I blame Whitey

Rating: 7/10 (27 September 2015)

One of the friends I saw this with has read two books about Whitey Bulger, and said after seeing it that it was very close to the facts with one exception: in real life, the sequence in which two men are shot to death in a moving vehicle involved one of the men getting away and having to be murdered at a later date. This confirms my overall impression that this film does a pretty good job at representing the reality of Whitey's life of crime within the framework of a Hollywood movie. In fact everything about it is well done, and as my friend observed, the people who designed and applied the prosthetic makeup on Johnny Depp and Benedict Cumberbatch should get all the awards, because it's literally seamless. (I suspect a touch of CGI went into it too.) The story itself is one that deserves to be told, about the FBI's disastrous decision to use the psychopathic Whitey as a tool to take down a rival gangster, which entailed letting him get away with whatever crimes he felt like committing under their protection. The problem is that real psychopaths, unlike Hollywood psychopaths like Hannibal Lecter and Frank Underwood, aren't interesting people. They don't have normal emotions or motivations so it's impossible for a normal person to relate to them. So the story revolves around the complex of people around Whitey who enabled his crime spree, particularly the main FBI agent who personally profited from setting up Whitey as an informant, i.e. another psychopath. I suspect in real life most if not all of the main players in this story were psychopaths to some degree, and I think this is at the heart of why this perfectly well-made film is lacking a certain something. It would take a lightning bolt of inspiration to strike any screenwriter to give them what it would take to make this story about the stupid and mean adventures of a gang of douches thrilling or poignant or mesmerizing. And really, inspiration would be better spent on a more inspiring story than this vile and contemptible shambles of aimless greed and cruelty.
Johnny Depp does a fine job of conveying the alien psychological state of a psychopathic criminal. Whitey refused Johnny's request to meet with him while he was preparing to play him on screen, so the blame rests on Whitey that Johnny has had to invent his own Whitey rather than model him on the real man. The revelation at the end of the film that Whitey was ultimately brought to justice and rots in prison to this day is the most satisfying thing about it.