On ‘Patriots Day’: ‘Love will defeat evil’
Here’s something Oscar voters and regular folks probably don’t think they’ll want or need this year: a movie all but guaranteed to make them cry.
It’s coming, anyway: “Patriots Day,” a film about the 2013 Boston Marathon bombing, directed by Peter Berg and starring Mark Wahlberg, a Beantown son, as a police officer. The film nabbed the closingnight slot at the American Film Institute festival in November, landed on the National Board of Review’s Top 10 list and opens Wednesday.
For a picture that some say is arriving too soon, or that risks being exploitative or worse, “Patriots Day” stands, on the one hand, to be unintentionally well timed. At a recent screening in New York, as audience members gasped their way through tears, it became clear that the film got at something more elemental than tragedy: It captured the purity of the altruistic outpouring that came in the bombings’ wake. Sniffling away, I couldn’t help wondering, might this be a film that makes both blue hearts and red hearts crack open, and proves a unifier of sorts?
Then again, we are living in times when the very definition of “patriot” is deeply contested and fraught, when the word alone often causes liberal neck hair to stand on end.
“Patriots Day” is Berg and Wahlberg’s third film together, after this year’s “Deepwater Horizon,” about the deadly 2010 oil explosion and spill, and the 2013 “Lone Survivor,” about a disastrous war mission. All three neatly fit the definition of what Rolling Stone describes as the “neo-patriotic blockbuster”: movies whose heroes wear blue collars rather than cowboy hats or capes.
“These are films that seek to whitewash America,” Corey Atad wrote in Esquire, “boosting the virtue of pure patriotism, fashioning an uncomplicated reality for an audience tired of feeling like their country is being lost to liberal pussyfooting and terrorist threats.”
To little surprise, Berg and Wahlberg say “Patriots Day” holds resonance, no matter what the viewers’ political bent.
“We get asked this a lot, about our politics, and we’re just not going to get into it,” Berg said, sitting with Wahlberg. “Mark and I both wanted to make a film about love. A film about: ‘You know what? If you think you’re going to beat us through violence, you’re wrong. Because love will rise, love will defeat evil.’ ”
But for some Bostonians, the marathon atrocity is still too fresh. It was only last year that the surviving Boston bomber, Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, was tried and convicted. So, was “Patriots” made and released in haste?
“Mark’s fond of saying it probably wasn’t soon enough, in many ways,” the director said. “We felt the real theme of this film wasn’t going to be about a manhunt of justice being served up, although those were elements of this story. At the end of the day, the story was about how a community responded to kind of what unfortunately is becoming the new reality of our lives.”
After poring over hours of grisly footage and talking with the families of victims, Berg, who cites the work of Studs Terkel, fabled chronicler of the American Everyman, as a major influence, said he struggled mightily to make sense of the atrocity and to understand how affected families found the energy to go on.
He found his answer at this year’s marathon, where he and Wahlberg watched Patrick Downes become the first Boston bombing amputee to complete the race. He fell into the arms of his wife, who lost both legs in the bombings — footage of their embrace is in the film.
At that moment, Wahlberg said, an 80-year-old woman from the Boston Athletic Association approached them both and said: “You see that? That’s what this movie better be about. About love. You make sure you get that right.”
Ergo the sobbing Berg was surprised to hear in early screenings of the film. “Crying can be a good thing,” he said, “a catharsis and a release.”