I guess it's officially Oscar season. Johnny Depp ushers us in with an early grab for Best Actor that is easily his best performance in years. Depp plays Whitey Bulger, infamous gangster lord of South Boston, with a monstrous intensity that transforms the character into a devilish force of nature. He disappears into the role, aided by excellent makeup, and transcends the film around him. If nothing else, see this movie for Depp. His chilling, bulbous blue glare is entrancing on screen, and he injects venom into every word he speaks.
The rest of the film is a solid crime thriller, to be sure, but not one I found to be very palatable. We are given precious little insight into Bulger's character, and indeed we are given only shallow and fleeting peeks into the plethora of other characters. Rather than appreciating the scope of the story, I was having trouble keeping tabs on everyone (not helped by the fact that they are all white men in business suits with thick accents discussing a lot of proper nouns that hadn't yet been established visually). The script is immense, spanning several years, locations across the country, and tons of characters; handled well, this type of script can be effective (remember David Fincher's Zodiac?), but here it buries itself in details and names and motives. Whole subplots come and go with seemingly little logic (whether the fault of the writer or the director), and the editing occasionally feels forced and awkward.
That's not to say there aren't shining moments. The performances are solid all around, notably in Joel Edgerton, who has to share several intense scenes with Depp, and in Julianne Nicholson, who shares only one scene with Depp that will probably give me nightmares tonight. Benedict Cumberbatch, Kevin Bacon, Peter Sarsgaard, Corey Stoll, and Juno Temple all pop in for a few scenes, which is fun if nothing else. And the lengthy, expository dialogue sometimes gives way to brutal gems, usually delivered by Depp, that often tore me out of my reverie.
Speaking of reverie, I should mention that Masanobu Takayanagi's cinematography is really excellent (he also helped shoot Babel, Eat Pray Love, Silver Linings Playbook, and State of Play), alternating between closeups of our lead actors' faces and grand stillshots of larger, usually remote locations. Though most images are in stark grayscale and in bleak lighting, Takayanagi frames his shots so that even an abandoned alley or the muddy underside of a bridge look as important as a cathedral. I think someone decided to pay attention to the title. Elegant and almost Gothic, his camerawork gives an engaging and hypnotic energy to the film that I found endlessly intriguing.
It doesn't have the heart of The Town, the sweeping grandeur of an epic like The Godfather, or even commentary on politics or violence like we might see in The Drop or Public Enemies. And watching it, I didn't really care what happened to these people because director Scott Cooper didn't seem to either. But as the last ten minutes came to a strange sort of climax (underscored by a haunting symphonic melody), I realized that the movie works in levels beyond those conventions. It's just an examination of a man's life. Gritty and bleak, the film makes us intimate with a gangster and his methods, including his liaisons with the FBI, and then leaves us with the weight of his sins (and ours, by extension) to contemplate as we leave. If the filmmakers wanted to undermine the cathartic and spiritual (confession/redemption) convention of recent crime dramas, they did so, and this black mass consistently piles on the heavy stuff with no hope for absolution.
IMDb: Black Mass
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