1000 faces of delusion

Rating: Null/10 (8 February 2016)

This is the typical gangster film, with rise and fall and a series of tense situations. It's not quite Goodfellas but in that same lineage of unspoken titillation at what sociopaths get away with; it seems we'll always want to be flies-in-the-wall in the same room with horrible men, tiptoe out from our lives of social convention to sneak a peak at a life of gross irresponsibility.
Of the two things that stand out in this peak one is Depp continuing to be our current Lon Chaney Sr; here donning a ghastly new face and glacial stare as Boston mobster who menaces everyone, adding another face to the Depp gallery. I would love to see him as Dr. Mabuse.
It's the usual gangster role since Cagney first delighted us by tearing holes at the life of convention, only with the studied reserve that Depp brings to films. Cagney threw himself at the room, Depp glides cautiously. Whereas others would simply have played a guy, you can tell that he has spent copious time constructing, studying mannerisms and inflections. It seems that he almost always needs the remove of a mask from which to immerse himself.
The other thing that I liked here is that we don't just have crime plots and counterplots but these understood in the light of what gives rise to a profoundly illogical world at large; ours, as we spy shades of it daily in the news.
People come together to create bonds and form alliances, mobsters against another more dominant fraction, mobsters and Feds in cahoots against that faction, mobsters and Florida businessmen skimming together off the top, mobsters and IRA in alliance for the good of a cause, other Feds against the corrupt former ones. We see enough of it to imagine that it goes on forever in myriad guises.
Bonds of this kind being a matter of seeing yourself in a common ground with others, this ground is always constructed on the basis of shared storytelling. It can be loyalty or justice, or having grown up in the same neighborhood. But when this internal logic is upheld against common human sense, that ends up creating deluded human beings and an illogical world, one where a law agency turns a blind eye to crime in one side of the city to quash it in another, only to find the whole city still festered with it.
You'll see tribal allegiances of this kind whenever humanity is beset by violence and oppression, sometimes as response. This is true from mafia and drug cartels to the cartels of financiers and politicians. It's - partly but significantly - why the Middle East is full of rips in the fabric and only held together with brute force.
Interestingly we're shown that all the relevant information that helped them make progress were already available to them in the depositions of informants, Bulger gave them nothing of substance. The whole plot was to no avail, all they needed was in plain sight of them, if only they had looked.