There is indeed a lost Boston. It’s hidden
beneath the newly gentrified city. It’s a place of memories both good and bad.
Some involve places that now exist only in the past, like Scollay Square, the
old West End and the Combat Zone which reached from the Theater District into
Chinatown. But others represent a way of life, a neighborhood code, and a
culture that are vanishing as the working class becomes smaller as the city
becomes increasingly gentrified. Nonetheless, the memories are kept alive by
those who remember this picture of Boston, however rapidly it erodes.
As Dick Lehr, co-author of Black Mass: The True Story of an Unholy
Alliance Between the FBI and the Irish Mob, on which the movie is based
recalls, “I wouldn’t say it’s gone. It’s largely diminished, because Southie
has changed so much. It used to be an extremely insular neighborhood, almost
entirely Irish-Catholic. But now it’s not. It’s home to a lot of young
professionals and whatnot, and the whole Seaport District. But there are still
plenty of nooks and crannies of old Boston and old Southie, just as there are
in Charlestown. It’s not prevailing and not dominant, so that you can, I think,
spend a day in Southie and not see it, whereas 20 years ago or something, you
couldn’t miss it if you went into Southie.”
This is, after all, the place locals
remember when they reflect on their city. The appeal of this grittier, realer
city is hard to explain to outsiders, but everyone who grew up in Boston is who
they are because of the city that shaped them. Boston leaves its fingerprint.
Humans are products of their environment and Boston, with its tight blocks and
narrow streets aligned with triple-decker houses, has a distinct signature of
its own.
No wonder, then, that no matter
where in the world he ran to in his later years, Whitey Bulger was synonymous
with the tough streets of South Boston. A big part of the Bulger mystique is
that, as fierce a killer as he was, he lived by the code of the streets. Brutal
as they were, his murders were, in his philosophy, justified and committed when
he had been disrespected. He saw himself as a benefactor to his community and
got a lot back in return.
For this reason, Scott Cooper’s Black Mass argues, Whitey Bulger
remained a free man for over forty years. His connections in the FBI covered
him, while the rest of the FBI knew there were moles in the system but didn’t
have the evidence to act. The movies spans the heyday of the Winter Hill Gang
from 1975 to 1987, leaving out much of his life after he left Boston and his relationship
with Catherine Greig (scenes involving Bulger’s life on the lam were filmed
with Sienna Miller as Greig, but were cut before the final release to narrow
the focus). The extent of the FBI’s involvement in Bulger’s ability to elude
prosecution is still disputed. For a while, the extent of Bulger’s agreement
with the FBI was the stuff of rumors, but by the time he was captured in
California in 2011 and was facing nineteen murder charges, the evidence against
John Connolly, a two-faced agent eleven years Bulger’s junior who grew up under
his wing and therefore loyal to his mentor while wanting to impress his
superiors in the agency, on charges ranging from murder to obstruction of
justice was so overwhelming he was sentenced by the State to forty years in
prison.
In Black Mass, Connolly is played by Joel Edgerton, an Australian with
an impressive mastery of working-class Bostonisms. The real Connolly was the
inspiration for the double agent played by Matt Damon in The Departed, but this movie’s version of Connolly as a tragic
figure is probably closer to the truth. In Bulger’s Boston, allegiance to your
neighborhood family runs deeper than career advancement and Connolly aimed for
both. He knows he is in precarious situation when the FBI’s gaze turns toward
Bugler. He is expected to bring organized crime come to an end, but can’t
forget how good Whitey and his politically ambitious brother William (Benedict
Cumberbatch in another stellar performance) were to him in his youth.
Given his predicament, Connolly’s
solution was ingenious as far as it went. He would help his old pal by bringing
down his rivals, the Angiulo Brothers, who ran the North End rackets, in
exchange for Bulger informing the FBI of their movements and helping them bug
their gaming houses. It was a win for all parties involved. Bugler would
accomplish little more than help eradicate his enemies in exchange for being
left almost entirely alone by the FBI. Connolly, in turn, would make good with
his superiors at the FBI, taking responsibility for the arrest of Gennaro
Angiulo in September of 1983 while keeping the heat off of his friend. Of
course, things would get ugly, especially as the murders pinned on Bulger began
to rise and the FBI became increasingly impatient with their rogue informant
and his inside connection.
Bulger’s downfall may well have been
the death of his six-year old son Douglas in 1973 due to Reye’s Syndrome. He
was always a violent criminal, but his murders became bolder then, culminating
in the ordered assassination of business magnet Roger Wheeler who was beginning
to expose the Winter Hill Gang’s doing at his resort in Miami. This was one of
the few times Bulger violated the lesson he thought his son, “If nobody sees it
happen, it didn’t happen.” Wheeler was killed by Bulger’s strongman Johnny
Martorano (W. Earl Brown) in a parking lot in Tulsa in broad daylight.
Whatever the cause of the escalating violence
it becomes harder for Connolly to shield Bulger from his superiors and as the
FBI becomes increasingly suspicious of both Bulger and Connolly. As Connolly
feels the walls closing in on him, Edgerton may have discovered a new talent
for playing weak lugs losing their grip. Black
Mass is blunt about its accusations. Connolly not only knew about Bulger’s
doings but actively helped him cover his tracks. In truth, the FBI knew they
were on to something in their distrust of Connolly, but the weasel knew all the
loopholes.
Though he is ultimately harshest on
William Bulger, the wisest decision by director Scott Cooper is to not
sympathize with Connolly in any way, even as he sees his world collapsing
around him. What he does provide is a cold interpretation of the
Connolly-Bulger relationship in street code terms; products of their time and
place. Above all else, Bulger demanded loyalty. He took the lessons of South
Boston and turned them into a business policy in which the lowest form of
disrespect was running your mouth. Most everyone who winds up dead in the movie
ended up in his burial ground by the Neponset River for talking too much.
Hence, a serio-comic (depends from where you look at it) moment in which Bulger
taunts a secret informant about giving up the secret to a family recipe so
easily is taken seriously even by the audience.
Ironically, the framework of the movie is a
recorded testimony of his associates, now safely in jail, snitching on their
former boss as part of a plea bargain. Many of these men, Kevin Weeks (played
well by Jesse Plemons but, considering Plemons’s resemblance to local boy Matt
Damon one wonders why he wasn’t the natural choice), Stephen Flemmi (Rory
Cochrane), and Martorano, were cold-blooded thugs, but the ease with which they
spill the details of their boss once they are safely behind bars makes one
wonder how long they had tired of his unpredictable outbursts. The film hints
that Flemmi’s beaking point may have been watching Bulger strangle his
stepdaughter to death for fear she has become an informant.
There’s no denying, though, that Whitey
Bulger cultivated himself a steady legion of admirers, even after he got out of
prison. Black Mass offers one brief
moment in which Bulger and his cronies help an elderly woman from the block
carry her groceries up the stairs, much to her gratitude and satisfaction of
having him back in the neighborhood, but the movie could have used a deeper
insight into his stubborn cult following.
After hours of research entailing skimming
through surveillance tapes and talking to Bulger’s attorney, Depp himself
discovered part of the reasoning behind the Bulger fandom.
“Nobody, no matter how evil we would
consider them or that sorta thing, they never look at themselves as evil;
they’re on a quest, and they feel what they’re doing is righteous, from the
worst to the clumsy,” he said. “There’s something poetic about what he was able
to do in his work, and at the same time, be of that very proud Irish immigrant
stock who was loyal to his neighborhood, who was a great caregiver to his
mother, who was very, very close with his brother, who was a very upper-echelon
politician.”
Black
Mass,
however, does the right thing in the end and refuses from telling the story of
Whitey Bulger as a tragic fall. He is, in the words of Stephen Flemmi, “pure
criminal”. This unrelenting approach makes Black
Mass something of an eye-opener even to some of those well versed in his
legacy. It’s all here in plain truth, he was a sociopath capable of murdering
without showing the slightest emotion.
Arguably, this is Johnny Depp’s bravest
performance coming when he needed it most. In recent years he had become the
worst thing a flamboyant star can become, predictable. That’s the inevitable
pitfall of becoming well versed in playing oddballs, the surprise soon wares
off. He tried changing his game up, but movies like The Tourist (underrated though it was) did little to save the
sinking ship. In Black Mass he played
his last card. He stopped being Johnny Depp and became one of the most
despicable killers of the age. It was a bold and smart decision. No one
watching Black Mass will think of
Depp before they think of Bulger, no doubt a partial result of the chilling
demonic make-up job (the soulless blue eyes and skull-like face). Depp had gone
rogue before in Public Enemies, but
that movie was tame and his Dillinger so charming it was nothing more than an
exercise in versatility.
“The physical transformation was utterly
transfixing and complete, but his interior transformation was mesmerizing,”
Scott Cooper said. “For him to completely give himself over to Whitey's psyche
and play not only an extremely broken man and haunted man, but a man who is at
turns vicious and cunning was memorizing to watch. I think Johnny gives a full
body portrait that I hope will rank among some of his great performances of all
time.”
“It was very, very important to look as
much like Jimmy Bulger as humanly possible,” said Depp. “My eyeballs are black
as the ace of spades, so clearly the blue contacts… they were hand-painted
because they needed to be piercing, they needed to cut right through you.”
Depp had been attached to the project
since 2013 when Barry Levinson was set to direct. The deal hit some rocky
ground resulting in Levinson’s exit, Depp’s participation was in doubt over a
salary dispute, and the project itself in limbo. Such was its story ever since
Miramax first bought writes to the book Lehr wrote with Gerard O’Neill in 2000.
At the time, Bugler was still a fugitive and Connolly under indictment, two
factors that helped make the project an enticing venture for any studio. The
scandal surrounding it surely did more good for it than bad.
“We first broke the story in ’88 that
Whitey Bulger was an FBI informant, and we were crucified for it — everyone
emphatically denied it,” O’Neill said. When the FBI confirmed as much in 1997
the story only got better. Somehow, the film seemed destined to be made.
“Black Mass the movie is one of
those legendary Hollywood stories where it’s been on again, off again, on
again, off again, on again, off again for almost 10 years,” Lehr said. “Right
when the book came out in 2000, even before it came out, the movie rights had
been optioned by Harvey Weinstein and his Miramax company. He had in mind Ben
Affleck and Matt Damon, who were just coming off their breakthrough movie. That
was all pretty exciting, but that was 15 years ago now and nothing ever came of
it, and no one knows why. It went through several different producers’ hands
through option and development. There was a director named Robert Greenwald who
had it for a couple of years, and he was going to do a four-hour cable TV movie,
and that never happened.
Then along came Brian Oliver, who was the
producer and made Black Mass along
with Warner Brothers. I think it was 2005 or 2006 when he picked up the option.
At the time, he was a Berkeley grad, an attorney, and he’s in the film
business, but it was not like he was a rainmaker.
He hired a guy to develop the script, but
it took him 10 years to make the movie. It’s all about him and his
determination to turn Black Mass the
book into a movie. The breakthrough from him was he produced Black Swan. His own career opened up in
a big way a few years ago, and he created a company called Cross Creek
Pictures. Black Swan made a ton of
money, a lot of critical acclaim, along with The Ides of March, the George Clooney movie, so he’s become, in the
last five years, a pretty major Hollywood player. And he always had Black Mass, and he never forgot Black Mass, and he finally put that deal
together in the last few years.”
By January of 2014, Scott Cooper was
fighting his way to direct the movie and Depp was ready to hop back on, which
he confirmed that February.
Depp makes Black Mass a terrific actor’s film but not in the traditional
sense. The real star here, however, is Scott Cooper, a Virginian with only
three other films before Black Mass
(including the applauded Crazy Heart)
with an astounding understanding of Boston (a lost Boston at that) every bit as
detailed as Townie’s Ben Affleck’s, in this sense surpassing Clint Eastwood’s Mystic River (which, incidentally, also
featured Kevin Bacon as a hot-tempered law enforcement officer). Everything
about Black Mass rings true,
especially to those who remember the lost city it captures. The ugliness of
Bulger’s legacy may be a shock to them but, like many in the movie itself, they
will accept it as part of the story of the city that shaped them.
