Johnny Depp scares up a performance in the bloated Black Mass
Black Mass is Johnny Depp’s movie. That is, when someone asks you what movies you’ve seen lately, and you answer that you’ve seen Black Mass, and then the person asks what that is, and you say, “The new Johnny Depp movie, the one where he plays an albino Ray Liotta.” But I want to talk for a minute about Corey Stoll. Because I think maybe Stoll, who was a perfect Ernest Hemingway in Woody Allen’s Midnight in Paris and then became the best reason to watch the first, and only the first, season of House of Cards, is actually a gifted office worker who just picks up high-profile acting work on the side.
In Black Mass, Stoll’s desk is in a Boston federal building, and the sign on his door says he is a U.S. attorney, but the no-nonsense shaven head and the loosened but equally no-nonsense necktie and the rolled-up but very white shirt sleeves would get him an employee-of-the-month parking spot outside any high-rise in America. He exudes Type A drive and upright authority and looks like he answers his own phone, never past the first ring. And if his spartan government office is where the buck stops, it’s also where director Scott Cooper’s absorbing but sluggish Black Mass shudders to a halt.
Like most of the actors in Black Mass, Stoll plays a real-life person here: Fred Wyshak, the natural-born prosecutor who helped dismantle James “Whitey” Bulger’s Winter Hill Gang. Along the way, Wyshak and his office took down a couple of FBI agents who had, by protecting Bulger as an informant, enabled the gangster’s unfettered ascent to the top of South Boston’s underworld. In the movie, one of those corrupt G-men, John Connolly, drops by Wyshak’s tidy office to introduce himself, choice Red Sox tickets in hand and Southie accent turned up full blast. Wyshak declines the game and starts to shoo Connolly away before the script prompts him to make the guy sweat with some smart questions about Bulger. And, really, why shouldn’t he be suspicious when Connolly, as portrayed by Joel Edgerton, is as unctuous and shifty as a politician selling you an old car? For Connolly’s part, one look at that head, that tie and that shirt — one look at Stoll, who looks and behaves like no other performer in the laboriously period-centric, actors-workshop-y Black Mass — should have told him to keep his mouth shut.
Until this terse face-off, you’re aware of the layered artifice at work — from Depp’s hair and makeup and marble-factory contact lenses to cinematographer Masanobu Takayanagi’s sulfurous lighting to the showroom variety of kitchen wallpaper decorating seemingly every set — but not distracted by it. You also still basically understand that time is going by: The movie opens in 1975, peaks in 1981 or so, and then goes mute on the chronology until we’re suddenly past the Reagan years. But a couple of minutes with the insistently modern Stoll breaks the fragile Scorsesean spell that Cooper — following the director’s melodramatic Crazy Heart and absurdly dour Out of the Furnace — tries to cast. After that short scene, the movie fails to get going again, and the lost momentum makes a dull countdown out of what should be escalating final-act tension. While Stoll keeps toiling in that office, as though a film crew has interrupted his 65-hour workweek, you see everyone else go back to playing cops and robbers wearing wide lapels and hairspray halos, and you realize just how stylized everything up to now has been, and you wonder how much longer it’s going to take for everyone to get caught or flee.
Also, truth be told, by then you’re a little fatigued by Depp, Edgerton and their respective crews. Cooper crams a lot of crime into Black Mass, starting with Jesse Plemons’ wigs and not stopping until Juno Temple is dead, dead, dead. (A lot of familiar faces, too; see above, plus, on the side of relative law and order, a wardrobe-chewing Kevin Bacon as Connolly’s boss and Adam Scott as a series of reaction shots.) The financial crimes take place offscreen, leaving plenty of time for slayings that never startle the way Cooper intends.
The impersonations on parade here vary from dramatically licensed authenticity — Benedict Cumberbatch fares fine as Bulger’s up-and-up younger brother — to movie-movie caricature. There’s plenty of both in Depp’s Bulger, which conveys the actor’s own self-awareness — the blue eyes and the bad teeth and the leather coats amount to another pirate outfit — and his awareness of Bulger’s self-awareness. (The criminal is said to have been spotted watching The Departed in a theater one night.) It’s showy acting in a showy role, and you sometimes catch him relishing the chance to introduce gunmetal menace to the increasingly florid palette he has relied on over the past 10 or 15 years. Now that we all agree again that he’s capable of grace, canniness and quiet, though, can we also convince him to apply these and other skills to more nuanced projects?
Black Mass feints toward nuance, with a minor display of Bulger’s grief at the death of his son packed into the story to suggest a psychopath’s unexpected dimensionality. This intention is given explicit mention later in the movie, paired with an obligatory Ma’s-Catholic-funeral sequence; to paraphrase a henchman turning state’s evidence, Whitey was never the same after those losses. (Neither, of course, were the families of the people he murdered.) Depp’s performance makes this plain enough without the voice-over, but Cooper seems not to have noticed what his star has done for him.
