Joel Edgerton and Johnny Depp (Claire Folger/Warner Bros. Pictures)
If you can buy Johnny Depp as Benedict Cumberbatch’s older Irish brother; if you can watch a gangster movie that features the Rolling Stones on the soundtrack without comparing it to the works of Martin Scorsese; if you trust Scott Cooper, the hack who directed the banal country music drama Crazy Heart, to navigate a thickly-accented ensemble cast through an epic tale of South Boston crime, tribal loyalty, brotherhood, and friendship; if you can get past all those hurdles, then Black Mass will work fine for you.
But it’s a lot to overcome. A heavily-made up Depp plays Whitey Bulger, the brutal kingpin of South Boston’s Irish-American mob. The movie focuses on Bulger’s involvement with FBI agent John Connolly (Joel Edgerton), who grew up with Bulger. Connolly decides that his old neighborhood hero, a murderous psychopath, would make a reliable informant to bring down the Angiulo crime family, Bulger’s most hated rivals.
The role of Whitey Bulger would have been a natural fit for another generation of actors, a James Cagney or Frank Gorshin. Depp’s makeup people seem to have dredged up the latter’s corpse, wriggled the unrepentant ham into his late elder’s skin and affixed steely-blue prosthetic irises. The result is an emotionally and physically restrained performance, a coiled and angry creature more than a human. Depp stands as an intimidating figure over his henchmen, but the uneasy friendship with Connolly doesn’t come off. Edgerton is fine, but is no match for Depp’s makeup, his baby face too smooth to register the gradual moral descent from simply looking the other way when his star source orders a few hits to reveling in the gangster lifestyle.
The film’s biggest strength is in its supporting cast. I’m not sure how much of their seedy appearance is owed to makeup, but they sure look like guys you wouldn’t want to see if you walked into a South Boston bar. The film opens as longtime Bulger confidant Kevin Weeks (Jesse Plemons and his presumably prosthetic bulbousness) spills the beans to the authorities. Interrogations are peppered throughout the film as brutal episodes in the Bulger timeline are framed by his former associates held under questioning. Plemons and fellow supporting cast members like Rory Cochran and Peter Sarsgaard turn in suitably colorful performances, and the film’s period art direction seems spot-on. But it is missing a driving spark.
The movie comes closest to finding that spark with Julianne Nicholson, as Connolly’s wife Marianne. When the FBI agent gets defensive about Bulger, explaining that the mob boss was good to him when they were growing up, his wife coos, “Did he take you trick or treating?” As violent as Black Mass is, it could have used more of this. It also could have used a more convincing actor as Billy Bulger, Whitey’s little brother in the Massachusetts State Senate. The traces of Benedict Cumberbatch’s native accent that slip through his portrayal could conceivably be excused as Boston Brahmin, but if you can suspend disbelief enough to believe they’re siblings, you have a better imagination than I do.
The script by Mark Mallouk and Jez Butterworth, based on the book by Dick Lehr and Gerard O’Neill, tries to humanize Bulger—he loves his young son and says hi to old ladies in the neighborhood. Butterworth wrote the script to the James Brown biopic Get On Up, and to a lesser extent than that film this isn’t weighed by the usual; biopic tropes. But Cooper can’t make it sing, generating little angst out of a cultural milieu that should be naturally explosive. I wasn’t bored by Black Mass, but if my most vivid memory from a gangster movie is a line about trick or treating, something went wrong.
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Black Mass
Directed by Scott Cooper
Written by Mark Mallouk and Jez Butterworth
With Johnny Depp, Joel Edgerton, Benedict Cumberbatch
Rated R for brutal violence, language throughout, some sexual references and brief drug use
Running time 122 minutes
Opens today at a multiplex near you
