The excellent crime drama Black Mass tells the true life story of how gangster James “Whitey” Bulger built his Boston Irish gang into a major crime empire under the protection of the FBI. As if we needed an illustrative example, Bulger is proof that psychopathy and ambition is a really nasty combination. And, as Black Mass points out with the FBI characters, even ambition alone can prove to be a vulnerability.
Here’s what really happened: Bulger (Johnny Depp), the ruthless leader of the Winter Hill Gang in South Boston was approached by FBI agent John Connolly (Joel Edgerton) for help in eradicating Boston’s Italian Mafia. Connolly was as ambitious as Bulger, and the two men shared Southie roots. It was in Bulger’s interest to rid himself of the competition, and he parlayed Connolly’s career-climbing grasping into a de facto amnesty that allowed Bulger to expand his murderous enterprises throughout Boston and beyond – even to Florida jai alai and gun running to Northern Ireland.
It’s an amazing tale, and director Scott Cooper (Crazy Heart) tells it very well, letting Depp and Edgerton drive the story by inhabiting a pair of characters that become a toxic mixture. With an erect swagger and some of the coldest eyes in cinema history, Johnny Depp is superb as the feral Bulger. The trailer below includes his life lesson to a small boy around the family breakfast table that shows his world view. When the eyes go cold, Depp’s Bulger can terrorize with a touch, a word or even just a glance.
Joel Edgerton is equally effective as the corrupted FBI agent Connolly, who uses Southie bombast and bluster to escape the snares of office politics. Alas, it all finally catches up to him when a new prosecutor directs fresh eyes on Boston’s crime scene. Until recently, I’ve known Edgerton as an Australian action star (he was the the Navy Seal team leader in Zero Dark Thirty and one of the thugs in Animal Kingdom). Edgerton recently wrote, directed and stared in the excellent psychological thriller The Gift, and his performance in Black mass reinforces that he’s a very talented and versatile filmmaker.
The cast is very deep and uniformly excellent, including Julianne Nicolson, Juno Temple, Kevin Bacon, Benedict Cumberbatch, Corey Stoll (Midnight in Paris and House of Cards) and Dakota Johnson. Besides Depp and Edgerton, three other actors popped off the screen for me:
- Rory Cochrane plays Bulger’s partner Steve Flemmi. Cochrane is a veteran actor whose most memorable role is probably as the pothead Slater in Dazed and Confused. Now filled out in middle age, he plays a guy who is about half of Depp’s scenes, but says very, very little. As they say, the best acting is reacting, and Cochrane just chews gum and observes, letting his eyes tell us what he is thinking and feeling.
- David Harbour plays Connolly’s FBI partner, a guy who becomes entangled in a web not of his own doing. One of the most riveting scenes in Black Mass, he becomes terrorized about, of all things, a recipe for a steak marinade. Harbour is a reliable veteran, but this is among his very best work.
- Peter Sarsgaard is always brilliant, and here he gets to become a tweaked out lowlife who involuntarily giggles when he thinks that getting handed a valise full of cash is a good thing when it’s not.
Black Mass is a top rate crime story very well-told. No more and no less.
One more thing: there is a string of up-close-and-personal murders depicted here, including two by strangulation and a host of gunshot executions. It’s not particularly gruesome by the standards of modern crime movies, but DON’T TAKE YOUR 4-YEAR-OLD. A couple at my screening did just that. What are people thinking?