Gangster movies tend to hang on loyalty. Gangs tend to hang on loyalty. The lower thugs not giving up their betters, so that the cops can’t make cases that disrupt the criminal enterprise. And audiences respect that loyalty in gangster stories. Sure, they’re all murdering, thieving monsters. But they stick together.
Buy Black Mass 4K UHDBlack Mass (2015) is largely about the hollowness of that loyalty, and the corrupting force of it. Jimmy “Whitey” Bulger, a major gangster in ’70s Boston, didn’t only have the loyalty of his men. He had the loyalty of a member of the FBI.
John Connally grew up with Whitey, but was really friends with his brother, Billy, who eventually became president of the Massachusetts Senate. He was the most powerful man in the state… and was determinedly unaware of his brother’s racketeering and murder.
Connally wasn’t. But he figured (rather self-servingly) that the Italians were worse. And Whitey would make a valuable informant against them. In return, the FBI could turn a blind eye towards his minor infractions.
Maybe it would have been a good deal if Whitey wasn’t a complete psychopath. He murdered, or ordered murdered, people for reasons that were dubious at best. Might be, he just liked killing. And was happier to do it when he knew the FBI would turn a blind eye, if he was “informing.”
Which leads to some typical gangster movie shenanigans. The intersection of government and crime is interesting, but not new. Black Mass (a title never explained in the film) is most distinguished by its performances.
The showiest is, of course, Johnny Depp as Jimmy “Whitey” Bulger. Whitey was a genuinely odd man, who was a neighborhood fixture early in his teens. In jail, he took part in LSD trials to get some time off his sentence. He was an odd duck, and some of his oddness was his penchant for sudden catastrophic violence.
That’s not necessarily what Depp is known for, but he embodies Whitey entirely in this performance. Just as impressive, though, are the seemingly interchangeable FBI men who populate the Boston office. It’s a collection of semi-anonymous men played by heavy hitters like Kevin Bacon, Adam Scott, and particularly David Harbour. Harbour starts as the stoic collaborator with John’s semi-criminal plan, but he eventually breaks down under the weight of Bulger’s criminality.
All the performances in the film are fantastic, better, perhaps, than the film’s story. Because that is a rather repetitive cascade of events. FBI meets: is this alliance worth it? Connolly assures them it is. Bulger commits a lot of crimes. Rinse, repeat.
The film asks questions it doesn’t answer. Is the value of loyalty worth the price paid? I don’t know, but just a cursory look at Bulger’s compatriots shows them to be scum. And he treats them like that, the second they’re inconvenient.
So, he’s a grotesque character. What’s left of interest are the coterie around him. Most of them are sketchily drawn, and held up by bravura performances. Black Mass is more intriguing than interesting, held up by the uniformly impeccable performances of a brilliant cast.
It’s a pretty good-looking film, and this is a pretty good looking 4K release. Set mostly in the ’70s and early ’80s, Black Mass gets the look of the period right. The ’70s seems warmer, while in the ’80s the look is colder and more blue.
Black Mass doesn’t have a story that sets itself higher than most gangster stories. It’s a real-life, and well-known story, so there’s not a ton of tension in what is going to happen. The FBI angle, where they are functionally complicit in aiding and abetting, is interesting, but the actual action in the film is very familiar. That doesn’t stop the cast, especially Johnny Depp, from giving absolutely committed performances. He turns menace off and on at the drop of a hat, giving Whitey Bulger the feel of an unpredictable psychopath. It’s enough to recommend the film.
Black Mass has been released on 4K UHD by Warner Brothers. There is no digital code or standard Blu-ray included, just the UHD disc. Video extras on the disc include “Black Mass: Deepest Cover, Darkest Crime” (23 min), which features the cast and crew talking about the film and its real-life background; “Johnny Depp: Becoming White Bulger” (13 min), where Depp discusses his preparation for the role; and “The Manhunt for Whitey Bulger” (62 min), a documentary about the real-life events that happen after the film’s main story, where Bulger is on the run from the law, and how he is ultimately caught.
