Black Mass

Johnny Depp gives one of his best performances as James "Whitey" Bulger, the notorious Boston gangster who was an informant for the FBI.  Depp is chilling as a brutal criminal with a warm spot for those he loves. However, of all the people who could have played Bulger, why choose someone who looks nothing like him? We have to look past the solid make-up job, the receding hairline, the blondish hair, the distracting blue contact lenses that obscure Depp's expressiveness. Even though his performance is good, it seems encumbered by artifice. Depp fancies himself a modern-day Alec Guinness and loves physical transformations, but in this realistic movie this feels like an uphill battle. Ed Harris would have been spot-on in terms of looks. But so could have Matt Damon, who'd have no trouble with the Southie accent, or Edward Norton, or Ryan Gosling, or even Kevin Bacon, who is in the movie as an FBI agent, and who always rocks. Basically, any good actor who is also a blue-eyed blond could do. All the effort made to turn Depp into Bulger is distracting and it whacks the film out of balance.
The story is incredibly juicy. John Connolly (the excellent Joel Edgerton), is an FBI agent who was a childhood friend of Bulger's and he convinces Bulger to inform against the Boston Italian mafia. The brutal Bulger then uses the government's protection to run rampant and become the mafia kingpin of Boston. The movie is about testing loyalty, and about the good getting in bed with the very bad. The incestuous level of corruption between criminality and the government is the most interesting part, but the script by Jez Butterworth and Mark Mallouk seems a bit unfocused. I would have loved to know a little more about how it was possible for the most notorious gangster in Boston to have a brother (Cumberbatch) who was state senator for Massachusetts.
The direction by Scott Cooper is spotty. Some scenes are powerful but others smack of cliché. Who is really the main character? Bulger or Connolly, who starts out wanting to make a name for himself as the guy who brought the mafia down, and ends up sullying himself and the FBI for recklessly consorting with criminals?
I enjoyed the long, unwieldy movie because the cast is a dream (it also includes Corey Stoll, Peter Sarsgaard, Julianne Nicholson, Dakota Johnson, and Rory Cochrane). While Depp is busy channelling the likes of Christopher Walken, Joel Edgerton brings a dark humor to Connolly, an excitable, ambitious, if crass, agent who gets comfortable playing outside the rules to accommodate Bulger, and then flails in hot water by watching him spin out of his control. Edgerton is an intellectually sexy actor; he brings surprising but coherent quirks to every part he plays. Here, he gives a very layered, rounded performance, swaying between his gratitude and admiration for Bulger, to a comic swagger that creeps in once he gets his way, to his deepening brazen, desperate denial about the terrible mess he has created.
This movie needs a director with a fiercer sense of irony and a stronger sense of outrage. Still, if you like gangster films, this one's a keeper. Even the good guys are thugs.

The Gift

Here's one scary movie that has no creaking doors, no ghosts, no supernatural forces. The evil man can do needs no special effects; it is destructive enough to warp reality for a lifetime. This excellent psychological thriller from the multi-talented writer, director, producer and actor Joel Edgerton delivers several jolts that make the audience jump in their seats, and, better yet, some very disturbing twists firmly rooted in complicated, believable characters.
Jason Bateman plays Simon, a charming achiever who moves from Chicago with his lovely wife Robin (the excellent Rebecca Hall) to a beautiful mid-century house in LA, an exposed house seemingly made of endless glass windows, delicate like an eggshell. Simon and Robin are a lovely couple trying to start a family, and Hall and Bateman have an effortless, lived-in intimacy which is rare in movies.
Bateman is perfectly cast as an ambitious corporate climber with a casual sense of humor and an easy-going charm. He is one of the best straight men in comedy, who specializes in smug all-American jocks. He brings his deadpan humor to this dramatic role. We root for Simon, we are seduced by his pluck, his good looks, and how he charms everyone who crosses his path: such a nice, successful man.  He is so suave that he has somehow talked Robin into moving away and quitting her job as a successful interior designer. Getting his way comes effortlessly to him.
As they shop for new furniture, they run into an old classmate of Simon's, a guy called Gordon (Edgerton). Soon Gordon, formerly nicknamed Gordo, is welcoming the couple to the neighborhood with a zeal bordering on the creepy. He leaves gifts on their doorstep, shows up unannounced, too full of good intentions. However, there is something about Gordo that seems both cowed and aggressive, weak and persistent. He is hateful, as all stalkers.
This movie delivers surprising twists that catch the audience off-guard, and change our perception of the characters, which feels as shocking to us as it does to Robin. The fortuitous encounter with her husband's old schoolmate unravels a web of secrets she had no clue about. It is a terrifying feeling to find out that you don't really know the person you think you know best.
Edgerton creates an atmosphere of tension from the moment Gordo appears at the furniture store, out of focus, on the edge of the frame. The sense of class tension helps, as Simon's golden boy seems to have thrived while everything about Gordo is undefined, and clearly not as successful. Robin is willing to give Gordo's neediness the benefit of the doubt. He has been in the Army, his life has unraveled, and he keeps showering them with gifts. But Simon is mean about him and a little wary.
Unsettling things happen. Simon asks Gordo to stop pestering them. As he explains himself to his wife, he sounds like a mouthpiece for the Republican party. He has little sympathy for Gordo's travails; he claims he had a rough childhood but got up by his bootstraps and made something of himself. His smug charm is that of any garden-variety sociopath, of those people who don't need guns or violence to crush others. In this country, their getting ahead by any means tends to be celebrated. Exuberant admiration for enterprising bullies (from Steve Jobs to Donald Trump, to name just two) is a quintessentially American thing. Edgerton is from Australia. Perhaps his vantage point allows him to see this with unusual clarity.
Although The Gift becomes more conventional towards the end, it establishes its premise and its characters deftly enough that certain exaggerated twists still make sense within the story. It's a small quibble for the rare thriller that uses reality to give us a good scare.

Exodus: Gods And Kings

Any movie where John Turturro plays a Pharaoh and Christian Bale plays Moses is worth seeing in my book. But just as it should not have taken the Jews 40 years to cross that desert, it should not have taken Ridley Scott almost three hours to tell the story of Moses and the exodus from Egypt.
But three hours it takes, and it befuddles that Scott, who is quite a visual storyteller, chooses to linger on endless chariot chases, multiple aerial views of Memphis (not Tennessee), has Jews sauntering through the desert with what seems nary a care in the world,  and Moses falling in love for forever in screen time with Zipporah (who cares?). But then he doesn't let the story alight on more interesting stuff.
Blink and you will miss the golden calf. But the most egregious omission is that he diminishes the very payoff of the story: the bequeathing of the ten commandments to the Jews. They were slaves for centuries, they are liberated by Moses with the help of some fabulous CGI plagues, courtesy of a very testy God who murders everything in sight, and, in an amazing ironic twist with a Biblical amount of chutzpah, gives them the basic tenets of civilization in writing, which include, in capital letters, Thou Shalt Not Kill. It is with these laws that they will flourish as a free nation. Alas, we are not to see this epic moment in this epic film. Instead, we see a much diminished Moses sitting inside a dumpy cart guarding the ark of the covenant as if it were lost luggage at La Guardia.
Why bury the most redeeming aspect of such a violent story? To me this is far more ridiculous than the decision to have God appear to Moses in the form of a British child. I would have much preferred the thundering voice of say, Benedict Cumberbatch coming from behind that feeble burning bush that looks like someone lit it by accident with a can of Sterno, (perhaps Reese Witherspoon wandering in from Wild - same story), but apparently Scott and his four writers move in mysterious ways.
Having a physical presence for Moses to argue with is not an uninspired choice. It may have seemed more modern to the filmmakers, but it does detract a wee bit from the majesty and mystery of an unseen, but very much felt, God.
Epic movies about anything that happened more than two centuries ago are not to be taken factually or seriously. They tend to be a hoot. Hence, it is my humble opinion that it is a waste of time to disparage the racial casting in this movie. We might also whine about 2000 years of Western art in which Jesus, the Virgin and the Apostles are always all as white as Wonder Bread. I didn't see an actual Jew playing any Jews, but I haven't heard anyone complain about this either. I agree that movies need to be more inclusive and true to reality in casting, but not necessarily when it comes to ancient times. Ancient times call for British thespians and Aaron Paul looking as if he'd rather be dead in Arizona than Joshua in this other desert dump.
Turturro nails his sadly short part with a couple of wonderful scenes with Bale, with whom he seems to have real rapport. Edgerton, who has quite a pair of Egyptian lips, is also quite good and campy as a petulant megalomaniac with daddy issues. He finds something to hold on to in his Ramses, while Bale has a harder time finding Moses as Moses tries to find himself. It's hard to be a Jew. Also, it's hard to play a hero whose transformation into a revolutionary is not very convincing. Is it because he saw the suffering of the people, because Ben Kingsley told him to, or because God finally appeared to him? I love that he argues with God, true to biblical form, but I didn't understand how Moses gained his sense of purpose. So Moses is conflicted. But his conflict seems visited on him by the rulebook of Hollywood Personal Conflicts 101, rather than by a real identity crisis. Being an Egyptian prince your entire life only to find out you are a lowly Jew has got to to mess with your head, but Scott prefers to cut (again and again) to the bigger battles.
We can discuss other strange liberties taken by this movie, such as why the very corrupt and evil character of the Viceroy (an Egyptian played by Ben Mendelsohn, probably the only Jew around), is a raging homosexual of the most insidious variety. Why does he have to be a sibilant gay? Is that in the Bible? More importantly, is anybody other than me complaining about this yet? Why bring in Sigourney Weaver to give her half a second of screen time? After three hours of some truly well crafted spectacle interrupted by unnecessary padding, I realized that the reason why this this epic story was failing is because it has been boiled down to yet another irrelevant yarn about two dudes fighting. GAWD. Guys, you got to get a hold of yourselves. This is getting tiresome. You can feel the movie balloon in preposterousness while it deflates in intelligence as this ridiculous, simplistic thread is pursued. If we're not going to have a payoff of Biblical proportions, why bother?