What to Watch
Advertisement
Supported by
The director Peter Berg and the actor Mark Wahlberg have collaborated on three films dramatizing real-life calamities in the past four years. Their first, “Lone Survivor” from 2013, chronicled an unsuccessful 2005 Navy SEAL mission to kill a Taliban leader in Afghanistan. This year’s “Deepwater Horizon” was about a fatal 2010 disaster involving an oil rig collapse off the Louisiana coast. Now comes “Patriots Day,” about the Boston Marathon bombing of April 15, 2013.
Movies that depict heinous real-life criminal acts and attempt to grapple with their human toll are provocative undertakings, particularly when they’re made so soon after the actual events. As it happens, “Patriots Day” works so well on a dramatic level that my qualms were silenced almost entirely from the start.
The screenplay, which Mr. Berg wrote with Matt Cook and Joshua Zetumer (Eric Johnson and Paul Tamasy contributed to the story), divides the movie into several story lines focusing on specific individuals. Although Mr. Wahlberg’s character, a police detective who’s working off a suspension by doing uniformed duty at the marathon, is a fictionalized composite, almost all of the other characters — from Gov. Deval Patrick of Massachusetts to the newlyweds played by Rachel Brosnahan and Christopher O’Shea — are based on real people.
Those also include the two bombers, the brothers Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev; Tamerlan’s wife, Katherine Russell (Melissa Benoist); and Tamerlan and Katherine’s toddler daughter, Zahira. Their little household is shown squabbling over milk for the baby on the morning of the bombing. This is about as humanizing as the depiction of the terrorists gets.
Themo Melikidze’s Tamerlan emerges as a terse and truculent quasi-fanatic, while Dzhokhar (Alex Wolff) is repellently trivial-minded in his sense of entitlement. When the brothers hijacked a terrified young man’s S.U.V., which they are considering driving to New York to plant more bombs, Dzhokhar’s almost immediate concern is whether it has an iPod dock. The movie’s attitude toward Ms. Russell, who has not been accused or charged in connection with the bombings, is very aggressive, and her portrayal by Ms. Benoist is ice-cold and angry. (This is likely to prove controversial, most specifically with Ms. Russell’s lawyers.)
We are having trouble retrieving the article content.
Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.
Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.
Thank you for your patience while we verify access.
Already a subscriber? Log in.
Want all of The Times? Subscribe.
Advertisement
