Director Peter Berg had a banner year in 2016. He first released his disaster movie epic Deepwater Horizon in September, and most recently, his late December release, the Boston Marathon bombing drama has gone into nationwide expansion in the states with a worldwide release to follow.
Tobias A. Schliessler’s outstanding and highly visceral camerawork is stunning, and I can’t believe this film isn’t getting the respect it deserves. It’s a total crime that Berg will go unrecognised during awards season for either of his two topical films from 2016; I can’t imagine the intensity of working on these films back to back.
Everyone knows, or thinks they know, about the Boston Marathon bombing and what ensued during the immediate aftermath, so even if the events are familiar, that doesn’t keep Berg and his creative team from establishing a tremendous amount of suspense through his customary hand-held shooting style, while being aided immensely by the pulsating, unnerving musical score by Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross.
The Watertown shoot-out sequence was beyond aggressive and more than a little scary; you’re not accustomed to seeing full-scale combat in the streets of American suburbs. Maybe it’s because I live in Connecticut, which is in close proximity to Massachusetts, and it always helps when you’re in a massive theater that’s totally packed and nobody speaks a word during the screening, but this movie is going to hit hard for some people.
Berg co-wrote the all-forward-momentum screenplay with Matt Cook and Joshua Zetumer (Paul Tamasay and Eric Johnson received story by credits), and taking a page out of the Paul Greengrass/United 93 playbook, the audience is introduced to a variety of characters within the first act, all of whom you’ll get to know very well before the devastation takes place.
Berg has always excelled at portraying American families and people in motion; look no further than his film version and television adaptation of the best selling book Friday Night Lights to see how he “gets it” in terms of how people partake in their daily rituals.
The cast is uniformly excellent, with Mark Wahlberg predictably effective as the everyman cop who is at ground level during the events, John Goodman reliably strong as Boston Police Commissioner Ed Davis, Kevin Bacon sharp and on-point as Richard DesLauriers, Special Agent in the FBI’s Boston field office, and J.K. Simmons as Watertown Police Sergeant Jeffrey Pugliese. Alex Wolff and Themo Melikidze are both chilling as the idiotic and misguided radicalized terrorists, who clearly never truly understood what it was that they were doing.
You also meet some of the marathon attendees who will never look at life the same way, and the courageous Dun Meng, played by Jimmy Yang, who escaped captivity by the Tsarnaev brothers, which helped to bring them both down.
The editing by Colby Parker Jr. and Gabriel Flemming is extraordinary, moving through various locations and characters with complete coherence and authority, and giving the film a tragic sense of inevitability as a result of its tightly constructed stylistic decisions.
And listen, I get it – it’s a scary world out there, and most people don’t want to be reminded that they can get blown up at a citywide marathon, but if one thing can be gleamed from the $14 million opening weekend that Patriots Day just encountered, it’s a further demonstration of an ostrich-like public that just wants to be mindlessly entertained, casually brushing off a piece of work that shines a light on heroism and sacrifice.
Something this immediate and cinematic can’t get lost in the shuffle. In general, the cinematic depiction of urban warfare was on high display in 2016, with Michael Bay bringing a very vivid and explosive eye to his vastly underrated Benghazi-set 13 Hours. In both Patriots Day and 13 Hours, the two directors applied the run-and-gun filmmaking aesthetic, with some key artistic differences, and achieved maximum results, with Bay ditching the toy robots and telling a grown-up story of survival and bloodshed that’s similar in spirit to Ridley Scott’s Black Hawk Down, while Berg opted for his customary doc-style to evoke those jittery fears that everyone had on that terrible day in April.
Way less jingoistic than certain members of the press would lead you to be believe and far from “right-wing propaganda” as many clueless people have been labeling it as, both of these fantastic actioners are cut from current events which keeps them vital and important. But I can’t wait to see Patriots Day again, as it reminds me to live every day to its fullest, and how nothing is certain in life. Ever.
Review by Nick Clement
Summary
Easily the most important and riveting piece of work that Peter Berg has made to date. The film is gripping, sad, expertly directed, with verisimilitude levels off the charts.
