Black Mass

James ​“Whitey” Bul­ger began his crim­i­nal career at the ten­der age of 14, when he was arrest­ed and charged with lar­ce­ny; Black Mass, Scott Cooper’s stul­ti­fy­ing­ly anaemic biopic, begins in 1975, well after the time he served in Alca­traz. We know that the film is set (and was, com­mend­ably, shot) in Boston, because the word ​“Southie” (Bulger’s neigh­bour­hood ter­rain) is said approx­i­mate­ly as many times as ​“fuck” is in The Big Lebows­ki – the film gen­er­al­ly takes sim­i­lar­ly clunky pains to con­vince us of its veracity.

And yet this is clear­ly a film that is mak­ing gener­ic, uncon­vinc­ing guess­es about its sub­ject and milieu. A very per­ti­nent exam­ple: Whitey’s one son died in 1973, but the film bumps the date up to the late ​’70s, at some unspec­i­fied point (Black Mass is fuzzy on the exact pro­gres­sion of time, among oth­er things) after the open­ing ​“1975” card. The col­lec­tive voiceover (the tell-don’t‑show screen­play is cred­it­ed to Jez But­ter­worth and Mark Mal­louk), sourced from var­i­ous for­mer crim­i­nal asso­ciates turn­ing infor­mants to the FBI, explic­it­ly attrib­ut­es an increase in Whitey’s ambi­tion and sheer vio­lence to this death, but such chrono­log­i­cal scram­bling is demon­stra­bly a screenwriter’s lazy convenience.

This pen­chant for easy psy­chol­o­gis­ing is espe­cial­ly both­er­some because Black Mass reduces the exact details of Whitey’s oper­a­tions to a few lines about all the rack­ets he ran and very lit­tle demon­stra­tion of what that amount­ed to; the crim­i­nal operation’s par­tic­u­lars are of no inter­est to the film­mak­ers. Despite its lack of speci­fici­ty, the film has (still!) been heav­i­ly crit­i­cised for its remain­ing lack of accu­ra­cy by, among oth­ers, Kevin Weeks, a for­mer asso­ciate whose tes­ti­mo­ny at the begin­ning of the film (deliv­ered by a glow­er­ing Jesse Ple­mons) struc­tures the narrative.

Weeks has numer­ous crit­i­cisms of par­tic­u­lar details and gen­er­al wrong-head­ed char­ac­ter­i­sa­tion (the mob­sters didn’t end­less­ly swear at each oth­er, as they reflex­ive­ly do here), but it doesn’t take a crim­i­nal record to sense that this is a film made by peo­ple guess­ing about the facts rather than real­ly under­stand­ing them.

Scott Cooper’s stag­ger­ing­ly dull film is first a show­case for John­ny Depp. Bald and beady-eyed, Depp deliv­ers a show­ily unshowy per­for­mance: his Whitey is lack­ing in charis­ma, a moody sulk­er with an itchy trig­ger fin­ger. Depp is actu­al­ly fine and con­vinc­ing, but the film wants to make him as black-hole unin­ter­est­ing as pos­si­ble and suc­ceeds in this dubi­ous task. The main nar­ra­tive arc is his rela­tion­ship with FBI agent John Con­nol­ly (Joel Edger­ton) in a mutu­al back-scratch­ing deal where­by Bulger’s infor­ma­tion about the Ital­ian mob secured his abil­i­ty to run amuck.

This, pre­dictably, did not end well – here, again, the film is very fuzzy on the big­ger pic­ture con­text on the FBI’s side. Its ill-fit­ting por­ten­tous­ness is cre­at­ed through a tiny visu­al vocab­u­lary and grim­ly pre­dictable plot choic­es. Cooper’s sig­na­ture move is to slow­ly draw the cam­era back­wards after par­tic­u­lar­ly momen­tous kills or tragedies, to under­line the impor­tance of the moment; with seem­ing­ly no oth­er ideas, he repeats this ges­ture through­out, which sums up the unsur­pris­ing two hours as a whole.