Biopic

Black Mass: Cops and Gangsters, Caught in a City’s Undertow

Jeremy BeckReviews
Johnny Depp stars as Whitey Bulger in "Black Mass"

James Whitey Bulger was one of the most notorious mobsters in United States history. What, don’t believe me? Just watch Black Mass, a movie that repeatedly and insistently trumpets Bulger’s legendary place in American gangster lore at every shrill turn. It features no shortage of people, whether harried law enforcement agents or cowed criminal cohorts, braying about Bulger’s illegal exploits and moral contemptibility. Yet the oddest thing about this adequately entertaining movie, which was directed in workmanlike fashion by Scott Cooper and features a dream-team cast, is that for all its vociferous proclamations, it reveals very little about who Bulger was, what he did, or how he eventually became one of the country’s most wanted fugitives. Yes, he kills a few people over the course of the film, and he threatens a few others, and he certainly seems very mean. But to the extent that he ruled Boston’s underworld for two decades as the leader of the Winter Hill Gang, well, you’ll just have to take Black Mass at its word. It presents a litany of testimony swearing to Bulger’s evil, but therein lies its flaw: It tells, but it does not show.

This does not mean that there is nothing to see. To begin with, there is the unforgettable sight of a blue-eyed Johnny Depp. Those eerie cerulean irises (the product of contact lenses), along with slicked-back pale-blond hair and prosthetically rotted teeth, combine to give 2009’s sexiest man alive a truly frightening countenance. And while one might quibble with the subtlety of Depp’s performance as Bulger—which is to say, there is none—it is impossible to deny the ferocious commitment he brings to the role. Often the target of critical ridicule for his unfettered flamboyance (which can, of course, yield spectacular results), he is all business here, those unblinking, alien blues teaming with a snarling Beantown monotone that befits Bulger’s blunt, monolithic persona. He rarely raises his voice, but he is always threatening, whether he’s coolly berating an underling or, in the film’s most quietly terrifying scene, exerting his will over a colleague’s wife. He is not someone you wish to cross. Read More

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Straight Outta Compton: Defying the Cops, the State, and One Another

Jeremy BeckReviews
Ice Cube, Dr. Dre, and Eazy-E come "Straight Outta Compton" and into the multiplex

F. Gary Gray’s Straight Outta Compton tells the story of the rise and fall of N.W.A., a rap supergroup featuring Ice Cube (O’Shea Jackson Jr., Cube’s real-life son), Dr. Dre (Corey Hawkins), and Eazy-E (Jason Mitchell). For those of you not well-versed in late-20th-century hip-hop lore—not that I have anyone in mind—”N.W.A.” stands for “Niggas with Attitude”. It does not require a degree in linguistics or cultural studies to recognize that this was a provocative name for a gangster rap group, particularly one that delivered such ferocious, uncompromising anthems about racial inequality and police brutality. The problem with Straight Outta Compton—what caps it at the level of passable entertainment rather than world-conquering triumph—is that it relays N.W.A.’s history through the form of dutiful hagiography. The members of N.W.A. became legends largely because of the way they upended existing notions of how music could be made, but Straight Outta Compton hits most of the expected beats (though it skips a few others) without ever straying from the sheet music. The result is a perfectly enjoyable movie that often feels like a carefully curated Wikipedia entry.

That doesn’t make it bad. Much of Straight Outta Compton is easily entertaining, especially its zippy first half. It helps that the actors are appealing, particularly Hawkins, who’s able to convey Dre’s musical genius without letting loose on the mic. Behind-the-scenes glimpses of artists sculpting their work are always satisfying, and an early scene of Dre coaxing Eazy on his delivery (for a track that would become “Boyz-n-the-Hood”) demonstrates N.W.A.’s dedication to musical craft as well as social upheaval. And once Paul Giamatti shows up as music impresario Jerry Heller (marking the second time this year he’s played a wig-wearing manipulator of 1980s talent), the movie tracks the methodical process by which a handful of young rappers became objects of fan worship and, more importantly, persons of governmental interest. Read More

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The End of the Tour: Talking About Writing, and Other Demons

Jeremy BeckReviews
Jesse Eisenberg and Jason Segel talk (and talk) in "The End of the Tour"

Writing in the New York Times in 1996 about Infinite Jest, the magnum opus from David Foster Wallace, the critic Jay McInerney wrote, “While there are many uninteresting pages in this novel, there are not many uninteresting sentences.” I feel similarly about The End of the Tour, James Ponsoldt’s compassionate, provocative, and occasionally dull recreation of the five-day period shortly following the release of Infinite Jest, in which Rolling Stone‘s David Lipsky trailed Wallace on his promotional rounds. It is not an especially kinetic movie, and if it is in no hurry to go anywhere, its luxuriant patience occasionally creeps into stasis. But it is also a sharply scripted and profoundly affecting character study, tenderly depicting two writers who are deeply committed both to their specific jobs and to the grander notion of composing meaningful words. Wallace and Lipsky both believed that their prose, as painful as it was to conceive, might actually mean something. The End of the Tour nobly honors their commitment, even if certain stretches of its narrative feel meaningless.

The movie opens in 2008, with a dumbfounded Lipsky (Jesse Eisenberg, even better than usual) learning of Wallace’s suicide, a tragic event whose dark shadow looms over The End of the Tour. It then flashes back 12 years, revealing Lipsky as a hungry and energetic young writer who keeps hearing about this rapturously received tome called Infinite Jest. Animated by both jealousy and disbelief, he scoffs at the reviews claiming that this mammoth novel heralds the arrival of the next Pynchon. Then he reads it. Not long after, he’s pleading with his editor at Rolling Stone to interview Wallace for a celebrity profile, and then he’s jetting off to snowy Illinois, hoping to reconcile this generation-defining book with the mere mortal who wrote it. Read More

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Love & Mercy: Picking Up Vibrations, Good and Bad Alike

Jeremy BeckReviews
John Cusack stars as one half of Brian Wilson in "Love & Mercy"

Being a musical genius must be hard. You hear harmonies no one else can hear, you struggle to communicate your vision to your band mates and studio bosses, and if you’re fortunate enough to be able to actually produce revolutionary music, your innovative advances often go unnoticed until they’re discovered by later generations. But making a movie about such a genius—conveying those enigmatic bursts of internal, auditory inspiration through the visible, visual medium of cinema—is similarly perilous. Love & Mercy, Bill Pohlad’s strange and sensitive biopic of the Beach Boys’ Brian Wilson, does not entirely conquer this challenge. Despite its whirring sound design and persistent effort, it never quite communicates the creative synapses firing within its protagonist’s big, drug-addled brain. But Love & Mercy is nevertheless a compelling portrait of artistic triumph and toil. It is also, more surprisingly, a touching romantic drama. It’s odd that a film about such an idiosyncratic man is at its best when it is at its most conventional.

That doesn’t stop Pohlad, working from a screenplay by Oren Moverman (director of The Messenger) and Michael Alan Lerner, from laboring strenuously to circumvent the customs of the genre. His most obvious and daring maneuver is to structure Love & Mercy as two separate mini-movies. In one, set in the mid-’60s, Wilson (Paul Dano) drifts from his brothers and colleagues while obsessing over the production of the Beach Boys’ seminal album, Pet Sounds. In the other, set some 20 years later, a mentally ill, overmedicated Wilson (now played by John Cusack, delivering his best performance in more than a decade) romances a Cadillac saleswoman, Melinda Ledbetter (Elizabeth Banks, radiant), and wilts under the yoke of his domineering psychotherapist, Dr. Eugene Landy (Paul Giamatti, bewigged and ferocious). Love & Mercy toggles back and forth between the two eras without any particular rhythm or formula. (Think The Godfather Part II, only, er, not quite as good.) It’s an engrossing approach that nonetheless fails to reap any real dividends; it’s fair to wonder how the film would have played in linear fashion, given that neither subplot clearly informs the other. Of course, that lack of causality between the two stories is arguably the point, which is why, in the abstract, Love & Mercy‘s jagged chronology makes sense. This is a fractured movie about a broken man. Read More

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