‘Black Mass’ keeps human element in criminal activity
Depp also speaks on his transformation to Whitey Bulger.
With director Scott Cooper’s Black Mass, South Boston crime boss James “Whitey” Bulger joins Al Capone, John Dillinger, Bonnie and Clyde and other infamous gangsters on the big screen.
What superhero movies are to the zeitgeist now, Mob films were to the 1930s and ’40s — as well as the ’70s, ’ 80s and early ’90s, when Goodfellas and The
Godfather trilogy fascinated cinema culture.
Yet Cooper acknowledges that he never thought he was making a gangster movie. Instead he saw Black Mass (in theaters Friday), which had a gala Monday at Toronto International Film Festival, as a humanistic drama centered on three guys who grew up together in South Boston.
“I didn’t want to make a film about criminals who just happen to be humans,” Cooper says. “I wanted to make a film about humans who just happen to be criminals.”
For the director, there’s a big difference between the two, and it starts with Johnny Depp’s performance as Bulger, leader of Boston’s Winter Hill Gang in the late 1970s. Bulger used his childhood friendship with FBI agent John Connolly (Joel Edgerton) — who grew up in “Southie” with Bulger and his brother Billy (Benedict Cumberbatch), who became a Massachusetts state senator — to become an informant in order to take down the Italian Mob and get enough protection from the feds to rule
the city’s underworld.
The bonds of friendship between the Bulgers and Connolly led to their downfall, Cooper says, but at its heart,
Black Mass is “about loyalty and the fact that in South Boston during this time, certain lawmen and certain criminals were virtually indistinguishable.”
Warner Bros., the company releasing Black Mass, used to be known as the gangster studio, releasing The Public Enemy, Lit
tle Caesar and many of the preWorld War II films Cooper grew up loving. He notes that because the studio didn’t cast “movie stars” in those roles, people who were suffering through the Great Depression “saw themselves” in actors such as Edward G. Robinson and James Cagney.
The genre’s popularity spoke to a necessary sense of escapism, Depp says. In the 1930s, “the average bloke was looking for- ward to that next day’s headline in the newspaper to see what Dillinger had done. He was doing, especially in that period, everything that people would have loved to have been able to do.”
The mythology of Francis Ford Coppola’s The Godfather allowed Cooper to go from his everyday life in southwestern Virginia “into this Italian world that I just found intoxicating and riveting and (that’s) still in my marrow, honestly.”
While perhaps a little different from crime dramas before it, the director’s approach to Black
Mass was quite beautiful, Depp says.
“It would have been easy to dive into this thing as if it were just simply a gangster film,” the actor says. “What Scott caught on to right off the bat was, ‘No, man, this is a story about people. Present the people, warts and all, and then allow their personality, their way of life, to
reveal themselves.’ ”
“It would have been easy to dive into this thing as if it were just simply a gangster film. What (director Scott Cooper) caught on to was, ‘No, man, this is a story about people.”
Johnny Depp