The “war on drugs” is one of the longest battles in American history. In 1971 President Richard Nixon declared drug abuse “public enemy number one,” vowing combat against drug producers and dealers.
Forty years and many billions of dollars later the Global Commission on Drug Policy stated, “The global war on drugs has failed, with devastating consequences for individuals and societies around the world.”
Last year, writing in the New York Times, Mexican journalist José Luis Pardo Veiras echoed those sentiments. “Drugs continue to stream north to the United States, the great user, and firearms enter Mexico in return, where they kill thousands.”
The fight has been a failure for everyone except Hollywood, which has consistently mined the war on drugs for stories and colourful characters. This weekend Tom Cruise stars in the latest tale from the war on drugs, American Made, the real-life story of Barry Seal, adrenaline junkie and TWA pilot.
The story begins with Seal being hired by the CIA to take reconnaissance photos of Soviet-backed insurgents in South America. His life quickly spirals out of control as he becomes a courier between the CIA and Panamanian CIA informant General Manuel Noriega while also working as a cocaine smuggler for the Medellin Cartel.
Drug cartel stories are tailor made for the movies. Populated by bigger-than-life characters like the wealthiest criminal in history, the so-called “The King of Cocaine,” Pablo Escobar, the stories have it all: glamour, drama, moral ambiguity and the primal clash of good and evil. Here are three films with three very different approaches to the war on drugs.
One critic described Sicario as a “French Connection for the drug-fuelled Mexico-US border war.” Starring Emily Blunt, Benicio del Toro and Josh Brolin, it’s a drama about an idealistic FBI agent working with an elite task force to stem the flow of drugs between Mexico and the United States. It’s gritty and certainly not a feel-good movie about winning the war on drugs. Instead, it’s a powerful look at a seemingly unwinnable battle and the toll it takes on its soldiers.
Savages is an over-the-top Oliver Stone movie that sees Aaron Johnson and Taylor Kitsch as drug dealers and two thirds of a love triangle with a California cutie played by Blake Lively. Their product, a potent strain of legal medical-grade marijuana, earns the attention of a Mexican Baja drug Cartel boss (Salma Hayek) who’ll do anything to create a “joint” venture, including kidnapping and murder.
Savages, at its black-hearted best, is a preposterous popcorn movie that sees Stone leave behind the restraint of movies like W and World Trade Center and kick into full bore, unhinged Natural Born Killers mode. It’s a wild, down ’n dirty look into the business of drugs and revenge.
Smaller in scale is End of Watch. Jake Gyllenhaal and Michael Peña play patrol cops in Los Angeles’s tough South Central neighbourhood. A routine traffic stop turns into something bigger when they confiscate money and guns from a cartel member. “Be careful,” they’re warned by a senior officer, “You just tugged on the tail of a snake that’s going to turn around and bite you.”
These movies and others, like Code of the West and The House I Live In, prove the winners of the war on drugs are filmmakers.
The War on Drugs is one of the longest battles in American history. In 1971 President Richard Nixon declared drug abuse “public enemy number one, “ vowing combat against drug producers and dealers. Forty years and many billions of dollars later the Global Commission on Drug Policy stated, “The global war on drugs has failed, with devastating consequences for individuals and societies around the world.”
The only winners in the drug wars appear to be filmmakers who have mined a rich vein of stories from the decades long battle.
This weekend Tom Cruise stars in the latest tale from the War on Drugs, “American Made,” the real-life story of Barry Seal, adrenaline junkie and TWA pilot. The story begins in 1978 with Seal mentally on autopilot and looking for thrills. Caught smuggling cigars into the United States, the CIA senses his potential and hires him to take reconnaissance photos of Soviet-backed insurgents in South America.
“The work is covert,” says his recruiter, Agent Schafer (Domhnall Gleeson). “If anyone finds out about it, family, friends, your wife, that would be a problem.”
What begins as a safe and profitable adventure takes a dangerous turn when he becomes a courier between the CIA and Panamanian CIA informant General Manuel Noriega. Next he signs onto an even more dangerous assignment, running arms to the contras in Nicaragua in their battle against the communist Sandinistas.
“Is this legal?” he asks. ”It is if you do it for the good guys,” says his Agent Schafer (Domhnall Gleeson).
Seduced by the money and the excitement he also takes gigs as a cocaine smuggler for the Medellin Cartel. “I’m working for the CIA, the DEA and Pablo Escobar,” he boasts. He sees himself as “just gringo who always delivers,” but his convoluted work life and allegiances make him a person of interest not only to everyone from Pablo “The King of Cocaine” Escobar to the DEA, the FBI and even the White House.
Drug cartel stories are tailor made for the movies. Populated by bigger-than-life characters like the wealthiest criminals in history like the Medellin Cartel members, the stories have it all—glamour, drama, moral ambiguity and the primal clash of good and evil. “American Made” has all that, although played in a lower key than movies like “Blow” or “Cocaine Cowboys.” It has a lighter touch—it’s not too violent and, oddly for a drug dealer movie, has no scenes where anyone actually samples the goods—which keeps things moving along at quite a clip but sheds next to no light on its characters, its go-go 80s setting or the political mess that turned into the Iran-Contra affair.
Echoes of “Top Gun” hang heavy over Cruise as the cockpit king Seals. He’s all teeth and grins, a charmer who can talk his way through almost any situation. He has nerves of steel and high-flying greed, a combo that should give us a compelling anti-hero but instead Cruise plays him as a decent guy who “didn’t ask enough questions.” Didn’t ask enough questions about the personal toll his work running guns and drugs for a cartel. Didn’t ask enough questions about human trafficking. He didn’t ask questions because he was greedy. He liked the suitcases of cash and fancy cars his job provided. If the movie had allowed Cruise (or vice versa) to actually explore Barry’s dark side the film might have delivered more of a punch.
There’s more character work in any episode of “Breaking Bad” or “Narcos” than “American Made’s” entire 115 minute running time but Cruise’s movie does have a sense of humour about itself that makes for an amiable, if not memorable, watch.
“The Program,” a biopic of disgraced Tour de France racer Lance Armstrong begins like a fairy tale, although one with doping and cancer, but ends as a Shakespearean tragedy.
Ben Foster plays the cyclist as an athlete obsessed with winning. A rising star on the race circuit, he looks to Dr. Medecin Michele Ferrari (Guillaume Canet), an Italian doctor with a “scientific” approach to training to create a routine—the program—involving exercise, growth hormones, erythropoietin, cortisone and testosterone patches that will turn him into a champion. “You just tell me what to do,” Armstrong says eagerly, “and I’ll do it.” The doctor tells Lance that under his care you’ll, “no longer confined to earth now you can fly.”
In other words: OK Racer + Performance Enhancing Drugs = Great Racer.
When his career momentum is slowed by testicular cancer it seems as though everything will be lost but he beats the disease and comes back stronger than ever. Almost too strong. Sunday Times sports reporter David Walsh (Chris O’Dowd) notes that during one race Armstrong is moving so quickly he has to use his brakes…going uphill. “He recovered from cancer and turned into Superman,” he says. Suspicious, he puts Armstrong and his team, the U.S. Postal Service Pro Cycling Team, under a journalistic microscope. “I have no interest in watching chemists racing up a hill,” says Walsh.
As Armstrong and Co begin a streak that will eventually see them win seven Tour de France races Walsh raises an “unwelcome question,” Is it real or is it dope? Meanwhile Armstrong becomes an American hero, supporting cancer research through his charity, all the while denying any wrong doing in the dope department.
As the pressure increases so does his ego. He starts referring to himself in the third person—“Will he passed every test?” he says. “Yes he will because he doesn’t use performance-enhancing drugs.”—and launches lawsuits against the Sunday Times and Walsh in an effort to intimidate them into silence. It isn’t until a former teammate, Floyd Landis (Jesse Plemons), comes clean about the doping that Lance’s empire crumbles.
Like its subject “The Program” moves quickly. So quickly, in fact, it plays like a montage, never settling on one thing long enough for the audience to care. Racing scene! Doping scene! Inspirational chatter like “Say to yourself, I’m flying”! Director Stephen Frears races through Lance’s life—his cancer is dispensed with in minutes while in another scene he meets a woman and in the next they’re walking out of a church, married—touching down here and there on the greatest hits of the man’s life. It’s a face paced but unsatisfying way to learn about the rise and fall of the most famous bicyclist in the world.
That he was a doper and a cheat is not in question but what got him there? Winning is everything to Lance, but why? Is it hubris? The movie doesn’t let us know. It is content to zip through the details without too much commentary on how or why we got there. It’s a story of hubris, heroics and hypocrisy that is more interested in broad strokes of how Armstrong created his own legend than the details.
“The Program” falls somewhere between a biopic, sports movie and the investigative reporting of “Spotlight,” but never gels as any one thing. Foster is fine in the lead role but the film doesn’t allow him to really inhabit the ski of his character. For a more complete and interesting look at Lance check out Alex Gibney’s documentary “The Armstrong Lie.”
In Black Mass, Dakota Johnson has a high profile role as the steely-but-sweet girlfriend to notorious gangster James “Whitey” Bulger but for much of her life she was simply known as a child of Hollywood, the daughter of Melanie Griffith and Don Johnson.
Despite an acting career that stretches back to 1999, the 25-year-old became a sensation just last year when she landed the lead role in one of the most anticipated films of the decade.
She beat out half of young Hollywood to play Anastasia Steele in the fastest selling R-rated title ever, Fifty Shades of Grey. She bared all, physically and emotionally; and became famous enough to have designers create clothes for her and an avalanche of interesting scripts to tumble her way. She’ll soon be seen in a Fifty Shades sequel and a remake of the legendary Italian horror film Suspiria.
This week she stars opposite her 21 Jump Street co-star Johnny Depp — they appeared in the 2012 film — as Lindsey Cyr, mother of Bulger’s son and the only person in South Boston who would stand up to the infamous killer.
Cyr is still alive but Johnson didn’t think it was a good idea to meet with her.
“It would have been if my goal had been to be extremely accurate but my goal was to bring out a different side of Jimmy. We talked about meeting her but we decided that it would have added a bunch of components. You wouldn’t see them. You wouldn’t see the stories she was telling because it wasn’t part of our story.”
Instead she studied footage of the former diner waitress and lawyer’s assistant.
“I did as much research as was available to me,” she says, “but the majority of the footage I found on her was pretty recent and it was her looking back on her time with Jimmy Bulger.
“Obviously the time that we see them together (in the film) is when she is quite young. A lot of that came from working it out with (director) Scott Cooper and Johnny.”
In her most intense scene she stares down and out-manoeuvres the controlling gangster after personal tragedy strikes the couple.
“There was a very heavy atmosphere on set but because Johnny was really not himself, he was a completely different person and because I’m not a mother and have never experienced anything as profoundly devastating as losing a child, I think we both completely slipped away from ourselves. That allowed us to create the scene the way it was.”
On acting: Edgerton portrays former FBI agent as a ‘bad dude’
Joel Edgerton didn’t meet the inspiration for his character in Black Mass, former FBI agent John Connolly.
“He’s alive and with us, albeit in federal prison and a little hard to reach,” said the Australian actor. The real-life Connolly was convicted of racketeering and obstruction of justice charges stemming from his relationship with gangster James “Whitey” Bulger.
“His version of events doesn’t line up with our version…. I felt like it was a little unfair to go and visit him in federal prison and say, ‘You stay in here while I’m over here making you look like a bad dude.’ It felt like it wasn’t a very genuine thing to do.”
Black Mass sees Johnny Depp playing Jimmy ‘Whitey’ Bulger, a crime lord-turned-FBI-informant who ruled South Boston and was also the inspiration for Jack Nicholson’s character in The Departed.
Bulger was a community minded cold-blooded killer. He loved his neighbourhood, kids, cats and choking people to death with his bare hands.
Depp says “a responsibility to history and truth to some degree” was very important to him going into the project.
“When you’re playing someone who exists or existed,” he says, “there’s a tremendous kind of amount of responsibility, at least for me, no matter whether they’re deemed good or bad or whatever. You have a responsibility to that person.”
The fifty-two year old actor’s performance is already earning early Oscar buzz for the chilling authenticity he brings to a man described in the film as “ripened psychopath.”
Director Scott Cooper says, “I don’t think people come to narrative features for the facts, or for truth. I think you go to documentaries for that. What you do come to narrative features for is psychological truth, emotion and deep humanity. I did not want to make a film strictly about criminals who happened to be humans. I wanted to make a film about humans who happened to be criminals.”
Like many underworld figures, Bulger created his own mythology based on his exploits, making it difficult for co-screenwriter Mark Mallouk and Cooper to discern what was true and what wasn’t.
“Jimmy Bulger had his version of the truth which was different from (accomplice) Stephen Flemmi’s,” said the director, “that was different from (henchman) Kevin Weeks and (hitman) John Martorano. I had to determine what was the story I was going to tell… and tell it as accurately as I could from a very emotional place.”
It’s a hard-edged tale to be sure, fuelled by Bulger’s violent and grim behaviour, but Depp found it best not to judge the character.
“I don’t think any of us wake up in the morning and say, ‘I’m so evil. I’m so horrible,’” Depp said. “I approached James Bulger as a human being, who’s multi-faceted and did have a side to him that was human and loving.”
Depp’s performance and the work of his co-stars Dakota Johnson and Joel Edgerton among others, ensure that Black Mass is a complex study of human behaviour, but hopefully, according to Mallouk, not a glamorous one.
“None of wanted anyone walking out of the theatre to go, ‘I want to be Whitey Bulger,’” said Mallouk. “You feel that way after Scarface or Goodfellas or after The Godfather, and I love those movies, but there is a responsibility to not do that here. It feels more like Donnie Brasco. We did not want to create more fuel for the Whitey Bulger myth.”
Cooper says his responsibility as a filmmaker and storyteller was with “the victim’s families because Jimmy Bulger and the men we chronicle in this film left a deep emotional scar on the city of Boston that is still very fresh and widely felt.
“I care what they think about the film and I hope I didn’t trivialize these events.”
In real life Bulger, now eighty-six years old and serving two life terms plus five years at a penitentiary in Florida, was convicted of racketeering, money laundering, extortion, weapons charges and was found to have been involved in 11 murders.
“You talk about six degrees of Kevin Bacon,” says Cooper. “In South Boston or Boston in general it’s two degrees of Whitey Bulger. Everybody had a story and everybody knew him.”
“Southie kids went from playing cops and robbers in the playground to doing it for real on the streets,” says Kevin Weeks (Jesse Plemons), “and like on the playground sometimes it was hard to tell who was who.”
It’s not that hard, really. Not in “Black Mass” anyway. The story of Jimmy ‘Whitey” Bulger (Johnny Depp), the crime lord-turned-FBI-informant who ruled South Boston and was the inspiration for Jack Nicholson’s character in “The Departed,” is populated by bad men who do terrible things.
Bulger himself was a community minded cold-blooded killer. He loved his neighbourhood, kids, cats and choking people to death with his bare hands. He was, in the words of FBI agent Charles McGuire (Kevin Bacon) a “ripened psychopath.”
“It’s not what you do,” Bulger says, “it’s when and where you do it. If no one sees it didn’t happen.”
“Black Mass” is a gangster thriller in the same vein as ”Goodfellas.” It follows a familiar pattern, the rise, fall and eventual ratting out of a crime boss, but provides more than enough underworld intrigue to keep things interesting. Depp is all coiled menace, a dark-eyed malevolent force capable of helping an old neighbourhood woman with her groceries one moment and killing an old friend the next. He’s unpredictable in the most predictable of ways, but Depp makes sure that Bulger isn’t just an echo of Michael Corleone or Tony Montana by giving him some tender moments with his family, son, mother and brother. It’s terrific work and a welcome change from his recent, extended Caribbean trip.
This is very much Depp’s movie but it is populated by an array of interesting and well-performed characters.
Joel Edgerton is John Connolly, a Southie kid who grew up to become the FBI agent who convinced Bulger to become an informant. Edgerton is always interesting, often in supporting roles. Here in a large, showy part he is all swagger and Brut cologne.
As the assorted bad guys and crooked FBI agents Jesse Plemons, Rory Cochrane, Peter Sarsgaard bring the scuzz, but while this is a very male movie, there are three solid performances from the female cast. As Connolly’s wife Julianne Nicholson brings the right amount of scepticism about being airlifted into a world she doesn’t understand and Juno Temple is heartbreaking as a street waif who makes the mistake of trusting Whitey. Dakota Johnson, as Bulger’s common law wife Lindsey Cyr, stands out, riding the line between steeliness and sweetness in her scenes with Depp.
The gangster saga may be the great American movie genre. From Howard Hawks and William A. Wellman to Martin Scorsese and Francis Ford Coppola, bullets and bangers have been a staple on the big screen. “Black Mass” is another piece of that puzzle, but unlike “Scarface” or “The Godfather” it doesn’t glamourize gang life—this is the underworld’s more down-and-dirty side—but neither does it break much new ground. Perhaps given the extensive Hollywood history of on-screen thuggery there aren’t many new ways to present the rise-and-fall story but director Scott Cooper, Depp and cast at least keep it compelling.
Richard hosted the press conference for the movie Black Mass held during the 2015 Toronto International Film Festival on Monday September 14 with Dakota Johnson, Johnny Depp, Joel Edgerton, Peter Sarsgaard, Kevin Bacon, Julianne Nicholson, Jesse Plemons, Rory Cochrane, as well as director Scott Cooper.
