Director Scott Cooper is a luminary amidst the growing ranks of current directors who clearly worship the grand old days of gritty 1970s American New Wave cinema, but who also plainly don’t quite understand what made those films great: originality and a desire to rebel against established models. We know Black Mass is a serious gangster film because every now and then someone gets shot in the head, and every exterior shot seems greyer and grimmer than a winter holiday on Novaya Zemlya, laced with furiously sawing Hans Zimmer-ish music to beef up the drama. Johnny Depp plays South Boston brute James “Whitey” Bulger, who starts an ascent from small-time localised heavy to king of the city thanks to his childhood pal John Connolly (Joel Edgerton). Connolly, now an FBI agent who wants to pay Whitey back for saving him from bullies way back in the day as well as looking to give his own career a boost, proposes a deal: if Whitey helps him take down the city’s Mafia bosses, Connolly in turn will shield Whitey as he annexes their business. Like so many recent entries in the gangland genre, Black Mass seeks to extend the “You think I’m funny?” scene from Goodfellas (1990) into an entire movie, as Whitey fakes his way through repeated scenes where he converses with prey, his generally severe demeanour turning reassuringly amicable, only then to dispatch his target with gun, rope, or even the crook of his arm.
Whitey hogs the limelight as he murders and strong-arms his way to the top, although the script (by Mark Mallouk and Jez Butterworth) seems more compelled by Connolly’s obstinate, fixated sense of fidelity: his outright hero worship of the young Whitey blinds him, like many of the other people from the old neighbourhood, to the fact that his Robin Hood postures are mere reeking cover story for vicious predations. The film states rather than explores the fascinating troika of a slumland boys club, however, with the third face provided by Whitey’s brother Billy (Benedict Cumberbatch), who’s risen to become a state Senator and keeps his brother at arm’s length whilst still utilising similar mystique. The same aura of authenticity cements Billy’s political power, rooted in a fiercely clannish world, and all three men operate in their way according to a seemingly genetically coded mission, mixing mutual self-interest in tandem with vague communal ideals. Whitey wants to provide the IRA with guns just as Billy pats his audiences on the back for being the oppressed minority that could and Connolly wants to devastate the Mafia. Black Mass might have said something interesting about this, but instead it falls back on the old gangster movie leitmotifs of identity as a tie that binds and loyalty, however misplaced, as a maxim, critiquing but also servicing a specific vein of proletarian sentimentality. Southie gangland manners have been well charted in cinema in recent years, including of course Mystic River (2003), The Departed (2006), and The Town (2010). Black Mass affects to give us the real dirt on the figures and events who inspired that mystique, but it can’t help but feel like it’s late to the party, over and above its place as a mere boilerplate entry, lacking the pizazz of even a second-string gangster flick like Donnie Brasco (1997), the memory of which Depp might well have been yearning for when he signed up for this.
Whitey, at first relatively restrained although already a calculating and unconscionably brutal pavement warrior, becomes ever more deeply paranoid and swift to deliver fatal violence after his young son Douglas (Luke Ryan) dies, having being left brain-dead by an allergic reaction. He splits from his wife Lindsey (Dakota Johnson), who finds his flaring self-righteousness when she wants to pull the plug a bit hard to swallow. Black Mass starts well and moves forward with a kind of glowering charisma, much like Whitey himself, but becomes increasingly difficult to sit out as Bulger lurks and terrorises and Connolly sweats his way through repeated bluffs. Good actors flit by, asked to come on set and give their five or ten minutes worth of heavy thesping for a veneer of panoramic import, like Kevin Bacon as Connolly’s initially indulgent but soon vindictive boss, Jesse Plemons as the now-compulsory figure of the young initiate who provides relatively ordinary perspective on the peculiarities of his employer’s lifestyle, and Peter Sarsgaard as a jittery hitman who turns stoolie after he’s offended by being cut out of a contract. Juno Temple’s brief appearance as a prostitute who’s also the daughter-in-law of one of Whitey’s crew, yammering away about her brief incarceration and police interview under Whitey’s glare with bubbly obliviousness, helps make her scenes the only ones that really achieve the kind of colourful, organic New Wave-era delight in behaviour that Cooper wants so desperately to emulate. Depp and Temple’s scene together also points, however, to Black Mass’s disinterest in less worn and genre-processed precincts of demimonde portraiture. Whitey reprimands his lieutenant for sleeping with this hooker who calls him daddy, a momentary insight into the wayward manners and morals of men in this lifestyle that begs enlargement, but is provided as just another passing vignette setting up further display of Whitey’s psychopathic violence.
At that, no relationship in the film is probed with any particular depth. The intensity of Connolly’s attachment to Whitey and the specifics of the way the Bulger brothers both relate and avoid messing up each-other’s affairs, are insufficiently studied, whilst Lindsey just vanishes from the film. Depp, caked in a make-up chair chrome-dome, looks as if he’s turning into one of the iguana monsters he ran from in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (1998), an appropriate devolution as the film could be read as a vaguely nihilistic turn for a once-idealistic actor turned put-upon movie-star. He’s effective enough as Bulger and skilled enough to make the physical transformation, which might have been distracting, seem unimportant, and yet it’s mildly depressing that Depp has to play such a glum two-note role to get himself taken seriously again, especially after his deft Terry-Thomas tribute earlier this year in Mortdecai, a superior performance. Many of the actors including Depp himself have obviously been cast to work against image, and most do well, including Cumberbatch, albeit in a rather thankless role. Cooper’s direction, although livelier than his work on Crazy Heart (2009), mistakes moodiness for gravitas, and ambles on without quite adding up all these quality parts into an actual experience. If it’s less grating and pseud as a filch on ’70s cinema aesthetics than American Hustle (2013), it’s also far less animated and never feels, as David O. Russell’s film did, like it’s groping towards any kind of novelty. The old-fashioned tape recorders and other period details are offered with exacting pride but no anthropological wit or passion. Cooper eventually stops his film rather than ends it, reducing Whitey’s later years of exile and anonymity to some perfunctory shots, the totality of Whitey’s unique, even surreal life story allowed to evaporate like so much spilt turpentine. Black Mass moves across the cinema screen smoothly enough, but afterwards I wasn’t sure why I watched it.
