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Towering timidly over his fellow crowd members, Owen Saki, 17, politely struggled to the edge of the barricade. He smiled, took a quick glance at the girls who had just been in front of him and adjusted the dark baseball cap sitting slightly ajar on top of his head.
“I heard about this in class and decided to come right down here after school,” said Saki, a junior at Brookline High School.
And he was not alone. Just in front of him stood Carolina Fuchs, 16, and Andrea Maytorena, 15, both fellow students at BHS who had just sandwiched themselves between the masses gathered up and down Harvard Street in Brookline Tuesday night. The crowd had come to celebrate the outsized arrival of Hollywood royalty to the otherwise quiet area.
Many of them gathered in full daylight, watching with anticipation alongside a smorgasbord of tightly clustered news units as the sun slipped out of view over the course of three long hours.
The occasion? Brookline’s historic Coolidge Corner Theatre hosted a special screening of Scott Cooper’s “Black Mass,” a tense depiction of the alliance between infamous South Boston gangster James “Whitey” Bulger (Johnny Depp, buried beneath prosthetics and color contacts) and his childhood friend, FBI agent John Connolly (Joel Edgerton). The film, based on a book by Boston University professor Dick Lehr and Boston Globe veteran Gerard O’Neill, was filmed entirely in Massachusetts.
Accompanying the screening was a lush red carpet, sprawled along the edge of Harvard Street and connected to the theater entrance, promising to sport a number of the film’s major players. For weeks, it was rumored that Depp himself would show up, but true confirmation did not arrive until Monday afternoon.
In response, many locals came armed with signs and photos, a few of which were addressed to Depp’s co-star Dakota Johnson, who plays Bulger’s girlfriend Lindsey Cyr in the film. One gentleman standing toward the front of the pack went so far as to don full Jack Sparrow garb.
“This is awesome, it’s a local theater,” said Miriam Olken, 28, of Somerville. “We’re really honored to have the cast and crew here tonight.”
Olken was not alone in her sense of local pride. While “Black Mass” tells the story of a particularly dark period in Boston history, it also portrays South Boston as a fascinating, complex web of deeply held alliances and prized tradition.
“This story is a part of Boston history,” said Erica McDermott, a Cambridge native, at the red carpet. “It’s not our best moment, but it is our story.”
McDermott is perhaps most well-known for playing Cindy, one of Micky Ward’s sisters, in 2010’s “The Fighter,” which was also set in Massachusetts and portrayed a local who gained national attention. In “Black Mass,” McDermott plays Mary Bulger, the wife of Billy (a stellar Benedict Cumberbatch), who held a Massachusetts senatorial seat while his brother Whitey rose to criminal infamy.
“It makes me really happy that they chose to film here,” McDermott said. “It definitely does bring a certain authenticity to the movie. The respect that the cast and [director] Scott Cooper had for this story was outstanding, and it was moving.”
Watching the film, it becomes easy to see why someone like McDermott might have reservations about a cinematic portrayal of Bulger’s life.
First of all, Bulger is still alive. The bulk of the film’s action takes place between 1975 and 1981, and thus many of Bulger’s cohorts and the families of the victims seen in the film are alive as well. And while the film’s Southie is tradition-bound and loyalty-minded, it does seem to imply that perhaps this blind sense of devotion to the people one grew up with does more harm than good.
The good news is that “Black Mass” is mostly very good. Its cinematography has the seedy, granular, cold and beautiful bent of a good David Fincher thriller. Cooper’s camera often sweeps across hollowed-out, wintry Boston cityscapes at eye level, lending the action a disquieting level of immediacy. The violence, which comes in fits and starts but is largely horrifying, is staged with a chilling shoulder shrug, always allowing the audience to glimpse the most gruesome aspect of an execution before we have time to realize what we’re seeing.
Perhaps the film’s biggest asset is its cast. Edgerton’s Connolly is buffoonish and primitive, brashly protecting Bulger at every stomach-flipping turn with the forward motion of unchecked testosterone. But he also draws us in slowly to the corrosive conflict of protecting one’s own and watching one’s moral compass splayed and shattered with every passing moment.
Julianne Nicholson, of Medford, plays Connolly’s wife Marianne, and her quiet, begrudging acceptance of her husband’s horrific choices is mesmerizing to behold.
And then, of course, there’s Depp. What is there to say? The film belongs to him. He plays Bulger without ever moving much of his face, communicating shifts in disposition by a flick of the upper lip or a miniscule shift in vocal tone. Whitey whispers most of what he has to say with gravelly force, regardless of what it may be, and it holds a spine-tingling level of authority. When he shoots a former colleague, he barely blinks.
Depp’s prosthetics are not entirely convincing, but it almost feels as if that’s the point. All of his henchmen are interchangeable underlings, but he moves through the world with an almost demonic grace.
The biggest problem of “Black Mass” is that it lacks a unifying narrative arc. It sports a fun but insignificant framing device that has a rotating cast of Bulger’s former partners in crime, giving the police information that forms the bulk of the film.
And this, in its very nature, results in an episodic structure. There’s no beginning, middle and end. Instead, there are a number of very interesting events with the loose thread of Connolly and Bulger’s alliance connecting them, and then there are the credits.
That framing device also decentralizes the focus and narrative authority from Whitey, which is an interesting and justifiable decision, but it results in perhaps one too many layers of removal from the heart of the story.
At the end of the day, the film is about a lot more than one man’s crimes or the FBI agent who decided to cover them up. It’s about unforeseen interconnectedness and bringing attention to the things that might otherwise remain in the shadows, and Tuesday’s event honored those themes.
“Most movies we see are in New York or [Los Angeles],” said Armani Nova, 20, who was accompanied by friends from Emerson College and the South End. “It’s good to see Boston get its time in the light.”
