RUN OF THE MILL
A dramatisation of the hunt for the Boston Marathon bombers comes across as hollow, says Geoffrey Macnab
Patriots Day ★★★☆☆
Dir: Peter Berg, 130 mins, starring: Mark Wahlberg, Kevin Bacon, John Goodman, JK Simmons, Michelle Monaghan
How do you make sense of an event like the Patriots Day bombing of the Boston Marathon? On a beautiful day in April 2013, two homegrown “terrorists” detonated homemade bombs near the finishing line of the race, killing three people and injuring more than 200 others. The terrorists then went on the run, sparking a massive manhunt. Peter Berg’s film covers the bombing and the days that immediately followed. Like his last feature, Deepwater Horizon (also starring Mark Wahlberg), it somehow fashions an uplifting story from events that seemed senseless, bloody and chaotic at the time. Patriots Day is brilliantly made but often
hollow and unconvincing as drama.
This is a story in which there are two villains – the Tsarnaev brothers, Dzhokhar and Tamerlan, who plant the bombs – but in which just about everybody else is selfless and heroic in the extreme. They take their cue from their home city. They are “Boston strong”. In the face of senseless carnage, they come together. Berg has an obvious flair for making films based on real-life incidents and with multiple characters and overlapping storylines. The first half hour of Patriots Day is riveting. The exaggerated normality of the early scenes immediately puts us on edge. All the main protagonists are introduced one by one. Although they're only on screen fleetingly, we are given an immediate sense of their foibles and passions.
Wahlberg's Tommy is a hard-drinking, big-hearted, salt-of-the-earth sergeant, back on duty after being suspended for unspecified disciplinary reasons. He has a bad knee, a condition which kicking down suspects' doors doesn't help, and moves very gingerly. His frustration at being posted at the finish line of the marathon is self evident. He'd far rather be catching real criminals than trying to keep runners dressed as lobsters in line. Wahlberg is a fitting star for the Trump era, the craggy blue-collar everyman taking on America’s enemies (as in Berg’s Lone Survivor) or exposing corruption and incompetence (cleaning the swamp). His character in Patriots Day is fictional, but concocted to be the all-American hero.
As a police procedural drama, ‘Patriots Day’ works fine; the problem is how simple-minded and jingoistic the film soon becomes
JK Simmons plays Jeffrey Pugliese, a sergeant from the Watertown suburbs; a laconic and patient man who calculates everything carefully. We know as much from the way he places his still smouldering cigar on a ledge outside when he enters a cafe, knowing he will have time to finish it later. Predictably, when he is called into action, he behaves in exactly the same painstaking fashion.
Alongside the cops are the civilians: the marathon runners, young lovers, parents and kids who have the misfortune to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. The filmmakers sketch in their back stories in expert fashion. We're even given a glimpse into the everyday domestic lives of the terrorists, complete with toddlers, TV, and mobile phones. It's when the older one describes Martin Luther King as a fornicator and a hypocrite that we realise the extent of their grudge against America.
Patriots Day stands as a tribute to the city in which it is set. Berg portrays the different sections of the community in an idealised way. Divisions across class, social, and ethnic lines seem non-existent. In the wake of the bomb blast, everybody, whether Red Sox fans or MIT boffins, comes together. The film features some fine actors in supporting roles (Kevin Bacon as the harassed FBI special agent and John Goodman’s hardbitten police chief among them) but none can compete with Boston itself. The city helps flush out the Tsarnaev brothers. All the experts overseeing the manhunt – the government officials, representatives from the mayor’s office, the senior policemen and the FBI agents – are secondary to the local citizens.
As in Lone Survivor and Deepwater Horizon, Berg is operating in a grey area between documentary and dramatic features. One of the most impressive aspects here is the seamless way in which recreations and newsreel footage are brought together. Every detail, from the revelations about the brothers’ web browsing histories (they watched “more pornography than Bin Laden” it is joked) to the stuttering exchanges between the Tsarnaevs and the young Chinese émigré whose Mercedes they carjack, has clearly been exhaustively researched.
As a police procedural drama, Patriots Day works fine, albeit with a few very loose strands. The problem is
how simple-minded and jingoistic the film soon becomes. “Go get the motherfuckers!” one character growls as the net draws in on the brothers. We’re left with an old-fashioned revenge story in which the posse hunts down the outlaws. You don’t expect the filmmakers to express any sympathy for the Tsarnaevs after they’ve killed and maimed so many innocent people. It might have helped, though, for Berg to have provided more context and background about the brothers and to have explored just why they became radicalised in the first place.
Arguably, the most disturbing and powerful scene in the film is the interrogation of Tamerlan's wife, Katherine Russell (Melissa Benoist). She is neither cooperative nor apologetic. Russell’s lawyer has complained that she is depicted unfairly but this is one of the few moments in which we’re given any sense of the bombers’ ideas and motivations. It’s a chilling scene which punctures the mood of resilience and optimism that the film tries so hard to build elsewhere.