By Karen Chutsky
The Movie Lady
No-one hated the Italian Mafia more than Robert Kennedy, the famed attorney general of the 60's, who set out LEGALLY to destroy the brutal mobsters choke hold on his beloved Boston. But it took an ILLEGAL gangster- Whitey Bulger- to finally bring them down, or more accurately, to get the FBI to do the dirty work of getting rid of his biggest rival for him.
Remember those infamous words Mickey Rooney uttered in Boys Town, “No Faddah, I ain’t rattin’ on my braddah.” Well in “Black Mass” that code of conduct-the lifelong oath of poor street kids to protect one another no matter what the cost, is at the heart of Scott Cooper’s film. The only difference is the oath sounds more like this-“Like it aw nawt, when yaw a street kid, you give and get lawlty.” These were a different breed of mobster, that of Boston’s Southie boys. They made up the White Hill Gang, most of whom came out of the gutter projects of the fifties. They shared a singular state of mind, that of the Immigrant Irish against the world.
And at the gang’s helm was Whitey Bulger- a dangerous delinquent with a Jimmy Cagney flair. At a young age he did a long stint on the Alcatraz rock, but managed to spend those years wisely in the prison library sharpening his instincts, turning his mind into an encyclopedia of law enforcements tactics and past mobster mistakes. He came out like a chess master, ready to make controlled moves to shake down the city. He stuck to the shadows through it all, managing to keep his hands clean making the most of the Southie neighborhoods “Code of Silence” that had his back.
It was that loyalty that helped Whitey Bulger keep his nefarious stronghold on the city of Boston for two decades, loyalty that kept his political heavy weight brother-Massachusetts State Senate president Jimmy Bulger- from being touched by any scandal, and loyalty that brought an ambitious FBI agent John Connolly the glory he sought in his career, to be the one to bring down the head of the Boston mafia, though he did it by wallowing in the filth of Boston’s White Hill Gang’s underworld.
From his perch overlooking the city, Agent Connolly was looking to bag a top tier informant to help him shine in the Boston Organized Crime Division of the FBI. And Whitey Bulger was willing to play that role, for a price. He’d help Connolly bring down the Mafioso Angiulo Family in North Boston, in exchange for being left alone to go about his malfeasant businesses as he pleased.
It was a deal that became so out of whack that any good that came the FBI’s way was offset by the unbridled license Bulger exercised to commit crimes, and the invisible ink addendum of sorts that called for the FBI Agents to commit crimes to protect Bulger, favors that came in the form of tip-offs to any law enforcement getting too close to Bulger’s operations.
Connolly, the “Elmer Gantry“ of the Boston FBI office, used the power of his charismatic words to cover Bulger's crime wave tracks and to win over converts to his way of doing things, while keeping up a blizzard of false paperwork that gave Bulger a high gloss stamped seal of FBI approval designating him a five star informant.
Thus the FBI became an intoxicated passenger on the Bulger train.
Throw into the Kabal; a brutal hitman named Steve Flemmi, an FBI agent by the name of Morris who got too- seduced and too-entangled to get un-entangled, a slew of prominent judges, police chiefs and politicians and you’ve got a ‘Black Mass’ in Boston Crime.
“Black Mass” is a good old fashioned mob movie where everyone is bad. Beware, it’s awash with violence and vulgarity, but that’s to be expected when the main players are engaging in extortion, loan sharking, gambling, drug trafficking and lots of murder.
The screenplay was based on the book , ‘Black Mass’, written by two Pulitzer prize winning reporters hailing from the famed Spotlight investigative team at the Boston Globe, Dick Lehr and Gerard O’Neill. They spent years piecing together the underworld web choking their city beat. Slowly they picked at the fraying yarns until the blanket of the underworld began unraveling, one dirty rat at a time. The toxic waste of Bulger’s world oozed out and eventually drowned high flying FBI agent Connolly. But not before he tipped off Whitey Bulger- one last time- and amazingly Bulger managed to stay on the lam for nearly 20 years. He was finally arrested in Santa Monica in 2011.
Johnny Depp once again puts in a strong performance transmuting himself into the slithering greasy snake that was and still is Whitey Bulger.
Benedict Cumberbatch (the new young English Sherlock Holmes on BBC) measures up to the high bar of character acting the English carry off as if by birth rite.
But the award should go to Joel Edgerton playing John Connolly. He’s a powerful screen presence as the magnetic ballsy Southie FBI Agent whose fancy footwork and blowhard street charm allowed him to get away with his gutsy power game for near two decades. You really do feel bad he has to eventually take the fall.
The big drawback is the film only skims the surface of it all. The whole scope of the epic story is much better represented in the book, a detailed crime manual worth a read before or after you see the film.
So if you’re up for the violent double crossing fermenting abuse of power at the center of which are the black hearts of two old friends, and a lot of creepy hoods, which in-turn strangles a city, you’ll want to see “Black Mass.”