“Before we start, I want you to know something,” the fleshy-faced man tells his interrogator. “I am not a rat.”
The fear of “ratting out” to the FBI is a theme that runs through Black Mass, a film based on the book about James “Whitey” Bulger’s rise to fame as the crime kingpin in Boston in the 1980s. The movie stars Johnny Depp in a critically-acclaimed role, and it spares no punches in telling the story of one of the greatest “rats” of all time.
At first, Whitey was just a neighborhood hoodlum of sorts. “The truth of the matter is,” the narrator tells his interrogator, “a lot of people in Southie loved Jimmy.” Over time, though, his star began to rise, especially when a friend from his youth, James Connelly, comes back to Boston to work for the FBI. Connelly recruits Whitey to feed him intel in order to take down Boston’s Italian mafia family. Whitey’s decision to inform to the FBI is extremely controversial, both for the FBI and Whitey’s men, especially as Whitey finds it hard to honor his side of the deal — and keeps killing people.
The movie unfolds like a good book, with intimate family scenes placed next to white-knuckle arrests and cold-blooded murders. Johnny Depp does an excellent job as Whitey, although he is almost impossible to recognize, thanks to a prosthetic mask, colored contacts, and false teeth. According to some reports, this made Depp look unnervingly like Whitey himself, but it also lends a frozen caste to Depp’s face. It works, though; his icy expressions fit with the cold, calculating man who was FBI’s Most Wanted (second only to Osama bin Laden) after he disappeared into anonymity in 1995.
“Depp gave a great performance, but the supporting cast really shines,” says moviegoer Elliott. “I wonder how many times he passed through Coronado before he was arrested?” After 16 years on the run, Whitey was apprehended by the FBI in 2011 in his Santa Monica apartment building. There is much about this film — an average kid gone bad, a cop with misguided loyalties — that could happen in any town, and yet so much more that is uniquely awe-inspiring and terrifying, the story of a criminal mastermind of our time.
Black Mass
Starring: Johnny Depp, Benedict Cumberbatch, Dakota Johnson
Run time: 2 hours 2 minutes
Rated: R
See upcoming showtimes for Black Mass here.
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Becca Garber
Staff Writer
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