Black Mass – directed by Scott Cooper. Crime Drama. 122 minutes Color 2015.
★★★★
The Story: A Boston racketeer becomes an FBI informant and The Godfather of Boston.
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Johnny Depp is the inheritor of Brando’s mantle. I don’t mean the mantle that had “The Greatest Actor In The World” written on it that everybody in the world could see but him.
That mantle ruined Brando. No, I mean the mantle of all the parts Brando never played, through laziness, perversity, and ruin.
Depp made two movies with Brando, one of which Depp directed, The Brave in which Brando gave one of his most brilliantly conceived and terrifying characterizations. Brando kept contact with Depp; the long midnight calls for which Brando was known, yes, but also the fact that who else was there? Sean Penn, whom Brando also called? Penn didn’t have the range, and he was also lazy.
Brando’s mantle is not the parts that Brando never played: Coriolanus, Lear, Macbeth. No, Brando was a heavy actor; Depp is not. Depp must choose lighter fare to dine on. Depp is a miniaturist. Depp could play Iago, but never Othello. Both could do Restoration comedy, but Depp only has done it. His brilliant performance in Mordecai is a version of it. He keeps setting before us small masterpieces of technique. And Black Mass is one of them.
He wears a big makeup from the start, and it does not relent as the character ages and becomes more ruthless before our eyes. He plays a gang lord who achieves immunity from his crimes because he has enlisted himself as an informant to the FBI on the doings of gangs rival to him.
However, this betrays a code common to his community, his cohorts, and his Catholicism. You do not peach! Those you were raised with, in the Boston hood and boyhood, you remain loyal to through thick and thin, mainly thick. No murder, crime, betrayal, divorce, may clash with the code of this loyalty. You stand by this code as you would your family, your own dearest child. You sacrifice all higher ideals for this code. It is more to you than religion.
Now when the story of Black Mass appeared, I read it with fascination because it recorded the daring of this gang lord, James “Whitey” Bulger, his long career, his eluding arrest, and his eventual escape. Set against this story is the story of Bulger’s younger brother, William Bulger, who was a state senator and as honest as James was dishonest – but would not betray him, nor more would he benefit from Whitey’s crimes. The story is starling and daft. As journalism it is superb.
But as drama it looses force because the power that brings Bulger down is not the arrival of a new FBI chief in Boston as we are told, but the arising and resumption of a set of standards and codes older than loyalty codes. Those codes are the codes of human decency. They are more primordial than any code of loyalty, justice, or retribution. For Whitey is seen in time as the enemy of the survival of family itself. Whitey kills everyone slightly suspicious. And, as he does this, his cohorts stir and see that his loyalty code does not hold true. It is being used for assassination. Any of them might go next.
However, in the journalism on which Black Mass is based this older code of decency is not given play, and in the movie it is only hinted at. The women are the first to express it, but we lose track of them in impotence and focus. Eventually the men of his gang see his madness and arise loyal to that decency, and turn state’s evidence against Bulgur. But this is only done cinematically and slightly. There is no scene for it. There is no confrontation.
So in the end, the film disappoints. It is not high and noble ideals that brought Bulger down, but simple, primitive, human ones. But that’s not what we get. Instead, we get is journalism. What we need is a movie.
Whitey Bulger was never brought down. He slipped away and lived in hiding for years. In a way, his escape was from the very human values that did him in. But we never see this.
What we see is a superb production, beautifully acted by everyone. And Johnny Depp with nothing to play against.
Here he is, though, playing The Godfather, an Irish one. How different he is from Brando. And how right he is to tackle a role of this ferocity. Played, unlike Brando, without humor, without kindliness. But just as sane, just as determined. He is a businessman for our time. It is a chief work in Depp’s portfolio.