The story of James ‘Whitey’ Bulger is one that, if it weren’t true, would be thought too ridiculous to film. The kingpin of Boston crime was actually an FBI informant when the FBI was trying to take down the Boston Mafia – by playing the FBI he helped take them down while being given the freedom to build his own criminal empire.
Johnny Depp once again disappears into a role as he brings Bulger to life.
Black Mass opens with a man we come to know as Kevin Weeks (Jesse Plemons) agreeing to testify against Bulger. Bulger’s story unfolds as testimony from Weeks, Steve Flemmi (Rory Cochrane) and at least one other of Bulger’s crew talk to FBI interrogators.
We first see Jimmy as he watches the bouncer at a Southie bar brawling with three men (including one of his cousins) who had been barred. Instead of being ticked off at the bouncer, he hires him on the spot as his driver.
It becomes apparent that Jimmy’s gang and the mafia running crime on Boston’s north side are about to get into a war – but fellow Southie FBI Agent John Connolly (Joel Edgerton) convinces his colleague, John Morris (David Harbour) and superior, Charles McGuire (Kevin Bacon) to enlist Jimmy’s aid in taking down the mob. Another agent (Adam Scott) reluctantly goes along.
By the time this alliance from hell actually puts the mob down, Jimmy has expanded to the point where – once the mob are gone – he controls virtually the entire city’s criminal activity. Not only that, but the FBI’s complicity in covering for him until the mob is put down leaves them in a position where they can’t now put a stop to Jimmy.
During the movie, we also Jimmy and his wife, Lindsey Cyr (Dakota Johnson) and son Douglas (Luke Ryan) – but these scenes don’t so much suggest a tiny bit of humanity in the man, as confirm his nastiness as a medical crisis leads to Douglas’ being declared brain dead. Likewise, scenes with his mother (Mary Klug) and an elderly woman, whom he gets his boys to help with her groceries, feel more like Jimmy building goodwill more than actually caring – though he and his brother, Billy (Benedict Cumberbatch) do mourn his mom when she dies.
In one of the great ironies that real life specializes in, while Jimmy has been a career criminal, Billy has become a senator and is the most powerful politician in Massachusetts. The further irony is that each has progressed in their own way independent of the other.
By the time that Jimmy is given up by his men, we’ve seen ample evidence that he was a monster – well deserving of the two life sentences plus five years that he got when he was finally tried after hiding from the law for over a decade.
In the end, Black Mass is possibly Depp’s best work – but it comes in a movie that is more a string of well-conceived and nuanced scenes than a film that is of a single piece. It is full of intrigue – we wonder how and why the FBI would be so desperate as to put themselves in such a corner, and how it took so long for their connection to Jimmy to be put under a microscope – even as we see individual instances of how malicious the man was on both business and personal levels.
There are no poor performances here – though the role of women in the film (as wives and/or potential victims) doesn’t give Julianne Nicholson (as Agent Morris’ wife, Marianne) or Johnson (whose Lindsey disappears after her blow up with Jimmy) much to do, they do it well – but it’s Depp’s movie.
Even Corey Stoll (as Fred Wyshak, the man who eventually puts the pieces together to nail Jimmy, Connolly and Morris) gets very little screen time.
Black Mass feels like a standard gangster film that has been lifted to a higher level by its star. It’s competently directed – Scott Cooper has produced an entertaining and scary true story, but in reaching for Goodfellas or Godfather heights, has wound up with something more like The Departure. It’s good enough to keep its audience’s attention, but other than reinforcing knowledge that James ‘Whitey’ Bulger was a very, very bad man, it really doesn’t have much more to offer.
Final Grade: B
Photos by Claire Folger/Courtesy of Warner Bros.