Whitey: United States of America v. James J. Bulger movie review (2014)

Whitey, after all, ran the Irish mob in Boston for nearly 30 years without a single arrest, even a misdemeanor. (He was apprehended in California in 2011 after fleeing his native state and living for years under false identities.) How did he get away with it? Pretty much everyone concedes some level of official corruption and complicity, but the issue is what he did to get it. In his trial, Whitey admits to bribing (often with lavish cash Christmas "presents") pretty much every officer of the law he came into contact with. But some maintain that he gave the lawmen something else as well: information.

Was Whitey an informant? Strange that such activity is not criminal and thus is nowhere mentioned in the counts against Bulger, yet it becomes a central issue in the trial, the defense vigorously denying it and the prosecution everywhere asserting and implying it. That, it appears, is because both sides assume that Whitey will be convicted of most of the charges and then locked away forever. The real issue of contention, then, is reputation; or to use the term of choice, "legacy."

If Whitey ratted out his fellows, he is the lowest of the low, a man without honor anywhere in the universe. If, on the other hand, this is all a smear, then he can still portray himself as a "good bad guy" and hold his head up in the criminal underworld. A similar concern is attached to only one other issue: whether he killed two women (with his bare hands, no less). Good bad guys don’t murder the fairer sex, so Whitey’s defense team takes pains to deflect the charge onto other miscreants.

In centering his film on the trial, Berlinger commendably finds a new angle on Bulger, one of the most storied of modern criminals. (Scorsese’s "The Departed" fictionalized his exploits, and there are reportedly two big movies about him in the works now, one starring Johnny Depp, the other mounted by Ben Affleck and Matt Damon.) But of course, covering the trial is also a prism for looking at Whitey’s whole bloody career and a history of criminals-versus-crimefighters in which the moral lines were often fatally blurred.