'Black Mass' and Hollywood's "Cool Dude" Problem

This week I saw Black Mass, the new film from director Scott Cooper (Out of the Furnace). The film stars Oscar nominee Johnny Depp, Joel Edgerton (The Gift), Benedict Cumberbath (Star Trek Into Darkness), Kevin Bacon, Corey Stoll (This is Where I Leave You), Peter Sarsgaard (Blue Jasmine) and Dakota Johnson (50 Shades of Grey). The film has been promoted as the "official" beginning of the Oscar season. Its mid-September release date puts it in a weird position, however. The Oscar season is long and fickle, meaning the film could be forgotten by time December hits. Black Mass' best contender is star Depp himself as notorious criminal James "Whitey" Bulger, whose performance in the film is being touted as a "comeback" but he still needs strong legs at the box office to retain the momentum. 

But why is the movie considered an Oscar contender? Johnny Depp is laughably phony in the lead role, desperately vying for street cred by cursing on screen and staring at people. But this is no less a caricature than his work in Dark Shadows or the later Pirates of the Caribbean movies. Black Mass is a standard gangster biopic, where bad guys do bad things but look cool doing it and then get caught and we're supposed to understand that they're bad. It features overwritten dialogue that tries hard to be macho-poetic, throwing in the F word and other profanity to sound hardcore. This movie is reeking of testosterone and toxic masculinity. The movie is deemed "important" because it has the veneer of a prestige mobster move but in fact it is just as hollow as any studio programmed rom-com or blockbuster.

 Black Mass is, at its core, another "boys will be boys" antihero narrative, where violent crimes are glamorized until the 3rd act, where the criminals' bad acts catch up to them and the film haphazardly becomes a "critique" of toxic masculinity culture. And this is the exact kind of story that automatically becomes an Oscar contender both by being a biopic and because it's a story about men doing manly things and upholding manly honor to other men. Frankly, I'm sick to death of stories about criminals who are complicated because they stick by their own code even as they do reprehensible things. 

Bulger and his crew look cool committing crimes, especially when Cooper stages several murders as punchlines. Some, if not all, of the "critique" gets lost because the focus of the narrative is misguided. Cooper stops short of making Corey Stoll's federal prosecutor Fred Wyshak into a bad guy but not by much. Yes, he wants to stop criminals from murdering people, selling drugs and stealing money. What a jerk!

The film's three female characters with more than one scene (Dakota Johnson, above, Julianne Nicholson and Juno Temple) are such non-entities. They are only there to experience the brutality of being married or connected to the mob. There's a hilariously awful scene where Bulger threatens Nicholson's Marianne by rubbing his hands all over her face. Johnson plays Bulger's wife, with the 20+ year age difference between Depp and Johnson not even mentioned. Juno Temple not only gets introduced as a semi-incestuous drug addict hooker but her death scene is cripplingly graphic and bizarrely filmed. There's just no context to why these women get such harsh treatment beyond "they exist in this criminal world." I'm sorry but that is not good enough to justify the outright misogyny depicted in the film. Scott Cooper just isn't good enough to find the satire or criticism or whatever he's aiming for underneath the cruelty onscreen. He wants other bro types to cheer because, damn it, these are "cool dudes" who say "cool things" and love each other (no homo FYI).

You know who is able to criticize toxic masculinity with precision and insight? Martin Scorsese. Wolf of Wall Street, Goodfellas, Taxi Driver, The Departed--these films deftly avoided the trap of showing bad guys do glamorous things and losing the criticism. Sometimes audiences and so-called moral guardians may be too dumb to catch it but it's there. Cooper feels like one of those guys who saw Wolf of Wall Street and was like "that Belfort guy, he's got it."

Another issue I have with male antihero stories is that, at the end of the day, the point of the movie is "look how oppressive/violent/selfish these men are." Okay, that story is just boring after all. And it's not just gangster movies. Two teen comedy/dramas from this past summer--Paper Towns and Me, Earl and the Dying Girl, were films where the whole point was "look how selfish and self-absorbed these white guys are." Nightcrawler may have been one of the top films of 2014, but essentially it's telling the same "white guy" story. When are screenwriters, directors and other filmmakers going to stop showing us how privileged and/or awful white men are and just tell diverse stories? It's the same thing over and over again.

I would like to see more female antiheroes like Rosamund Pike in Gone Girl (above) or even Laura Dern in the HBO series Enlightened. Seeing what kind of havoc women can wreak could be fun if done correctly. But female filmmakers are rare when it comes to getting big projects produced and of course there's always the risk of the Internet screaming MISOGYNY!!! whenever a female character has some shades of grey. But it would breathe some life into the antihero narrative.

Because right now, films like Black Mass are signifying how hollow and boring these stories are. I am astounded that there is some serious Oscar talk surrounding a terrible, misguided and downright ugly film but considering how men's stories are perceived to be important just by virtue of existing, perhaps I shouldn't be. (Also, I felt this way even before I saw the film--the trailers were not promising either). For my money, I severely doubt that Johnny Depp or anyone involved with the film will get any sort of awards attention, aside from star-hungry Golden Globes.

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