Category: Julianne Nicholson

BLACK MASS

By Marc S. Sanders

Black Mass tells the story of an FBI agent, and his two childhood friends who are brothers.  One brother is Billy Bulger, a Massachusetts state senator.  The other is notorious Boston gangster James “Whitey” Bulger.  The script has a lot of elements to make for a great crime drama, but I wonder what Johnny Depp is doing here made up to perform like a crazed ghoul.

The FBI agent is John Connolly (Joel Edgerton) who turns to Whitey (Depp), a fearful leader of the Irish mob in South Boston during the nineteen seventies through eighties to work as an informant, providing intel on the competing Italian Mafia.  It’s no secret about Whitey Bulger’s dealings or what territory he covers.  Agent Connolly does his best to protect his friend, so long as he collects pertinent information that leads to arrests.  However, what’s the limit to Bulger’s activities, and how does this reflect on a public figure like Whitey’s politician brother, Billy (Benedict Cumberbatch)?

Much of Black Mass reenacts recorded testimonies after everything has shaken out.  Guys who survived Whitey’s violent crew (Jesse Plemmons, Rory Cochrane) offer information on the gangster’s activities and what he compelled his captains to carry out.  Mixed in with these voiceovers are how Connolly responds to the progress of his operations.  Time and again, his superiors (first played by Kevin Bacon and later by Corey Stoll) question Connolly about how beneficial Bulger can be if the crook always has his finger on the trigger, killing those that might rat him out.  Black Mass is told from an assortment of different perspectives and sometimes that muddies the water.

The most interesting storyline is how Connolly uses and protects his criminal friend, while also stepping away from getting blood on his hands.  Joel Edgerton gives the best performance of the film as an FBI guy who turns a blind eye to Whitey’s crimes. Connolly thinks he can continue his own corruption while Whitey cooperates and leads him to big, heroic indictments of the Italian mob.  As long as the arrangement upholds, the corrupt agent will always have an answer for his actions and stay ahead of the ethical lines he knows he’s crossing.  More importantly, even if his wife protests, Connolly is getting prestigious promotions and collecting substantial paychecks for his progress.  Scott Cooper directs Edgerton with conflicts of overwhelming complications.

One problem is that Whitey Bulger is a loose cannon who is never intimidated, not even by the Feds, especially not by his childhood friend.  His brother Billy looks away to maintain a clean political image.  Therefore, it is quite easy for Whitey to gun down a rat associate in broad daylight in the middle of a wide-open parking lot, shotgun and all.  The killer doesn’t even need to run away from the scene of the crime.  This is Whitey Bulger.

Johnny Depp is great in the role, but does his portrayal belong in this film?  Depp’s career is widely celebrated for the quirky, makeup clad parts he plays such as Jack Sparrow and Edward Scissorhands.  Even Ed Wood is delightfully weird.  In Black Mass, the actor dons steel grey eye contacts, white slicked back hair making him appear almost bald, and skeletal teeth beneath a near albino complexion.  He looks like Skeletor without the hood.  Throw in a brooding, deep Bostonian accent and you have the ghoul I referred to earlier.  Is this Whitey Bulger?  Online photos of the real guy do not seem consistent with the film’s appearance.  Depp’s delivery of dialogue and even his wicked Freddy Krueger laugh seem too far beyond the realm of this crime drama.  The actor is working on another plane than everyone else in the cast who wear hairpieces, three-piece cotton suits and cheesy off-the-rack polyesters and denims to populate this time period from forty years ago. 

A scene showing Bulger dining on steaks with Connolly and his FBI partner (David Harbor) was famously used in preview showings ahead of the film’s release.  Take this scene out of context like the trailer did and Depp looks scary good as he terrifies Harbor for doing something as simple as revealing a long-time secret family recipe.  Afterwards, Whitey goes upstairs to harass Connolly’s wife (Julianne Nicholson) at the bedroom door.  The dinner scene sold me on getting a ticket for the movie as soon as it was released.  However, put it back into the framework of the script and I feel like Black Mass is diverting itself from a complex crime drama to a vampire in a Member’s Only jacket.  As good as Depp is with his makeup and his vocal inflections and pace, it just doesn’t seem to belong in this particular film.  Marlon Brando as Don Corleone with the shoe polish in the hair and the cotton in the mouth? That works.  Johnny Depp as Count Dracula in Sergio Valente skinny jeans is not as effective.

Because the script changes hands from one perspective to another and then another, I found the reenactments of Connolly and Bulger’s reign of crimes to be a little inconsistent.  I found much potential for Benedict Cumberbatch’s purpose as Whitey’s brother, but there is too much diverted away from that character because the picture is trafficked with what everyone else is doing and seeing on top of giving Johnny Depp a lot of scenery to chew.

Black Mass pursued the potential for a very interesting gangster picture like Goodfellas or Donnie Brasco, but it wants to capitalize too much on the latest Johnny Depp routine.  I think James “Whitey” Bulger is an interesting twentieth century bad guy with a violently daring and checkered background.  He had associates within his family and gang to color in a movie that’ll grab you.  The tainted lawmen who were involved are also intriguing.  Scott Cooper and the screenwriters knew this, but often they opt to go in different directions.  

Now that a loose interpretation of Bulger has been played by Jack Nicholson in Martin Scorsese’s Oscar winning The Departed and again here, it’s time to tell the cold-blooded killer’s story once more.  Just go simpler without all the clownish theatrics.

AUGUST: OSAGE COUNTY

By Marc S. Sanders

Once the dead are buried, the secrets come out.  Some mourn the loss.  Others mourn the reality of what existed.  Tracy Letts’ Pulitzer Prize winning play August: Osage County was adapted into a very well-cast film in 2013.  Letts’ screenplay is just as biting as his original source. Perhaps that is because of the performances of not just Meryl Streep and Julia Roberts, but also the entire collection of actors.

Dysfunctional is not a strong enough word for the Weston family of the sleepy, lifeless area of Osage County, Oklahoma.  The patriarch, Beverly (Sam Shepard) hires Johnna (Misty Upham) a Native American housekeeper/helper, for his pill popping, cigarette smoking wife Violet (Streep) who is also stricken with cancer of the mouth.  Shortly after, Beverly disappears.  The family comes home to the dusty shelves of books and old black and white family photographs and learns that Beverly has committed suicide.  The opportunities flood in for Violet (or Vi) to unleash every ugly, harsh truth that her three daughters Barbara, Ivy and Karen (Roberts, Julianne Nicholson and Juliette Lewis) have encountered along with their partners.  There’s also Vi’s sister Fannie Mae (Margo Martindale), her husband Charlie (Chris Cooper) and their son Little Charlie (Benedict Cumberbatch) to revisit the revelations of the Weston family.  Barbara’s estranged husband Bill (Ewan MacGregor) and her daughter Jean (Abigail Breslin) have their own drama to contend with as well.

It’s best not to spoil too much of what is revealed in the movie directed by John Wells.  The centerpiece of the picture is the afternoon family meal following the funeral service.  This must be one of the most intense and captivating dinner scenes caught on film in recent years.  Wells positions his cameras perfectly, so you know where every family member is seated at the table and the trading of barbs that go back and forth between the different combinations of arguments.  I would say the scene lasts at least twenty minutes and Wells manages to seat the viewer next to or right in front of every person at the table.  At one end of the table is Charlie.  Chris Cooper is a reluctant fill in to the void left by Beverly, the original patriarch.  The instigator is Vi. Meryl Streep is placed at the other head of the table where her drug addled eye contact can be had with anyone seated in her presence.  I’d love to have seen Meryl Streep while shooting this scene because even when the camera is not on her for a close up, I can still see that she is there in the dining room.  I’d argue she never turned off this persona during the making of this film. 

The most agonizing relationship is clearly between Vi and oldest daughter Barbara.  The first pairing on screen for Meryl Streep and Julia Roberts.  Why didn’t it happen sooner?  Moreover, why hasn’t it happened again since this film?  Perhaps because it is rare to find material of this dramatic weight to justify what can come from these two incredible actors.

The dinner scene is left discomforting to say the least, but the timing and delivery of Tracy Letts’ dialogue is functioning with high energy.  At age fourteen, Jean is the youngest member at the table, and she is questioned as to why she doesn’t eat meat.  According to her, you are consuming an “animal’s fear.”  The Westons are only adoring when they are cruel to one another.  One of the rare times that the rest of the family will unite with the antagonizing Vi is when they can mock and chortle at young Jean’s philosophy for “claiming” to be vegan, which is also undone by her parents when they reveal what she eats back home in Colorado. 

A hip middle aged Florida man named Steve (Dermot Mulroney) in a Ferrari has accompanied Karen to Osage.  Karen is the flighty one with her head in the clouds.  Steve has been married three times and takes a liking to teenage Jean’s curiosity to try pot.  Vi expresses disdain for the jerk with another welcome facial expression from Streep, but Tracy Letts does not have his character lash out or protest Karen’s choice to marry the guy.  For Violet Weston, it is better that Karen does marry this letch.  It gives Vi more purpose to criticize and belabor upon one more poor decision made by another daughter.  Violet thrives on bellowing out the shortcomings of her children, her dead poet/author husband, her sister, and anyone else within her presence.  It’s how she lives and overcomes her cancer while an unkempt wig conceals her chemo remaining grey hairs.

On the side, a relationship is brewing between first cousins Little Charlie and Vi’s middle daughter Ivy.  They know it’s wrong, but they can’t help hiding their affections much longer.  Cumberbatch goes against type here as a nervous, insecure young man who has not matured from his boyhood nature.  Julianne Nicholson appears to be the most held together of the three daughters as she has never ventured out of Osage while living with her parents.  She is now ready to give up that lifestyle, and she’s leaving it in Barbara’s lap to figure what’s to come of Vi. 

Barbara is the most unhinged.  She is married to sweet natured but boring Bill and it’s likely that the past demons she clung to from her upbringing left Osage with her when she relocated to Colorado with her husband and daughter.  Bill might be having a tryst with one of his college students but is he the worst one in the marriage?  Barbara Weston might be Julia Roberts’ best role since her early career film introduction in Steel Magnolias and her Oscar winning turn in Erin Brockovich.  In films like these, Julia Roberts doesn’t look like the starlet she once was in the 1990s.  In August: Osage County she has downed her appearance with no makeup, unwashed hair, and wrinkled clothes while carrying an emotionally exhausted physique.  However, she’s perfect to play the eldest daughter who somehow must be the one responsible for picking up the shattered pieces of dishware that hit the floor on numerous occasions and fractured connections left behind in the family dynamic.  This is a commanding performance by Julia Roberts; one that needs to be seen.  Incidentally, she never does clean up the broken plates.  I only assume it would be her who must do so.  However, the quiet Johnna is around somewhere. She will make everything disappear.

Memorably, a physical altercation ends the dinner.  The day passes into the next mid afternoon and more secrets are uncovered.  Some are quite horrifying, considering the circumstances that some members of the family have themselves in.  Just when you think that this script is ending with a debate of which daughter will look after mother now that daddy is gone, there’s more troubling truth to grapple with as well.

August: Osage County is a movie hinged on the acting chops of its cast with a smart, unforgiving script for the damaged characters depicted.  It falls in the same category as David Mamet’s Glengarry Glen Ross or Sam Shepard’s True West.  We may be witnessing the abnormalities and sins of these people, but it would be more unusual had these folks possessed genuine happiness and solid affection for one another.  The quietly muted Native American Johnna enters the household of people who replaced her own people, who occupied this land long before the early generations of Westons ever arrived.  It’s telling that Tracy Letts demonstrates the original occupants still survive in peace while the ones that took over can’t find a way to live happily among themselves.  Watch the film or see the play.  Then come back and tell me if the white folks of the Weston family truly belong in the once occupied Native American Osage County, Oklahoma.