QUICK NOTES: Star Wars

            With the possible exception of some Antarctic explorer or some hermit meditating in some remote cave, the latest addition to the Star Wars franchise, number seven in the usual Roman numerals, (which impart more dignity) The Force Awakens , enjoyed one of the most profitable opening weeks in history, benefitting of course from what also must be the longest and loudest pre-release publicity campaign, complete with hundreds of related toys, games, puzzles, etc.   The distributors even offered advance reserved tickets, which sold out almost immediately (why people camp out to be the first to see a movie that will play for months at all times of the day at many theaters is a question that always puzzles me).   With that hype and the history of a fantastically successful franchise, the latest addition could not possibly fail.  And it did not.

            Despite the hype and the box office boffo, the new film accomplishes little in the way of advancing its subject, the history of the future.  That history, for example, remains confusing, despite all the nonsense about rebels versus the Empire, the Dark Side, the Force, and so on; at the same time, it remains the same old good guys versus bad guys, complete with all the aerial fights between the two sides, light saber duels, and troops of neo-Nazi storm troopers shooting blasters and usually missing their targets.  The picture continues the theme of fathers and sons, with a confrontation between Han Solo (Harrison Ford of course) and his estranged son Kylo Ren (Adam Driver). 

            Aside from resurrecting Ford, the film also brings back Carrie Fisher and, momentarily, Mark Hamill, reconstructing the trio that made the whole franchise work in the first place.  Although their appearance may thrill the millions of diehard fans, they actually contribute very little to the movie itself, which once again depends largely on its special effects in the usual triumph of technology over imagination.  Probably the best comment on the series and the film belongs to Harrison Ford; when he suddenly appears, a character says, “You’re Han Solo.”  He replies with a certain weariness, “I used to be.”  That line appropriately sums up the film and the franchise.

THE HEART OF THE SEA

BEFORE MOBY DICK

In the Heart of the Sea, directed by Ron Howard.

            Ron Howard’s latest movie displays a rather unusual layering of sources, originating as a book by Nathaniel Philbrick about the sinking of the whaleship Essex, itself based on the actual contemporary account of the incident, which in part inspired Herman Melville’s great novel, Moby-Dick.  The movie shows Melville (Ben Wishaw) visiting Tom Nickerson (Brendan Gleeson), who served as a young boy on the ship, to find out the truth behind the event and the subsequent survival of some of the crew.  At first reluctant, apparently laboring under a burden of guilt from the past, Nickerson recounts his memory of the voyage and the attack of the whale that sank the Essex.  His story then comes to life in the extended flashback that constitutes the major portion of the movie.

  Howard shows the fascinating details of loading the ship’s supplies, the implements and tools the crew need to ply the profitable and extremely dangerous trade of whaling, and examines a few of the personalities involved in the voyage.  He essentially invents a conflict between the chief character, first mate Owen Chase (Chris Hemsworth) and the captain, George Pollard (Benjamin Walker), both of them actual people who sailed on the doomed voyage, providing a perhaps unnecessary context that ultimately distracts from the central story.  When in the course of the voyage—a three-year journey—the crew meets another ship’s crew in South America, they hear the story of a white whale that sank their ship; the captain refuses to believe what he regards as a fantasy and sails for the area where the sinking allegedly occurred.  When they encounter a whole herd of whales, the crew launches their boats, but one of the whales (not really white, by the way, but mottled), turns and swims furiously toward the Essex, ramming and sinking it.  The rest of the film turns into a survival story, with Owen Chase and Captain Pollard sailing their little boats across thousands of miles of open ocean before finding land and eventually, rescue.

The author of the book shows that the survivors accomplished an amazing feat of seamanship in their long journey, superior even to the epic feat of Captain Bligh of the Bounty.  The director chooses to deal mostly with the Tom Nickerson’s remorse, the result of the cannibalism that the survivors practiced, actually an accepted practice in such desperate circumstances, a kind of law of the sea, well known among the inhabitants of the great whaling port of Nantucket Island.  That focus makes the presence of Herman Melville a kind of footnote to the story, perhaps to remind the audience of the basis of the novel.  Although colorful and certainly authentic in its details, the film sacrifices the real dangers and real courage of whaling for the melodrama of guilt and the personal stories of Owen Chase and George Pollard.  Although it shows some of the actual work of whaling, In the Heart of the Sea could benefit from more of that historical accuracy and less emotional invention.

Haunting and Revenge

Haunting and Revenge

The Revenant, directed by Alejandro Gonzalez Iñárritu.

            Hollywood often rewards actors for stretching themselves to a new dimension, which usually translates as shaving their heads, choosing to look less attractive than usual, playing a disabled person, or simply playing against type.  That thinking probably accounts, at least in part, for the nomination of Leonardo DiCaprio for his performance in The Revenant, a film surrounded by many stories about the difficulties of its production.  According to the director,

Alejandro González Iñárritu, DiCaprio not only performed under conditions of extreme cold and discomfort, but also, though a vegetarian, ate (or at least chewed on) a chunk of raw bison liver or heart or some organ, depending on whose account  your read: the sacrifices one makes for the sake of art.

The film itself derives from a famous historical incident as well as from the novel of the same name by Michael Punke.  In 1823 a trapper named Hugh Glass, one of a party of mountain men seeking beaver pelts, was badly mauled by a bear; the leader of his group left two men behind, one of them Jim Bridger, who became one of the most famous Westerners of them all, to tend his wounds and protect him until he died.  Thinking he was doomed and fearing for their own safety in an area patrolled by hostile Indians, the men abandoned him, an act that haunted Bridger the rest of his life.  As it turned out, Glass miraculously survived and, without weapons, tools, or supplies, traveled hundreds of miles to catch up with the men and exact a fitting revenge.  (In 1971 a pretty good movie, Man in the Wilderness, starring Richard Harris and John Huston, told a somewhat different version of the Glass story).

The major plot of the picture, changed and embellished significantly by the director, follows in a linear fashion Hugh Glass’s (DiCaprio) struggle for survival and his phenomenal journey through difficult and dangerous country.  It also presents an almost masochistic epic of suffering, as Glass manages to cauterize his throat wound by burning it with gunpowder, shows him crawling, gradually limping, swimming through icy waters, and evading Indian attacks in order to catch up with his betrayers, Bridger (Will Pulter) and John Fitzgerald (Tom Hardy).  The director fleshes out that relatively simply plot by intercutting scenes showing Fitzgerald, the major villain, spinning lies about Glass’s death and burial, and Bridger suffering his guilt in silence.

The director, who made the most successful Birdman, also thickens the soup by adding characters and events to both the factual and the fictional story—flashbacks to Glass’s Indian wife, now dead, Fitzgerald’s murder of Glass’s young son, a climactic fight, and so forth.  He also appears to have attended the Terrence Malick school of sentimental mysticism, interpolating events from Glass’s life, his memories of his wife and son, and dreamy, sometimes hallucinated images of the wife for some reason floating in the air above the wounded trapper.  Presumably these memories and images provide some of the motivation, beyond mere revenge, for Glass’s epic quest.

Although Leonardo DiCaprio occupies most of the screen time, raw meat eating and all, several other actors also perform competently and believably.  Tom Hardy in particular, as John Fitzgerald makes a most convincing villain who betrays without a qualm and embellishes his story with a number of inventive details, becoming for a while the hero of his own tale.  The bear that attacks Hugh Glass deserves at least a mention for best performance by an ursine actor since the late Bart the Bear, who distinguished himself in The Edge a number of years ago.

Filmed in natural light in appropriately rugged surroundings and terrible weather in Canada and Argentina, The Revenant stands out among the current crop of honored films for the daring and determination of the director.  If he bears comparison, for good or for bad, with Terrence Malick, he also resembles the Werner Herzog of Fitzcarraldo in his apparent attraction to suffering, a kind of obsession with authenticity that cost his cast a good deal of physical pain, hypothermia, frostbite, etc., similar to the problems Herzog’s alter ego, Klaus Kinski, complained about in Burden of Dreams.  If directing a movie presents the sorts of challenges that involve something like running a small country, Iñárritu may qualify as a benevolent dictator and his film certainly reflects the verisimilitude he sought.

HATEFUL

The Hateful Eight, directed by Quentin Tarantino.

            Judging by the advertisements littered with exclamation points by the usual exclaimers and the raves by the usual ravers, Quentin Tarantino’s newest movie, The Hateful Eight, represents yet another success for the writer-director.  Sporadically a darling of the reviewers, his peculiar penchant for excess and his delight in spilling blood, for reasons I cannot fully understand, endear him to many commentators.  His debut film, Reservoir Dogs, represents just the sort of amoral, brutal nihilism that launched his career; an attempt at a big caper flick, it features an ensemble of actors who turn up in his later work, and enough blood to paint a whole room red.  One memorable sequence shows a man bleeding to death for practically the whole movie, with a red tide washing all over the set; another shows a man, Michael Madsen as I recall, in an apparent attempt at grisly wit, shouting into the severed ear he holds.

Now in The Hateful Eight the director employs some of the standard devices of the Western, along with a few other forms, to create a complete bloodbath, with something like a dozen corpses littering the scenery, a kind of Reservoir Dogs with horses.  The title itself suggests his take on The Magnificent Seven, an ironic inversion to show his cleverness.  The movie begins in a time-honored manner, with a long panorama shot of a magnificent Wyoming mountain landscape covered with snow, as a solitary stagecoach traverses the screen.  Blocking its path, Major Marquis Warren (Samuel L. Jackson), a bounty hunter, sits on a stack of corpses, evidence of his success and proof of his prowess.  In the coach another hunter, John Ruth (Kurt Russell), holds Daisy Domergue (Jennifer Jason Leigh) in handcuffs; he plans to bring her, a murderer, to the nearest town for hanging.

The three of them, along with a couple of others, stop at a saloon/restaurant/ lodging house called, for some reason, Minnie’s Haberdashery, where the bulk of the movie’s action takes place.  Inside the Haberdashery, a stagey situation unfolds, where another half-dozen actors play cat-and-mouse games of identity and motive with Warren, and several of them refight a battle in the Civil War, where Warren’s troops opposed the Confederates led by another inhabitant of the bar, General Sanford Smithers (Bruce Dern).  The action settles into a violent, profane version of an Agatha Christie whodunit, with a cast of likely suspects marooned in a secluded location while Warren determines, through available evidence and reasoning, who poisoned a pot of coffee, which results in a couple of spectacular deaths; he also works out some of the truth about the assorted characters and their reasons for visiting the Haberdashery.

Tarantino divides the very long movie into chapters as if it were indeed a detective story, then adds his own voice-over narration, showing a series of brutal killings that created the present situation in Minnie’s Haberdashery.  The narration accompanies flashbacks to events that explain the identities of the characters, the evidence that Major Warren uncovers, and ultimately, the fate of all the people in a film that, oddly, combines incessant violence in language and action with as much talkiness as some polite British drawing-room comedy. 

The violence includes the graphic murders, complete with buckets of blood, of almost everyone in the cast, a couple of bloody projectile vomitings, the amputation of an arm, the explosion of a head, and a slow strangulation by hanging.  The acting for the most part meshes nicely with the action, with the prize for the highest ascent over the top won easily by Samuel L. Jackson.  His presence, by the way, underlines the status of Tarantino himself, who has now gone all self-referential, employing actors from his previous movies, like Jackson and Michael Madsen in this one, and in effect repeating himself in echoing the situation and action of Reservoir Dogs.  As for Jennifer Jason Leigh, the poor woman serves as something like a punching bag for Kurt Russell, who slugs her almost every time she opens her mouth, applies a bowl of hot stew to her face, then vomits blood all over her.  (For this she attended drama school?).  The crude violence she endures, along with the elaborate verbal and visual exposition, serve well to sum up the meaningless, sadistic, and essentially juvenile vulgarity of Tarantino’s vision.

TRUMBO

The Writer and the Blacklist

Trumbo

            Perhaps out of guilt and shame—if such feelings operate out there—Hollywood has swept an important chapter in its history under a large and colorful rug.  Not even a handful of movies deal with the infamous blacklist that ruined so many careers and lives in the entertainment world back in the 1950s.  The Front, directed by Martin Ritt in 1976, which employed a cast of formerly blacklisted actors, addresses television writers and their use of an amiable dunce (Woody Allen) as a pseudonymous cover for their work, but too often plays the situation for laughs.  Although it starred some accomplished performers, including Robert De Niro and Annette Bening, Guilty By Suspicion (1991), which focuses on a blacklisted director, barely raised an eyebrow.  George Clooney’s much more successful Good Night, and Good Luck (2005) deals directly with the career of the radio and television reporter Edward R. Murrow and his confrontations with Senator Joseph McCarthy, the prototype for the right wing demagogues of our own time.

            Now, almost 70 years after the events, the new movie Trumbo, directed by Jay Roach, provides the best and fullest depiction of the anti-Communist hysteria and subsequent persecution of the 1940s and 1950s, centering on the career of the highly successful screenwriter Dalton Trumbo (Bryan Cranston).  The docudrama shows the actions of several victims of the notorious House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), led by an odious Representative named J. Parnell Thomas (James DuMont), in an obvious quest to attract attention from the press and inflame the dependably panicky American public.  That hysteria promoted the careers of a great many politicians, including not only McCarthy, but an obscure Red-baiting congressman from California named Richard Nixon.

            HUAC asserted that the radio, television, and film industry employed a great many Communists and their sympathizers, who attempted in their work to subvert American values and even, in a favorite phrase, to overthrow the government of the United States.  Since most of the accused began their careers as writers, directors, and actors in the 1930s, during the Great Depression, the disastrous result of laissez-faire capitalism (known these days as trickle-down economics), many of them joined various leftist movements to seek some alternative political philosophy, method, and solution.  Marxism presented such an alternative, attracting a great many intellectuals and artists to a number of radical movements and organizations, and some indeed joined the Communist Party.  When America waged the Cold War against the Soviet Union, most of those people found themselves the objects of suspicion and hatred, vilified by politicians, press, and the public.

            Once HUAC decided to pursue Communists, sympathizers, those so-called “fellow travelers” in Hollywood, the reactions, as the picture shows, followed a distressing pattern.  Resolving to resist the ridiculous charges and insinuations, actors, directors, and writers protested publicly; a number traveled to Washington to demonstrate against the actions of the committee.  The reactions of the majority of the film community, however, reveal something less than a profile in courage.  Goaded by the press, including the vicious virago Hedda Hopper (Helen Mirren), who blackmails Louis B. Mayer, studio executives caved under pressure and fired the people who had been making their pictures and fattening their incomes.  Many of their coworkers, initially supportive, threatened by the loss of work and the end of their careers, “named names” as the committee demanded, betraying friends and colleagues.  Others, like Dalton Trumbo, defied the committee, asserted their Fifth Amendment rights, and as a result, suffered ostracism, loss of employment, and even in some cases, like Trumbo’s, imprisonment for contempt of Congress.

            The movie shows how after serving his time, Trumbo managed to survive by writing screenplays under pseudonyms in a sort of factory he established in his home, first for Poverty Row schlockmeisters, ultimately for Otto Preminger and Kirk Douglas.  He wrote some memorable films—The Brave One, Roman Holiday, Spartacus­—that won numerous awards, including a couple of Oscars that he couldn’t accept in person.   Spartacus was the first to list his name on the credits, which incited Hedda Hopper to deliver a fiery speech to the American Legion about Trumbo’s “treason,” resulting in a boycott of the movie and that right-wing group picketing theaters.  Reminding us of how times have changed, President-elect John F. Kennedy

, a genuine war hero, crossed the Legion’s picket lines to see Spartacus; I wonder if any contemporary politician possesses the courage to make such a gesture.  That act probably assisted in diluting the power of the list and the resurrection of Trumbo’s career.

            Using actors who resemble their real life counterparts—Michael Stuhlbarg as Edward G. Robinson, Dean O’Gorman as Kirk Douglas, Christian Berkel as Otto Preminger, for example—adds a great deal of credibility to a dramatic version of an important piece of history.  The skillful blending of actual footage from the time—newsreel films of HUAC in action, speeches and testimony by a number of Hollywood cowards, including the draft dodgers Ronald Reagan and John Wayne—with the scenes and dialogue of Trumbo, his family, friends, and colleagues both enlivens and authenticates the narrative.  The picture provides an important insight into the history of Hollywood, the history of America; it also demonstrates how the exploitation of fear creates the kind of cultural paranoia that blossoms so fragrantly in the present day.

            

SHORT TAKES

SHORT TAKES:

The Martian.

Based on a most entertaining novel, the movie looks more like science fact than science fiction.  Matt Damon stars as an astronaut abandoned on Mars who embarks on a solitary quest to survive on the alien landscape.  His ingenuity in using the materials, equipment, and tools left behind by the mission, the very process of his existence, provide the main plot, the survival of another Robinson Crusoe on Mars.  The movie also employs two other connected plots, the response of the various people who run NASA, and the crew of the spaceship that left Damon, believing he was dead, on the red planet; both work in some ingenious ways to communicate with him and to bring him home.  Naturally, for a picture directed by Ridley Scott, everything works wonderfully well, from the convincing Martian landscape—I’ve never been there myself—to the scenes back on Earth and in the spaceship, and the connected plots all mesh smoothly, with a suspenseful and exciting resolution.

Spectre. 

Despite the signature line in all the Bond movies, which comes straight from the Ian Fleming novels, oddly forgotten, both martinis and audiences should be stirred rather than shaken.  Unfortunately, in Spectre, the latest addition to the series, not much pleases beyond the whole lot of shaking going on.  The film resurrects a good deal of material from previous entries in the franchise, including the presence of Ernst Blofeld (Christoph Walz), a villain with the usual tiresome plans for world domination.  It also features the usual shootouts and explosions, two terrific car chases with two terrific cars, and of course Bond’s eventual and predictable triumph.  Daniel Craig once again makes a good Bond, but displays the fatigue he has confessed with a role he has promised to abandon, and the excellent Christoph Walz is entirely wasted in his silly part.  Aside from all the special effects, the repetition of so much familiar stuff suggests that the franchise seems to be running out of both energy and ideas.

War in the Shadows

Bridge of Spies, directed by Steven Spielberg.

 If nothing else, Steven Spielberg’s latest movie reminds us all that far too often American politics and cultural attitudes depend on the exploitation of fear. Back in the 1950s, politicians incessantly mined the possibility of nuclear war with the Soviet Union for popularity and support, accusing almost any entity they could imagine, including the United States Army, the State Department, and artists of all kinds (with a special emphasis on performing arts) of sympathy for Communism; the Congress formed committees to investigate people they called fellow travelers, pinkos, and “card carrying members of the Communist Party.”  (Some may recall that in his campaign against Michael Dukakis, George H.W. Bush in an attempt to revive old-school anti-Communism, called his opponent a “card carrying member of the ACLU.”)  Named after its chief practitioner, the false accusations, hysterical bullying, and demagoguery came to be known as McCarthyism; sadly, it succeeded, destroying careers and lives, intimidating scores of institutions, and electing a gaggle of politicians, not the least of them Richard Nixon.

Spielberg chooses an important but probably mostly forgotten incident from the Cold War to illustrate some of the tensions of the time.  Bridge of Spies dramatizes the back-and-forth of espionage and counterespionage in the days when the government was, as they said, finding Reds under every bed. The movie opens with the FBI’s arrest, after its customary bungling, of Colonel Rudolf Abel (Mark Rylance), the highest ranking Soviet spy ever discovered working in the United States.   Abel’s arrest triggers the major plot, introducing James Donovan (Tom Hanks), the lawyer assigned to defend him against the charge of espionage.

Although not entirely happy with the task, Donovan, a successful insurance attorney who has not practiced in a courtroom for years, performs the job as well as he can, even arguing, unsuccessfully, before the Supreme Court.  In defending Abel, despite pressure from his wife, ostracism by his firm, and even attacks on his family, Donovan conducts the case to the best of his ability; in the process he comes to like and even admire Abel, a man of great strength and a genuine sense of honor.  Considering himself a loyal soldier for his country, Abel refuses to cut a deal with the prosecution and tolerates his confinement with stoic courage.

In a parallel story that ultimately and dramatically intersects with the case, the movie shows the training and launching of the notorious U2 program of secret spy flights over the Soviet Union, which exploded into public knowledge with the shooting down of a plane piloted by Francis Gary Powers, played in the movie by Austin Stowell.  Bridge of Spies reaches a kind of climax when, after dealing with both German and Soviet recalcitrance, Donovan manages to work out an exchange of prisoners, Abel for Powers, on the bridge of the title.  James Donovan’s sharp dealing, his skill at negotiating, foreshadowed in a scene with a rival insurance lawyer, achieves an outcome that no one believed could succeed.

While capturing in documentary style some of the fear mongering of the time, the director dramatizes some incidents in the course of Donovan’s work.  He shows the hasty construction of the Berlin Wall occurring in the cold and snow of November, just as Donovan desperately tries to enter East Germany; in reality, the Wall went up in August of 1961, with little chance of snow.  He also only briefly alludes to Donovan’s work at the Nuremberg trials and never mentions his wartime service with the O.S.S.  To maintain suspense in a story whose conclusion is known, no small feat, he intercuts between the training of the U2 pilots, Donovan’s efforts to help his client, the striking differences between East and West Berlin, and even the various prisons that come to serve as a metaphor in the film.  Rudolf Abel languishes at Fort Leavenworth; after a show trial, Powers is condemned to ten years in a Russian prison; an unlucky American graduate student, Frederic Pryor (Will Rogers) finds himself on the wrong side of the Wall and, accused of espionage, spends time in an East German prison; and Donovan himself, set up by a German lawyer, is arrested and temporarily jailed by the East Berlin police.

The dialectic of that construction and Spielberg’s skillful manipulation of his material keeps the film in a constant tension, a taut wire never loosened, a sharp edge never blunted by the actuality of history.  Its relatively low key style, rather unusual for a director known for blockbusters, shows, with some irony and even some humor, the courage, commitment, and skill of a relative amateur, who consistently outwits the opposition and outthinks all his allies in the CIA.

The two principal actors also deserve a great deal of credit for participating in an authenticity of character that meshes appropriately with the movie’s sense of time and place as well as its low-key approach to its subject.  As the reluctant defense attorney who grows to like and admire his client, Tom Hanks works with conviction and a wry sense of humor, showing hints of an irony he’s displayed in some of his comic roles in the past.  The real triumph of the film’s acting, however, belongs to Mark Rylance, who displays an almost uncanny minimalism in his performance as Colonel Abel.  With very few words, a narrow range of facial expressions, a limited array of gestures, he somehow conveys a remarkable variety of emotions, constructing a really quite admirable personality that, in their several scenes together, entirely steals the picture from Hanks.  Just like the character he portrays, he remains a mystery, but also engages the sympathy of the audience, not the hated Commie spy, but a man of honor and courage according to his own principles and beliefs.

For recalling an important incident from a dark time and telling the story with objectivity and entirely without prejudice, Spielberg deserves a good deal of credit.  In showing the courage of two different men from two different backgrounds, Bridge of Spies shows how well a movie can work, with all its elements—acting, cinematography, plotting, and construction—functioning together.  Though different from many of his previous productions, Bridge of Spies demonstrates all over again his skill as a cinematic storyteller.

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.

On the Road Again

The End of the Tour, directed by James Ponsoldt.

The subject of the artist presents some special appeal in film, in part because of the inherent fascination of an art that in effect studies and transforms another art.  Among the many actual artists studied in numerous biopics, unfortunately, writers constitute the least promising material for that study and transformation.  The visual and musical arts naturally work well--painters making their masterpieces, composers creating music provide obvious subjects, which talented directors can turn into exciting images.  If the person in question, like most great artists, led a troubled or colorful life, the the filmmaker can plunder the biography for all sorts of interesting details--unhappy childhoods, love affairs, even crimes, the whole spectrum of behaviors that often please both producers and audiences.  More important than biography, however, the very creation of a work of art makes for appealing cinema.  Although probably not limited to American film, Hollywood handles the fascination of sheer process with special distinction--the barn raising in Witness, for example, Robert Redford crafting Wonderboy in The Natural, John Travolta assembling the accident sequence in Blow Out--so that the painting of a picture, the composition of a symphony, and even the staging of a show in all those backstage musicals make perfect subjects in numerous movies.

Writers and writing, however, cannot compete with those arts and those artists.  Few writers, for example, if they are not Ernest Hemingway, lead interesting or eventful lives, a fact that haunted a number of American novelists, including James Jones, Robert Roark, and above all, Norman Mailer.  More important, the act of writing, unlike the act of painting, sculpting, or making music possesses very little visual interest.  Whether with a chisel on a clay tablet, a quill pen, a typewriter, or a word processor, writing looks boring (which it often is)--someone staring at a blank sheet of sheepskin, paper, or the gray gloaming of a computer screen hardly qualifies as a compelling image.  The process, after all, takes place somewhere inside the head, the heart, or even the genitals, which the dancer Pearl Lang called "that lonely place between the legs."  Those internal processes seldom translate successfully to the screen, unless a director with more than the usual quantity of imagination finds some way of showing creative composition turning into action, a rare feat George Roy Hill accomplished in The World According to Garp, in a sequence that showed the title character writing as a series of images coalesce into a charming short story.

After all that pedantry, which I hope whatever readers are out there will forgive, the latest movie about a writer, The End of the Tour, avoids anything like the actual process of writing in order to concentrate on a writer's thoughts about his art, his ambitions, fame, life, and other heavy stuff.  Based on a memoir by David Lipsky, a writer for Rolling Stone, the film shows the five days that Lipsky, played in the movie by Jesse Eisenberg, spent with David Foster Wallace (Jason Segel), interviewing the author about his work and his life.  At that point, Wallace, who committed suicide in 2008, enjoys an enormous success with the publication, sales, and critical reception of thousand-page novel, Infinite Jest.  That novel created a kind of cult around the author and, sadly and inevitably, his suicide cemented his cultish appeal.  (The film never raises one obvious question: how many people actually read that enormous book?)

Wallace and Lipsky it it off well from the opening moments of their connection and, despite a couple of incidents that create some anger between two neurotic individuals, generally appreciate each other's company.  Lipsky watches Wallace teaching a creative writing class at a local Illinois college, then accompanies him on a book tour to Minneapolis, where he reads from his novel, autographs copies, appears on an NPR interview, and meets up with on old graduate school friend.  Throughout they discuss life, writing, fame, relationships, and other related matters; in fact, the film mostly consists of conversations between the two, with Wallace delivering philosophical insights in a dreary monotone and Lipsky writing them down.  Unlike most movies about writers, The End of the Tour never shows the novelist scratching his head and staring out the window, the usual visible signs of writing in progress.  That choice, however, fails to turn the writer and his writing into anything cinematically appealing.

A dried-out alcoholic, Wallace appears to subsist on the whole panoply of junk food that American companies sell to poison the populace.  He gorges on doughnuts and soft drinks, eats Pop Tarts for breakfast, and treats Lipsky to what he considers an upscale meal at McDonald's.  His culinary tastes emphasizes some elements of his troubled, perhaps addictive personality.  Occasionally he refers to his time in the famous psychiatric institution, McLean Hospital, the preferred recovery place for affluent literary types; the depression he suffered from for most of his life apparently led him, despite all his success, to hang himself.  The news of that death begins the movie, which flashes back to Lipsky's experience with him and all those conversations that follow and essentially provide the substance of the movie.  Despite the sad subtext and back story, the film remains a dull effort, neither making its subject interesting or his work accessible; it may, however, inspire people to read his magnum opus and will surely magnify his reputation and the cult it created.