Black Mass

The FBI’s Least Wanted Man

Black Mass, directed by Scott Cooper.

            The progress of that grand American form, the gangster film, demonstrates the perennially fascinating and intricate connections between life and art.  The form began fictionalizing the exploits of actual criminals, virtually lionized in the newspapers and consequently entirely familiar to the public, in that first great trilogy, Little Caesar, The Public Enemy, and Scarface.  The practice continued in film after film, stretching for decades from the 1930s to the present—think of Bonnie and Clyde, The Godfather trilogy, and GoodFellas.  Now Black Mass reinforces the tradition, emphasizing that unusual relationship between what we like to think of as real life and the creation of art.

            Black Mass, as most viewers know, deals with the life and career of James “Whitey” Bulger (played by Johnny Depp), who ran the Irish mob in Boston and worked closely with the FBI, both as a protected informant and perhaps even as an instrument for the agency’s own misdeeds.  Although it necessarily omits numerous details and of course dramatizes a substantial amount of the drab daily business of crime, a far less glamorous subject than its treatment in the movies, the picture provides a reasonably accurate summation of Whitey Bulger’s career during its most successful years.  The film shows the middle and end of his career, skipping his youthful crimes and his early incarceration in Alcatraz, concentrating mostly on his relationship with a childhood friend and fellow native son of South Boston (Southie to its residents), the FBI agent John Connolly (Joel Edgerton).

            In a quest to rid Boston of the Italian mob, Connolly persuades Bulger to provide information on La Cosa Nostra in exchange for a kind of protection from investigation of his own criminal activities, which consist of gambling, loan sharking, drug peddling, and their almost inevitable consequences, murder.  Although Bulger prizes loyalty above all other qualities and systematically tortures and kills anyone suspected of snitching, he actually follows a long Irish tradition of informing, an act of self destruction that perennially defeated the historic struggles against the British in Ireland itself.

            The narrative runs in a kind of retrospective, showing the interrogation of Bulger’s associates, who ultimately turned on him for a variety of reasons, especially in order to escape the most severe possible punishments, then opening up into the visual story.  All of them guilty of various crimes, including murder, they relate a number or anecdotes about their experience with Whitey, as friend, assistant, fellow killer.  The story, barely fictionalized and well known now, shows a career of almost unparalleled ruthlessness, and above all, the collaboration between Bulger and Connolly, between the Whitey’s Winter Hill Gang and the Federal Bureau of Investigation. 

            Aside from the steady diet of torture and murder, an incomplete record of Bulger’s crimes, the film at least shows some the culpability of the FBI in the gangster’s achievements.  The connection between Connolly and Bulger ultimately involved the agent and one of his colleagues, John Morris (David Harbour) in a number of crimes; Connolly and Morris concealed evidence, falsified records, fingered at least one informant whom Bulger killed, and even tipped him off when the heat from their bureau threatened exposure and arrest.

            Despite its resources and its publicity, the FBI remains something of a gold standard for official incompetence.  The Bureau’s record in the search for the Unabomber, the two-year hunt in North Carolina for a fugitive ultimately arrested by a probationary patrolman, the botched anthrax case, or one of my favorites, the failure to catch the serial killer Andrew Cunanan, who was driving a stolen red pickup truck with New Jersey plates all over Miami and using his own credit card, often seems like a bad comedy, funnier if it hadn’t resulted in so many deaths.  The Whitey Bulger case, however, reveals an unsuspected record of crime and dishonesty; some people, including this writer, believe that Bulger escaped arrest for so many years because the FBI really didn’t want to catch him—his arrest would reveal the Bureau’s involvement, much of which remains hidden.

Like its many predecessors in the last century, the movie itself follows the patterns of both history and fiction.  Just as the makers of those great gangster flicks from the 1930s ripped their people and events from the headlines, Black Mass recounts a story well known to many of its viewers that even at times resembles a documentary.  Only a few of its cast members rank among recognizable actors—Johnny Depp of course and the ubiquitous Kevin Bacon as John Connolly’s supervisor—which underlines the authenticity of the story.  In addition, gangster movies are generally brother movies, in which the brothers sometimes pursue polar opposite careers, with the gangster’s brother a cop or a lawyer or even a priest.  Black Mass shows the relationship between Whitey and his brother Billy (Benedict Cumberbatch), who rose from the same working-class background in a political career that made him the most powerful legislator in the state, then the chancellor of the University of Massachusetts: you can’t make this sort of thing up, though as Mark Twain noted, life is stranger than fiction because life has no need to be probable.

Showing a heretofore hidden penchant for malevolence, Depp captures the look and feel of the psychopathic Bulger, willing to kill anyone for the slightest infraction of his rules—disloyalty above all, but also insults, and the mere possibility that someone might inform on him.  In his most vicious murder, he strangles the stepdaughter of his closest associate, Steve Flemmi (Rory Cochrane) because she knows too much, while Flemmi looks on, helpless to prevent it, perhaps frightened of his boss’s willingness to erase any opposition: no wonder his henchmen finally betrayed him.  Above all, of course, the notion that Bulger himself worked as an informant for the FBI underlines his own lack of loyalty or even a violation of something like gangster’s honor.  In his trial, not shown in the movie, he reacted angrily when anyone called him a rat, the lowest animal in his sphere, which despite all his other crimes labeled him the very thing he hated.

While conforming to the conventions of its genre, the movie represents the new face of gangsterism, the collusion with law enforcement touched on in GoodFellas , a situation in which the good guys now closely resemble the bad guys, even to the point of informing on their own colleagues in order to receive a light sentence.  Disappointingly, it omits the alleged search for Bulger, which took 16 years and covered three continents, and the surprising method that led to his capture.  That search suggests the reluctance of the FBI to find the man who assisted in their corruption, whose accomplices they became, and whose actions forever tarnish the well shined image of their badge.  The story of Whitey Bulger really needs another movie to deal with all the subjects raised in Black Mass.