‘Patriots’ Day’ bigs on ‘Getting It Right’
“Patriots Day” filmmakers released an online featurette yesterday titled “Getting It Right,” aimed at showcasing their promise to honor the city with their movie about its darkest day: the 2013 Boston Marathon bombings.
“It’s such a sensitive subject matter and Boston is such a small place, everyone knows somebody who was directly affected,” Mark Wahlberg, who stars as a fictional Boston police officer in the film and is a producer on the flick, says in the trailer.
Director Peter Berg, Wahlberg said, “wants to tell the story of these heroes and he’s committed to getting it right.”
The three-minute piece features former police Commissioner Ed Davis, who led the manhunt for the bombers, sitting with John Goodman, the actor who plays him in the flick. Watertown police Sgt. John MacLellan and Sgt. Jeffrey Pugliese, who is portrayed by JK Simmons, also endorse the project.
“They didn’t fictionalize a lot of it. I don’t want to see a lot of stuff in the movie that didn’t happen,” Pugliese says. “I think that kind of stuff belittles the real heroes of the bombings, which are the victims.”
So dedicated was Berg to keeping the story authentic, he wanted real Boston police officers to play the cops in background shots and he shot inside slain MIT police officer Sean Collier’s house in Somerville and even kept the pink walls exactly as they were.
The one big stumbling block to all that authenticity is Wahlberg’s character: a composite of several of the Boston officers who worked the bombing because no one cop was present for all the crucial developments.
Whether that casts a pall over the realism will be up to the audience and the critics when “Patriots Day” gets its Boston debut on Dec. 21.