Scott Cooper’s version of the mob is closer to Matteo Garrone’s Gomorrah than it is to Martin Scorsese’s Goodfellas or even Frances Ford Coppola’s The Godfather. The latter two filmmakers cannot help but romanticize the mafia. They throw in a lot of graphic violence and in Godfather II we see the pared-down evil that Michael Corleone has become. Still, film fans tend to prefer films that approach the mob with a nudge, nudge, wink wink. Cooper refused to do that with Black Mass. Rather, he has exposed its icky, unattractive real face. I have to admit I was a bit taken aback by the middling reviews for Black Mass, a film I think is not only Scott Cooper’s best but one of the year’s best overall. It can be put in the same category as Beasts of No Nation — films that don’t feel like making the audience more comfortable in their quest towards ripping off the band-aid slowly. This one’s gonna hurt. And it ain’t gonna be quick.
Johnny Depp is at his best as Whitey Bulger — one of the most manipulative, ruthless killers the Boston mob ever produced. The film presents him as someone with half a heart until finally whatever’s left of his heart is removed. He becomes his own criminal mastermind who believes he can execute people at will — his enemies, people he thinks are his enemies, even someone who might look at him wrong. He is drunk on power and isn’t ready to surrender until he’s lived most of his life and is finally caught, as a frail old man.
Depp’s scenes are creepy but more than that, as Kenneth Turan says, he disappears into the part: “This is an ideal role for Depp because it calls on both his formidable charisma — Bulger’s terrifying presence would chill the blood whenever he walked into a room — and his penchant for hiding in plain sight Using silicone prosthetics, blue contact lenses and a receding hairline wig so elaborate it had to be worked on in shifts 24 hours a day, makeup department head Joel Harlow and his team created a look Depp could disappear into and still be himself. His convincingly psychotic and homicidal Bulger is a Nosferatu look-alike, a bloodless vampire of crime whose performance is the essence of this film.”
Peter Travers says this about Depp, “Ice-cold. Dead eyes. Demonic laugh. His face a mask you can’t read until he’s up in yours. Then run. That’s Johnny Depp giving everything he’s got in a riveting, rattlesnake performance as South Boston gangster James “Whitey” Bulger in Black Mass.”
And on the other side of things my friend Todd Vanderwerff writes, “Nothing on screen is bad, exactly. It’s all handsomely mounted and strikingly shot. The performances are all good, and the dialogue has a muted grandeur. But you’ll also notice just how unriveted you are, just how little you can bring yourself to care about what’s happening up on screen. In other words, you, too, might find yourself watching Obviously Failed Oscarbait.”
It always makes me laugh a little when people call something “failed” — I guess because nobody knows anything. There are going to be a great many people who view Johnny Depp’s performance as “Oscarbait,” failed or otherwise. But you know who else was accused of that? Last year’s winner, Eddie Redmayne. What a lot of folks think of as “Oscarbait” is, in fact, what Oscar voters might like. Is Depp’s “failed Oscarbait” even worse than “Oscarbait”? I don’t know. But it’s a damn fine performance either way.
Black Mass made me think of The Departed, where the characters are all likable, even the Whitey stand-in, Jack Nicholson. It also made me think of Goodfellas — and again, likable characters and a likable world where we all are in on the joke. Really, though, Black Mass appropriately is a stomach-turner, and a reminder that romanticizing the mob might not be the best way to go when evaluating who they are and what they do.
Depp seems to be the frontrunner for Best Actor, though getting a nod for Best Picture would certainly go along way to push that one through. As with everything Oscar, he would have to be out there kissing babies to pull in a win. Who really wants to do that? Only people who really want to win.
