It was trash day. I'll always remember that detail. The thud of the bin lids being tossed open one by one up the street by heavily armed patrols that had descended on our Watertown neighborhood. Everything else was silent. I'll remember being apprehensive about even stepping outside my home, the governor having advised all residents to shelter in place. Wondering if I pointed my phone at the sudden occupying force to take a picture if they'd panic and mistake it for a weapon. My wife not wanting me to go outside for a cigarette. There's a scene just like that in Patriots Day, right before a neighbor finds Dzhokhar Tsarnaev hiding out in a boat in his backyard. It felt real. It all felt very real, and yet disturbing in the way that the act of dramatization necessarily translates the currency of fact into the uncanny.
I'm not sure why any of this happened. Not the bombing of the Boston Marathon itself, because we've come to learn the motivations, such as they were, from the stunningly dimwitted but no less deadly Tsarnaev duo, but this movie. I don't know why it exists.
[youtube ]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ykwSo64RYao&t=14s[/youtube]
"Too soon" is something you might hear a lot around here when it comes to the film, the third in Mark Wahlberg and director Peter Berg's series of "uncomplicated patriotism" movies ripped from the headlines. And while there are certainly many who mean it in the sense that the wounds—literally and symbolically—are still too raw, watching the film I couldn't help but think it was actually too soon for a movie like this because we all still vividly remember every beat of the plot. There were no surprises in this film. I'm sure someone just hearing about the bombing for the first time will be fascinated. I don't know who else it was made for.
Wahlberg and Berg, appearing on opening night last Wednesday at the stately Wang Theater amidst a crowd of what counts for Boston A-list—David Ortiz, Elizabeth Warren, assorted Dropkick Murphii, Watertown's own Eliza Dushku, and many of the victims and first responders portrayed onscreen—once again affirmed their noble intentions in the making of the film.
"We're here to honor the men and women of the Boston community," Berg said. "We've been so touched and positively influenced by your courage and your poise and grace in the face of overwhelming obstacles."
"This movie is dedicated to the community of Boston, all of our people," Wahlberg added. "All the law enforcement officials and survivors, medical staff, government agents, first responders. When I decided to make this movie, I decided to make it because of the pride I felt in being a Bostonian seeing how my people responded in the face of this horrific tragedy."
A fine goal indeed. There's no doubt that many across the city, particularly those most directly impacted, will feel rightfully honored; a number of survivors and law enforcement members have joined on in the marketing of the film. Many others will recoil, either traumatized—like one woman sobbing in the bathroom before the screening, saying she couldn't watch—or bristle with suspicion.
The heroes may just have well felt similarly honored by the just released HBO documentary Marathon: The Patriots Day Bombing, a non-fiction telling of the events, or books like Boston Strong, by Casey Sherman and Dave Wedge (the latter a friend and occasional Esquire contributor), on which much of Berg's film was based. It's been over three years since the bombings, but scarcely a few weeks go by without this story being retold—in the local news, at sporting events, in charity appearances and so on. And so, to resonate, not as a municipal hagiography, but as a successful piece of cinema and story telling, Patriots Day would have to give us something we don't already know. It did not do that.
Not for its lack of trying. The film's attempt to faithfully retell the story with a smattering of fictionalization is both its chief asset and its biggest flaw. Watching Wahlberg, all blue-collar grit and hungover charm—the only two flavors of Bostonian according to our collected filmography—parachuted into the otherwise historically accurate plot felt something like watching a CGI character super-imposed into historical footage, like Forest Gump in a Red Sox hat goofing around with JFK.
But for all his talk of honoring his people, Wahlberg seems content to rely on the most hackneyed of Masshole signifiers in their portrayal. At one point—I shit you not, as a Bostonian on film would say, very Bostonly—a character is handed a Dunkin Donuts cup and says, "Ah, Coffee Coolatta. Those ah good." Casey Affleck's Dunkin Donuts sketch on SNL this past weekend has more characterization to it. The notes of Wahlberg's character Tommy—or Tahhmy—Saunders are briefly sketched out as he looks through his baseball cards sitting on his Patriots blanket. Everyone here is a ball-busting wise ass with a heart of gold, and everyone, especially John Goodman in the role of Boston Police Commissioner Ed Davis, sounds like Mayor Quimby after a sixer of Harpoon.
Part of that problem is one inherent in film itself. In order to have Wahlberg on hand in most of the major settings and serving as a grounding character through-line, they needed to concoct a composite. Berg was hoping to avoid a sort of "stolen valor" he said at a press conference the next morning, in attributing too much heroism to one real life police officer. "In the case of the police response, those four days, it became pretty clear to us this wasn't a Jason Bourne story," he said. "Iron Man or Superman or Batman didn't fly down and save the day. It was something more heroic and honest and genuine, a group of men and women working together and their cumulative effects were quite heroic."
As someone who seems to know the Boston character so intimately as he says, Wahlberg will likely not be surprised to find many around here responding to that effort with a resounding, Go fuck yourself, Mr. Hollywood.
"The thing I keep coming back to is that there was absolutely no reason whatsoever for Mark Wahlberg or his character to be in it," one friend of mine said. "It was as if he said, 'Hey, there's no real life character that I fit the description of, so lets invent a tough Boston cop on the edge who doesn't always play by the rules, but just happens to be at the scene of every major moment in the saga, regardless of precinct, who collects baseball cards and delivers stereotypical lines that only someone who hasn't lived in Boston for 25 years would deliver?'"
"Marky acting out his masturbatory hero fantasies is distasteful and disrespectful, in my opinion," said another. "But it fits his shitty, shallow brand to a T. That wannabe tough guy shit rankles me. He literally thinks if he was on the plane he would've stopped 9/11. Clearly thinks he would've stopped the bombers."
In his defense, it's a tough undertaking here. You either create a heroic and captivating fantasy and get accused of hamming it up, or you tell the actual story by the letter and risk a procedural slog. Somehow it managed to feel like both things.
Which isn't to say it wasn't an emotionally effective film. Even going in with the most cynical of expectations, I found myself crying throughout. Of course it was tailor-made to do just that, with close ups of blown off limbs, and seething anguish on the faces of the victims. Treacly musical cues played over scenes showing the love story of Jessica Kensky and Patrick Downes, a young couple who both lost legs in the blast, while grim unsettling motifs gave us our cues watching the death of eight-year-old Martin Richard, whose body is left on Boylston street under the watch of a police officer after everyone has cleared out.
A clip of David Ortiz's emotional declaration that "This is our fucking city!" appears toward the end. You can be as hard-assed a Bostonian pessimist as they come, but that's still going to get you, it just is.
It's a story about how love prevails over evil in the end, the producers have said many times. Wahlberg makes a thesis-statement speech sitting on the back of a pickup truck toward the end that reminds us as much. The Tsarnaevs, Tamerlan in particular, live up to the role—although Dzhokhar at times seems like he's been dropped in from a Seth Rogan stoner comedy about bungling jihadists trying to lose their virginity. A nod toward nuance is hinted at in their lives in what are the film's most chilling scenes, depicting their twisted, banal domesticity, but by and large everyone evil here is evil, and everyone heroic is heroic, and there's little space in between.
"I thought I was going to have the hardest time with the graphic scenes, but mostly what I hear [from other survivors] was that it was so hard to see the bombers on the screen," Jessica Kensky said at the press conference. "They really struggled with that. I don't think it was anyone's error or mistake, I think it's the nature of this."
So did they "get it right?" as everyone has been asking.
"This permanently changed lives and ended lives, so 'right' isn't something you achieve with survivors, but respect is," she went on. "And I do think the [producers] made sure that happened."
"We wanted to make sure that the story is accurate, make sure that's it's emotionally accurate and factually accurate," producer Michael Radutsky went on. "That became Pete and Mark's mantra: We have to get it right. For the city of Boston for everybody who went through what they did, and bring this message of hope to the country."
They succeeded on that front. Whether or not that makes for a quality film is another matter entirely.
