Up front, let me say that “Patriots Day” is a well-made, exciting film.
Produced by, and starring, Boston-area native (and devout Catholic) Mark Wahlberg, and directed by Peter Berg, it tracks the events leading up to the April 15, 2013, bombing at the finish line of the Boston Marathon, and continues through the massive manhunt for the bombers.
As much as possible, the filmmakers used the original locations, and the film ends with interviews with the real people involved, including police, local officials and survivors.
The Boston Globe is of the opinion that the film is unnecessary.
If you’re from around these parts, you already know whether you want to see “Patriots Day.” If you’d like to pay money to watch our local strength and valor celebrated, the movie would have to be terrible to keep you away. If the very idea of a Hollywood dramatization of the 2013 Marathon bombing strikes you as exploitative, it would have to be a four-star classic to suck you in.
Peter Berg’s movie, starring Mark Wahlberg in an invented role, is neither great nor gawdawful. It’s professionally made, slickly heartfelt, and is offered up as an act of civic healing. At best, it’s unnecessary. At worst, it’s vaguely insulting.
I’d tend to attribute this to local sentiment, if I hadn’t seen HBO’s recent “Marathon: The Patriots’ Day Bombing” documentary. At times, it and the movie are almost indistinguishable, except that the documentary is real — with a lot of security-camera footage (some of which is duplicated, almost frame for frame, in the movie).
What “Patriots Day” adds is scenes depicting the lives of some of the victims — especially surviving newlyweds Patrick Downes (Christopher O’Shea) and Jessica Kensky (Rachel Brosnahan) and murdered MIT Officer Sean Collier (Jake Picking) — and a composite police character, played by Wahlberg, who manages to be at all the major sites of the story.
We also go into the home of Tamerlan (Themo Melikidze) and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev (Alex Wolff), the jihad-inspired, Kyrgyzstan-born brothers who planted pressure-cooker bombs stuffed with nails and ball bearings in the crowd on Boylston Street.
The feature film follows the sequence of events in the immediate aftermath of the attack, involving local police and the FBI, that led to the identification of the Tsarnaev brothers. It adds the tense interrogation of Tamerlan’s steely American-born wife (played by “Supergirl” star Melissa Benoist).
The brothers go on the run, ending in a spectacular firefight in a Boston suburb that leads to Tamerlan’s death, and then a tense standoff with the injured Dzhokhar.
What the feature film lacks, and the documentary offers, are the details of the survivors’ agonizing road to recovery. The demands of drama probably precluded adding these, but it reminds me of something a writer mentor once told me, that the story is as much in the ripples as in the rock. Unfortunately, most movies are just about the rock.
But this is a heckuva rock.
While it’s obvious that Wahlberg’s character, Sergeant Tommy Saunders, is the fictional creation among the real people, he does provide the filmmakers a chance to channel a lot of emotions felt by different people. There are also moments of humor woven in, as tough-minded Bostonians deal with the chaos around them (I particularly liked one no-nonsense local cop who refused to budge from her vantage point for the FBI).
One thing I did appreciate about “Patriots Day” is it doesn’t yield to the politically correct temptation to romanticize or soften the Tsarnaev brothers, or play them as victims. They are the villains of the piece, period.
This stands in contrast to Rolling Stone, which ran a cover photo of Dzhokhar that made him look like the dreamy-eyed lead singer of a boy band.
In factual terms, “Patriots Day” hews closely to the official timeline, even if Berg may have jazzed up one event.
Said the Boston Globe:
And Saunders is right there in the thick of the climactic firefight in Watertown that resulted in the death of Tamerlan Tsarnaev (Themo Melikidze) and that, contrary to reports, is staged as a midsize apocalypse, with cars detonating in fireballs.
But a reporter on the scene did say that bombs were thrown, so, hey, it’s a movie.
The biggest missing element is eight-year-old victim Martin Richard, a Catholic boy who was killed on the scene. His parents didn’t want to be depicted, so Berg respected that. He exists in
the film only as a small body covered in a sheet, with a police officer standing vigil, so he won’t be alone.
That’s sufficient to get me all weepy.
If you watched the HBO film, you may not need to go see “Patriots Day.” But for everyone else, it will take you back to yet another day — one of far too many — when radical Islamists seek to destroy lives, cultures, freedom and peace of mind.
In the press conference for “Patriots Day,” the real Kensky was asked how she’s managed to survive her medical ordeal. Her answer, praising the help of nerve-pain medication and antidepressant Cymbalta — she even offered to do a commercial — was honest and real.
Like Kensky and the other survivors, we can bounce back from these brutal attacks, but they will tear away pieces of us, and they will leave scars. And, of course, that’s what the terrorists want most.
“Patriots Day” opens in Los Angeles, New York and Boston on Wednesday, Dec. 21, and nationwide on Jan. 13. Click here for tickets.
(“Patriots Day” contains language — almost immediately, in fact — but no sexual content; and an expected level of violence, considering the subject matter.)
Image: Courtesy CBS Films/Richard family
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