Rating summary

Movie		1.5
Video		4.5
Audio		4.0
Extras		4.0
Overall		3.0

Black Mass Blu-ray Movie Review

No Communion

Reviewed by Michael Reuben February 15, 2016

James "Whitey" Bulger is one of the most notorious gangsters in American history. For over two decades, Bulger dominated Boston's underworld, raking in millions from drugs, extortion, gambling and any other business that took his fancy. Anyone in Bulger's way was either beaten into submission or, more often, disappeared forever. Local law enforcement was powerless to stop him, because Bulger, in an ingenious scam, had corrupted the FBI into wrapping him in its protection. Bulger now claims that he simply paid federal agents to look the other way, but the truth is more disturbing. Beginning in 1974, Bulger registered as a federal informant, supposedly cooperating with the Bureau to bring down the Mafia. In exchange, he was effectively granted immunity for his own criminal activities. Every effort to investigate him was cut short, redirected or sabotaged. To this day, the FBI's relationship with Bulger remains a stain on the Bureau's reputation.

Bulger has already been the subject of film and TV documentaries, including the recent Whitey: United States V. James. J. Bulger, as well as numerous books, including Black Mass: The True Story of an Unholy Alliance Between the FBI and the Irish Mob, which was written by the two Boston Globe reporters who first revealed Bulger's deal with the government. Aspects of his biography have been incorporated into fictional characters like Jack Nicholson's mob boss in The Departed and Jason Isaacs' "bad" brother in Showtime's Brotherhood. When Black Mass was first announced, it promised a gripping portrayal of the actual criminal mastermind, to be played by the chameleon-like Johnny Depp, who specializes in bringing extreme characters to life.

Unfortunately, Black Mass is a dud, a two-hour catalog of missed opportunities and poor filmmaking choices by director Scott Cooper (Crazy Heart), who succeeded to the director's chair after several more experienced hands left the project. Cooper substantially rewrote the script by Jez Butterworth and Mark Mallouk (who remain credited as writers), and he has said that he wanted to "humanize" Bulger by exploring lesser known aspects of his life. In the process, though, he failed to provide an effective account of the criminal career that makes Bulger worthy of attention in the first place. Trying to tell multiple stories at once, Cooper tells none of them well.

(Note: If one believes that it is possible to "spoil" matters of historical record that have been widely reported, then the following review could be said to contain "spoilers".)

Black Mass picks up Bulger (Depp) in 1975, when he has already served a nine-year prison term (part of it in Alcatraz) and returned to South Boston to assume control of the Winter Hill Gang. We watch him recruit Kevin Weeks (Jesse Plemons), the last of the trio of close associates and confidantes who would later give evidence against him. The other two are Kevin Martarano (Deadwood's W. Earl Brown) and Stephen Flemmi (Rory Cochrane). Cooper stages several from the long list of notorious crimes in Bulger's career: the murder of businessman Roger Wheeler (David De Beck) at his Tulsa country club, so that Bulger can acquire ownership of World Jai-alai; the casual execution of Deborah Hussey (Juno Temple), an occasional girlfriend of Flemmi who may know too much and talks too easily; and the parking lot shooting of Brian Halloran (Peter Saarsgard), a drug dealer who approaches the FBI with information about Bulger and is almost certainly betrayed by the Bureau. Halloran's friend, Michael Donahue (Patrick M. Walsh), a construction worker with no criminal ties except that he knew Halloran, is also killed because he happened to offer Halloran a ride home.

While all this is happening, Bulger's childhood friend, John Connolly (Joel Edgerton), now an FBI agent, keeps insisting to his skeptical superior (Kevin Bacon) that his old buddy is just a small-timer. In the film's portrayal, it is Connolly who takes the lead in recruiting his pal as an informant and who then looks the other way so assiduously that his self-deception borders on comical. An ambitious climber who sees Bulger as his ticket to career advancement, Connolly finds that, having vouched for his old friend, he is stuck with cleaning up after him. Black Mass also suggests that Connolly was seduced by the flash and swagger of the criminal lifestyle—a point made forcefully by his wife, Marianne (Julianne Nicholson), who, as an outsider, can see clearly past the ties of the old neighborhood. Unlike Connolly's colleague, John Morris (David Harbour), who eventually blows Bulger's cover by tipping off the Globe about his FBI connection, Connolly remains loyal to the end. (The real Connolly is currently serving a lengthy prison term.)

As if all this weren't enough ground to cover, Cooper devotes substantial screen time to Bulger's personal life, showing him playing gin with his aging mother (Mary Klug); trying to act as a father to his illegitimate son (Luke Ryan); overcome with grief when tragedy befalls the boy; and remaining close to his brother, Bobby (Benedict Cumberbatch), a state senator and eventually president of the University of Massachusetts (a position he was forced to resign because of his ties to Whitey). These scenes presumably reflect Cooper's effort to "humanize" Bulger, and the writer/director has even gone so far as to suggest that Bulger's grief over the loss of his son and mother in quick succession may have contributed to the brutality of his crimes. It's a nonsensical theory, since Bulger was a vicious hoodlum long before he suffered personal loss. People cope with bereavement every day, and the vast majority don't become career criminals.

Cooper seems to have been guided by a concern that, as one of his producers says in the extras, there is no "hero" in Whitey Bulger's story. But that is the very nature of gangster films, which are routinely peopled by characters who commit evil deeds and are almost always punished for it in one way or another. The storyteller's job is to cultivate sympathy for the devil, but you can't do it by mixing in a few good deeds with the bad ones. The trick is to make the audience a fan of the bad guy, so that they become complicit in his activities, co-conspirators silently hoping he'll prevail. Think of the Corleone Family in The Godfather; or Henry Hill in Goodfellas; or Ace Rothstein in Casino; or even Tony Montana in Scarface. They're all bad people, but that doesn't prevent viewers from identifying with their point of view.

Of course, Coppola, Scorsese and De Palma knew enough to do the one thing that Cooper skips over, which is to depict their protagonists’ criminal enterprises in a clear and comprehensible way. Henry Hill's narration takes us on a guided tour of New York's wise guy scene; Casino provides a meticulous account of how Las Vegas makes money; and Scarface shows the mechanics of the cocaine trade from cultivation abroad to import and sales at home. The opening of The Godfather is a master class in conveying crucial information effectively and memorably, using nothing more than conversations at a wedding to trace the anatomy of a vast criminal organization. Black Mass has no equivalent, because Cooper makes no serious effort to explain what kind of operation Bulger oversaw or how it worked. It's as if the director expects the audience to supply that knowledge themselves, perhaps gleaned from other gangster films. Devoid of context, Bulger's crimes seem like nothing more than impulsive acts, less the machinations of a mastermind than the self-destructive eruptions characteristic of Joe Pesci in Goodfellas. Indeed, one of Depp's most memorable scenes seems intentionally designed to echo Pesci's famous "What's so funny about me?" intimidation, and the whole of Black Mass leaves the impression of Bulger as Tommy's Irish equivalent, but with piercing blue eyes. Cooper is so busy trying to "humanize" the thug that he loses sight of the master strategist. That character slips quietly away, much as Bulger himself slipped away in 1994 just ahead of an indictment.

An indirect but quietly devastating critique of Black Mass appears in the Blu-ray extras, in the form of an hour-long documentary on the pursuit of Bulger after he fled Boston. The documentary consists of nothing more than interviews, surveillance video and archival photos, but it details the extraordinary care with which Bulger pre-planned his escape and explains how he was able to remain undetected for sixteen years. The documentary is everything that Black Mass should have been and isn't. It demonstrates that you don't need a star turn by a noted actor to tell a gripping yarn. You just need to get the story right.

Black Mass Blu-ray Movie, Video Quality 

Black Mass was shot on film by Masanobu Takayanagi (Silver Linings Playbook), with post-production on a digital intermediate. The image on Warner's 1080p, AVC-encoded Blu-ray is typical of contemporary DI-finished productions, in that the image is sharp and detailed and the grain pattern of the film stock is so refined as to be nearly invisible. The film's color palette is frequently muted and understated, reflecting the worn and chilly Boston landscape of the Seventies and early Eighties (the production used real locations wherever possible). A brighter palette appears in the cheerful scenes in Florida, which the production re-created in Boston's Revere Beach. Occasional scenes at night or in clubs feature more saturated, even lurid colors, but overall Black Mass is not a film that will impress with its visual style. As with the anemic script, the production seems to have relied on Bulger's character, rather than visual design, to create tension and suspense.

Warner's new releases continue to be more aggressively compressed than the studio's catalog titles, a practice that is facilitated by the lack of prominent grain but is still less than optimal. Black Mass has been mastered with an average bitrate of 23.90 Mbps, but at least Warner has used some of the remaining disc space to include over an hour and a half of extras entirely in HD.

Black Mass Blu-ray Movie, Audio Quality 

Except for a few short scenes of gunplay, Black Mass's DTS-HD MA 5.1 soundtrack is mostly a quiet affair, with priority given to dialogue and the sound effects necessary to carry a scene. I have yet to encounter a film set in Boston where people didn't complain about the authenticity of the accents, but the important point here is that they are never so thick as to interfere with understanding the dialogue. The mournful score, which seems more inspired by the film's title than by the actual subject matter, is by Junkie XL a/k/a Tom Holkenborg (Mad Max: Fury Road).

Black Mass Blu-ray Movie, Special Features and Extras 

• Black Mass: Deepest Cover, Darkest Crime (1080p; 1.78:1; 23:00): Multiple interviewees, including Cooper, Depp, Cumberbatch, Edgerton and Harbour, discuss the film and the historical characters. Everyone is obviously sincere in their enthusiasm, but there's an odd tone to the proceedings. It's as if they're all trying to persuade themselves that the movie must be good because the underlying true story is so remarkable.



• Johnny Depp: Becoming Whitey Bulger (1080p; 1.78:1; 12:24): The shorter of the disc's two featurettes concentrates on Depp's preparation to play Bulger, including the development of the elaborate makeup and Depp's research. (Bulger refused to meet with him.)



• The Manhunt for Whitey Bulger (1080p; 1.78:1; 1:01:38): Written, directed and edited by Constantine Nasr (The Green Mile: Walking the Mile), this feature-length documentary recounts how a rotating coalition of Massachusetts lawmen and younger federal agents spent years tracking Bulger, despite continued resistance from the FBI's senior echelons, where Bulger remained an embarrassment. The interviewees include both representatives of law enforcement and journalists who followed the case, including Black Mass authors Dick Lehr and Gerard O'Neill. One of the most interesting subjects is Josh Bond, the young manager of the apartment complex in Santa Monica, California, where Bulger was ultimately apprehended. He still looks bemused by the strange turn his life took when he picked up the phone one day to learn that he'd been unwittingly harboring a fugitive on the FBI's Most Wanted list.

Black Mass Blu-ray Movie, Overall Score and Recommendation 

Johnny Depp's performance in Black Mass is fitfully engaging (though some have disputed its accuracy), but the film itself is inert. Storytelling is all about choices—what point of view to take, which events to include and what to leave out. Black Mass is an object lesson in bad dramatic choices. Not recommended for the film itself, but the disc is worth acquiring for the documentary about the hunt for Whitey.