Black Mass movie review & film summary (2015)

What we're seeing in "Black Mass," then, is not exactly Bulger, although we do see small-scaled moments of him interacting with his lover and son and underlings, as a regular person might. Mostly we're seeing the idea of Bulger: what Bulger represented to the people he hoodwinked and frightened and bent to his will. The story is told mainly through the eyes of Bulger's criminal associates. They come forward, one after the other, to describe some new facet of their boss' awfulness and admit their inability to reject it. In a scene where Bulger strangles another potential informant, the camera moves away from the murder to study the reactions of the man who enabled it, the better to absorb his shocked realization that he still has a bit of soul left and doesn't want Bulger to steal it.

We never gain access to Bulger's emotional interior. We're always looking at him from some storytelling remove. That he's always being reacted to or described, rather than entered into and understood, contributes to the notion of Bulger as "Bulger." Cooper shoots most of the film's FBI interrogation room scenes, and many of the scenes where Bulger tries to pry information or extract pledges of loyalty from his men, in a simple, tightly-framed, shot-reverse shot pattern, like a priest and a parishioner in a confession booth. This, too, is appropriate. What the other characters are describing (or confessing to) is an ongoing pact that they made with a real-life devil, and the irrevocable moral, perhaps spiritual damage they realized they had suffered too late to save their souls. Tom Holkenburg's score is funereal, music for a tragic recollection. At times it hits very low notes that seem to have been played on a pipe organ, as if making good on the film's punny title.

All this makes Depp exactly the right person to play Bulger in "Black Mass." In many of his other roles he seems to be channeling actors who made extravagant makeup and extreme gestures part of the experience: Lon Chaney, Peter Sellers, Orson Welles. This is another performance in that vein: a new panel to add to a gallery that showcases the likes of Edward Scissorhands, Willy Wonka and Captain Jack Sparrow. While the performance has moments of dry humor and even tenderness (mainly towards Bulger's girlfriend and son and his sainted mother, who cheats at cards) Depp is mainly portraying the myth here, not the man; not who Bulger was, but what he meant. In that context Depp's choices, and the film's, seem spot-on. Depp is chilling here in the way that great horror movie actors from the 1930s and '40s are chilling.

As sound as its central idea is, the execution of "Black Mass" is flawed. For most of its running time, it seems to be ramping up to greatness, only to turn around and sit down and brood a bit more. It's frustratingly not-quite-there, and half-assed in some ways. But it has a vision, and it's a powerful one. It's a gangster horror movie. It lingers in the mind.

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