Bad Fellas: BLACK MASS

Black Mass is a true crime gangster picture that doesn’t have a perspective or opinion on the events it recounts. It is content to grimly reenact backroom power plays and violent hits without caring too much about what it meant to the people involved, let alone using the proceedings as windows into their psyches. Set in Boston during the reign of crime kingpin James “Whitey” Bulger, a man who muscled out the Italian mob to become the city’s main source of organized crime, the screenplay makes clear the ties of neighborhood loyalty. This allowed Bulger to enter a mutually beneficial relationship with an FBI agent who once was a schoolyard chum, feeding information about his rivals while receiving a blind eye to his own criminal enterprises. This, along with a senator for a brother, allowed him to remain untouched for decades.

Director Scott Cooper (Crazy Heart) and screenwriters Mark Mallouk and Jez Butterworth (Get on Up) start in 1975 and work their way to 1995, following Bulger from humble nastiness to king of crime before it all unravels for him. Perhaps assuming the target audience has seen some gangster stories play out before, the film is not particularly interested in the how or what of its characters’ schemes, and is never clear about the nature of his income. Instead, it features tight close-ups and slow zooms highlighting small shifts in negotiations and power plays. The recurring moments are either intimately creepy – Bulger staring down another person with intimidating intensity until they give him what he wants – or violent, with killings telegraphed beyond the point of surprise arriving with nonetheless brutal force. What are we to make of these murders? Only that they’re senseless, I suppose.

A large ensemble of reliable talents slurring through a variety of phony Boston accents keep things watchable and reasonably interesting on a moment by moment basis. Joel Edgerton is a slimy FBI agent too close to Bulger, protecting him from his law enforcement colleagues (Kevin Bacon, David Harbour, Adam Scott, Corey Stoll) and their suspicions they’re not getting appropriately valuable intel for all the damage caused. Jesse Plemons, Rory Cochrane, and W. Earl Brown are Whitey’s flunkies, who do a lot of the beating and killing, and drop in and out of the narrative. Benedict Cumberbatch is Bulger’s brother, affectionate but precious about keeping his office out of crime. And in this masculine environment of jockeying for power and speaking in deep whispers, a trio of female roles (for Dakota Johnson, Julianne Nicholson, and Juno Temple) exists to provide people who think this whole thing is dangerous but have no way of stopping it.

The proceedings are the sort of surface seriousness that coasts on the appearance of heavy subject matter without actually engaging with the thematic content that could exist under the surface. Cooper’s too interested in directing the logistics of the large ensemble, making sure everyone’s posing in the correct period detail and mushing their Rs into appropriate vaguely Bostonian sounds. The potentially fascinating story of corruption and crime is told through solid craft, Masanobu Takayanagi’s cinematography finely textured, David Rosenbaum’s editing steadily accumulating mild dread at the story’s most dramatic moments of threat. But there’s never a sense of what all the blood and backstabbing really means for the people involved beyond the simple facts of the case, and no foothold for either a formless “that’s life” truthiness or rigorous moralizing. It goes straight up the middle, ending up nowhere.

The mystery at the center remains the man himself, a presence and an instigator throughout the narrative who somehow remains stubbornly out of focus. How did he first rise to power? What made him the top Irish mobster? What did he think about what he did? We don’t know from this film. Here he seems to emerge fully formed from the shadows. Played by Johnny Depp at his least communicative and yet somehow as, if not more, affected than his Mortdecai or Mad Hatter, his countenance is entombed in artifice. Dead ice blue eyes pop against sickly pale skin, his face remolded out of makeup effects into something that’s always off-putting and unnatural. His Bulger is spooky, moving stiffly, holding his posture rigid, always frowning. He lurks in dark corners, most creepy when he stands hidden in an empty church nook, or when he interrupts a woman reading The Exorcist to calmly, threateningly run his hand along her face and neck.

Presenting the facts in a style synthesized and hollowed out from an amalgamation of every gangster picture that came before is one thing. But to plunk a performance like Depp’s in the middle of it – so artificial, so designed, so immediately signaling evil – is strange. It’s an interesting approach, more Karloff than DeNiro, more Michael Myers than Brando. He doesn’t seem like a real person. He looks like he should’ve been featured in Famous Monsters of Filmland fifty years ago. It makes impossible the notion we should take this seriously as a look into the face of real evil that men do. Besides, the movie’s too unfocused to even activate the Nosferatu qualities of Depp’s work. It’s a case of a project with a script, a director, and a lead performance working at cross purposes. It’s too shallow to be a weighty exploration of crime and punishment, too restrained to be pulpy fun, and too unwilling to follow an eccentric lead into a more overtly nightmarish direction. It’s competent enough to work scene by scene, but adds up to a missed opportunity all around.

Family Matters: AUGUST: OSAGE COUNTY

In adapting his Pulitzer Prize and Tony Award-winning play August: Osage County to screenplay form, Tracy Letts, who has also adapted his Bug and Killer Joe into movies, trimmed the runtime by an hour but kept a great deal of its rich selection of meaty dialogues and monologues. The resulting film gathers a hugely talented ensemble and sets them before this all-you-can-act buffet and lets them chew. It’s theatrical, obviously finely written and overacted to the rafters. The story kicks off with the disappearance of the old patriarch of a large Oklahoman family. We glimpse him, played by Sam Shephard, in a brief introductory scene during which he reads us some T.S. Eliot in voice over. But now he’s gone, and his pill-popping cancer-patient wife (Meryl Streep) calls her grown daughters (Julia Roberts, Julianne Nicholson, and Juliette Lewis) home to wait and worry. Showing off its stagebound roots by trapping the ensemble in a stuffy house – you can almost feel the dusty stillness of the oppressive late-summer air – the film is eager to show us these great actors delivering great dialogue.

The screen is crowded with characters and none escape emotionally unscathed. Streep’s matriarch has cancer of the mouth and early on shouts that the pain has her feeling like he tongue is on fire. Hoo boy, is it ever. She spits unfiltered invective at everyone and everything, screwing up her face as if sucking on a lemon before the acid bubbles out of her, eating away at her family members. She feels neglected. She feels unappreciated. She feels abandoned. She’s shockingly mean and caustic under the mistaken belief that she’s simply telling the truth. You can feel sorry for her while completely understanding why two of her three daughters would want to move so far away. Roberts, who flies in with her husband (Ewan McGregor) and daughter (Abigail Breslin), is anxious and depressed. Lewis, the flightiest daughter, arrives with a stranger (Dermot Mulroney) she introduces, to her family’s surprise, as her fiancé. Nicholson, the most reserved and quietly dutiful of the daughters, has been helping her mother’s caretaker (Misty Upham), to what many characters assume is the detriment of her personal life. Streep’s sister (Margo Martindale), brother-in-law (Chris Cooper), and nephew (Benedict Cumberbatch) arrive as well, casserole in tow.

The centerpiece of the film is a lengthy disastrous dinner scene in which everyone gets to masticate over their lines with great delight as they start slow and build to a great roaring cacophony of spitting, wailing, teasing, lamenting, hollering, accusing, reminiscing, and snapping. In this scene, and many that approach its intensity of character and feeling, the acting is energetic, enthusiastic, and convincing in a beautifully theatrical way. It wouldn’t work if the ensemble was not so nicely balanced, some (Streep, Roberts, Martindale, Lewis) going so big, teeth tearing at every bit of scenery that crosses their paths, that others (Cooper, Nicholson, Breslin) can lean back and go low-key and small. There’s a sense of generosity, the actors pitching their performances at just the right levels to blend wonderfully without a sense that anyone is trying to out act their castmates. It’s gloriously hammy in the best sense of theatricality and the film is wise to step back and let them roar.

That’s precisely what the film is best at giving us: a talented ensemble chewing its way through delicious writing. It’s not much in the way of visually interesting, but that’s hardly an attempt on my part to pin the movie’s faults on staginess. On the contrary, I found the film’s theatrical roots to be better the more clearly and simply shown. This is only the second film from director John Wells, a longtime TV writer, director, and showrunner most famous for NBC’s E.R. and currently of Showtime’s Shameless. He shoots the film only functionally, with little personality. He stays out of the way of the crackling chaos in the familial war of words as old resentments erupt, spilling over into freshly growing fissure vents.

Even after slightly over two hours, there’s not much clarity in the geography of our surroundings or the house’s architecture. And the few attempts to open up past the proscenium – just a couple of car trips, really – seem too desperate an attempt to make it play at some imagined ideal of cinematic interpretation. Wells’s inexpressive direction dutifully captures the performances and allows for appreciation of Letts’s writing, but more imagination in the visual staging, and maybe even a better sense of claustrophobia by heightening the theatrical roots, would’ve brought the whole endeavor up to the same level as the material and the performances. He traffic-cops the cast capably, coaxing a fine-tuned sense of energy and a great underlying tension in the straining relationships. But in the end, I found myself appreciating the performances and the writing more than being moved by the whole.