptation creates a feeling truly haunted.