Vicious, fascinating, hollow

It's getting to the point where anyone born after 1990 has to grow up looking at the rise of organized crime as existing entirely for their screened entertainment purposes. If The Godfather brought us the modern mafia narrative, everything that has come after it -- from Scorsese to The Sopranos -- has served to reinforce the tenets of the genre.

The fact that the organized crime syndicates were, in fact, very real and left a long string of mangled corpses in their wake has become kind of immaterial as far as the movie-going public is concerned. Like the fall of Rome, or the Mongol invasions, it's a dark, bloody, desperate time in human history that lends itself very easily to genre films. It has been an embarrassment of riches over the decades since Coppola's two masterworks, with several of America's most acclaimed directors chronicling the rise, fall, and dissolution of the Mafia and related crime organizations.

I suppose it's not anyone's fault that it seems as if most every angle has been covered by now, but it doesn't make it easy to produce an organized crime film that doesn't feel like you've seen it dozens of times already. Even when the story is mostly true and based on one of the more notorious gangsters of the last 30 years: Jimmy "Whitey" Bulger, an Irish kid from South Boston, used his influence with a fellow Southie-turned-FBI agent John Connolly (Joel Edgerton) to run a massive racketeering operation for 20 years without federal interference. He was on the lam from authorities for 16 years, until he was finally captured in Santa Monica back in 2011.

As played by Johnny Depp -- sporting balding hair, rotting teeth and a carbide-piercing gaze -- Jimmy is everything a crime boss is meant to be: cunning, ruthless, unpredictable and intimidating beyond measure. Growing up with his younger brother, Billy (played by Benedict Cumberbatch), who would eventually become a powerful state senator, Jimmy earned a reputation as a person no one ever wanted to cross. But, at the same time, he was good to his ma (Mary Klug), and other elderly people from his neighborhood, and a devoted family-oriented man with a mistress (Dakota Johnson) and a young son (Luke Ryan) on the side.

When Connolly, his old Southie comrade, begins to rise in the ranks of the FBI, the two work out a mutually beneficial "alliance" -- ostensibly to help Connolly bring down Bulger's rivals, the powerful Italian mob at work in North Boston, but really to offer Jimmy a free pass in exchange for a smattering of information to help consolidate his power and create an extremely lucrative arrangement for the both of them.

With the FBI's backing -- to the consternation of Connolly's boss, McGuire (Kevin Bacon) -- Jimmy goes from small-time hood to larger-than-life kingpin, taking down rivals, rats, and potential squealers by the casketful in the process. By the time a new circuit judge (Corey Stoll) finally exposes the FBI's dubious operation in the early '90s, Jimmy has murdered, tortured, and extorted his way to the top of the heap.

Scott Cooper has an admirable track record with actors -- his work with Jeff Bridges in Crazy Heart helped the venerable leading man to an Oscar win -- so matching him up with a thespian of Depp's skill is predictably revelatory. Given an actual character to embody, few actors of Depp's generation can match his uncanny ability to sink into his subjects, and here, he's never less than snarlingly, brutally effective. Also strong is Edgerton, an Aussie actor with a track record of his own, who plays the hapless Connolly like a meathead thug from the streets who knows a good cash cow when he sees one.

As with all films set in Boston, we get a bit of a referendum on who can pull off the notorious accent of the region. I have not the ear for in-depth analysis, but Depp and Edgerton pass this novice's impression, at least considerably better than Cumberbatch, whose accent seems to slip away from him, line to line. But this is a minor quibble to the film's main difficulty: With so many other films depicting such similar figures, and their arcs, it's extremely difficult for Cooper and screenwriters Mark Mallouk and Jez Butterworth (working from a source book by former Boston Globe newsmen Dick Lehr and Gerard O'Neill) to find new, forceful ways of telling their story. Too many times, Cooper resorts to Scorsese's well-established bag of tricks -- slow-motion cameras, vintage FM radio rock standards (though, thankfully, he gives "Layla" a rest), and the like -- or gives us an actors' showcase scene that hits its narrative points a bit too on-point to be entirely resonant.

It also presents us with little more than a snapshot of Bulger's life before and after his dramatic rise to power, a wasted opportunity to bring us further insight into his character. The film hints at his softer side for his mother and family, while reinforcing the lack of such sentiment or remorse for anyone else outside that small circle. In one particularly brutal scene, he strangles a young woman for fear that she might conceivably leak information about him to the cops, setting her up, as he seems to do for most of his victims, by talking very sweetly a split second before savagely attacking her with his bare hands.

You get the sense that Cooper and Depp want Whitey to be more than the sum of his parts, that his grandeur came not just from his supernatural charisma -- a trait shared, we must point out, with superstar actors -- and that more was going on under his big frame sunglasses than just cruelty and malice, but as far as we see, he was just another monster, raised up from the streets to prey on everyone and everything around him until it was all under his control.

The end credits roll over blurry surveillance footage of the real thing: Whitey hanging out with his henchmen, laughing with someone leaning against a car, or gesticulating as he's telling a story of some kind. Prepared as you are to get up and leave, the dude does transfix you. You stay in your seat and peer at the grainy black and white images, watching him in action doing not very much at all and begin to get a sense of the way he controlled his environment.

There is something worth capturing there, but this film simply doesn't do enough to present him as an individual. As for Depp, while it's certainly encouraging to see him in something other than his Long John Silver getup (or something else with Tim Burton), as convincing as he may be, there's nothing to really differentiate his character. Try as the filmmakers might, with Bulger's personal mythmaking aside, their version reduces him to the same sociopath we've seen endlessly before.

MovieStyle on 09/18/2015