One of the strange phenomena in modern movie discourse is the fracturing of “moviegoer” as an identity. We like, for example, seeing scientists react to science in movies and gun experts react to John Wick. It’s also trickled down to below the professional level, where I’ve seen people chime in with things like “I’m Japanese and…” to comment on, say, Godzilla Minus One. It bothers me, if I’m being completely honest. Sure, that’s a perspective we can add to our composite of perspectives, but don’t flash it like a fucking badge. Asshole.
Yes, I’m resentful because I don’t have an expertise of my own. My job is “closed caption writer,” and there are no movies about closed captions that I can assess from a place of experience.
Theoretically, Patriots Day finally offers me this opportunity, being that I’m from New England. But it doesn’t. I’m probably closer to the depicted events than the average viewer, but that’s why I’m not gonna overstate it. My mother and sister were volunteer nurses at the 2013 Marathon, my friend was living on Boylston Street at the time, and a college roommate had actually wrestled Dzhokhar Tsarnaev in high school (and won). When I myself heard about the attack, I was a safe distance away – 50 miles, en route back to my college.
Patriots Day, directed by Peter Berg and starring Mark Wahlberg, is a thriller dramatizing the Marathon bombing and subsequent manhunt for the perpetrators, the Tsarnaev brothers. Upon its release in 2016, there was a split reaction among critics and Boston-based critics notable enough for a subsection on the Wikipedia page. It’s possible people were exhausted by Boston movies; earlier that year, Seth Meyers did the “Boston Accent” fake trailer, both skewering and codifying the genre. And yet, it was the local critics who took issue with the film. For The Boston Globe, Ty Burr wrote, “At best, it’s unnecessary. At worst, it’s vaguely insulting.”
And why not? For one thing, 2016 was only three years after the incident. It felt like cynical, inevitable Hollywood. But even more gruesome was the nature of “starring Mark Wahlberg” – also “produced by” – that everyone’s second least favorite Bostonian celebrity would be playing a made-up character, “Tommy Saunders.” Despite being based on a nonfiction book itself based on a real-world incident with plenty of actual heroes to spotlight, this film’s historical inaccuracy takes center stage.
This is part of the reason I skipped Patriots Day. Even divorced from the political atmosphere of 2016, it was also an unusually fraught time for entertainment. The convergence of social media and the beginnings of YouTube video essays might have been a net positive for me, but I’d also begun sorting movies into binary categories: “problematic” and “non-problematic.” At first, it was gender stuff, leading me to draw unfair conclusions about movies like Gone Girl and to a lesser extent Mad Max: Fury Road. Then it was pretty much anything. The Wolf of Wall Street glorifies a bad guy, period, Detroit reproduces Black pain, period, Patriots Day invented a guy to run around the Marathon bombing and they just had to cast him as fucking Mark goddamn Wahlburgers.
More than anything, I think that’s the sticking point. Mark Wahlberg, perennial tough guy, is so high off his own supply that it’s gotta be a vanity project. This asshole actually said that if he were on one of the planes that went down on 9/11 – as he was originally scheduled to be – that “There would have been a lot of blood in that first-class cabin and then me saying, ‘Okay, we’re going to land somewhere safely, don’t worry.’” He apologized for those remarks, and then five years later made this movie.
I finally sat down to watch it recently, as preparation for a QNA about “very special episodes,” like the comic where Doctor Doom sheds a tear at Ground Zero, his heart breaking for the city he’s always trying to destroy. I assumed Patriots Day would be that same sort of bizarre cultural artifact, though I’d likely have to concede it was an effective thriller under Berg’s assured direction, as even those Boston-based critics did. But to my astonishment, I actually found this movie to be genuinely great.
Certainly, it doesn’t start out great, instead tracking uncannily with expectations. We’re introduced to Mark Wahlberg playing Mark Wahlberg, though slightly less superpowered than usual. Aggressive still, but when his cop character Saunders kicks in a door to get a suspect, it actually hurts him. He’s chronically injured and he’s an alcoholic, but these things don’t truthfully slow him down. And the whole opening sequence is just so cliché. The police commissioner comes in and there’s all this cop-movie wisecracking that even the criminal guy gets in on. Ugh.
Then we’re introduced to a real-life couple, Jessica Kensky and Patrick Downes, who communicate their relationship with dialogue so light and inoffensive as to be insufficient and dull. Back-to-back, these two sequences tell us one thing: it is very difficult to humanize movie characters in mere minutes. And of course, they fit in as much Boston stuff as possible in the early going: we have the rowing crew on the Charles River, copious references to the Red Sox, a character says “Hopkinton” three times in one scene, and J.K. Simmons goes to Dunkin Donuts.
The music turns when we go to the Tsarnaev house, occupied at least by Dzhokhar, his older brother Tamerlan, and Tamerlan’s wife Katherine. I didn’t know at the time, but the score was done by Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross, and whatever its own merits, its use in these scenes is the standard emotional manipulation, clashing with the film’s visual approach to documentary-style verisimilitude, with pull-focuses and digital zooms. The result is a movie with a pall of artificiality. Like, naturally, Saunders’s wife is a nurse, played by Michelle Monaghan, who’s way too talented for a dud role like this (I mean, we don’t even see her be a nurse, she’s just wearing scrubs). And, like, naturally, the younger Tsarnaev is at first conflicted about the bomb plot. I tell you, Dzokhar is a screenwriter’s dream – provided it’s the screenwriter of 24.
And then, mercifully, the movie just stops being like this. We can break the whole thing down into at least three phases, where the first phase is the uphill battle of characterizing an entire city in too little time, and the second phase is a faithful recreation of the Marathon and the bombing, intercut with actual footage from that day. Images of runners gathering; the terrible dramatic irony makes it fairly emotional.
Arguably, it’s just a different kind of manipulation, but the point of the Marathon sequence is to build dread, and it’s palpable. What’s surprising, then, is how much this dread is complimented – not undercut – by humor, something which recurs in snatches throughout the film. The color commentators notice a guy in a lobster costume running bandit, and the next time we see him, he’s being detained by police for an unknown infraction. “Guys,” Saunders shouts, “the lobster’s back!” Surely, one of the disappointments with this film prerelease was how much Wahlberg was backsliding from his legitimate comedic talent. Whether in Pain & Gain or a straight comedy like Ted, it was so welcome because it subverts the usual bravado and makes him seem almost self-aware.
It’s hard to judge, but my assessment of the depiction of the bombing itself is that it’s tastefully done. Berg achieves the appropriate level of intensity without being exploitative. Or maybe without being too exploitative? In the scenes of the immediate aftermath, we cut between injured, screaming people and Saunders running around barking orders: stop the runners coming in, send the ambulances, confiscate all cell phones. This is where we can begin to identify the purpose of the character. For one thing, he’s written with the precognition that comes from a retrospective look at historical events. He’s shouting about a bomb when the second blast goes off. He always knows exactly what to do and where to be.
This is kind of what icks us out about the white-savior trope, that Saunders is so much better than everyone around him. There’s a moment where it almost seems like he’s dissociating amidst the chaos, but no, he keeps a cool head for the most part. But – and this is the ‘but’ – isn’t this exactly the guy you want to see in a situation like this? It’s comforting, in a strange way. He’s confident but appropriately wounded, even swigging off a wine bottle in an abandoned restaurant. When he returns home, Wahlberg gets kind of a monologue where he talks about what he saw and that he can’t get the images out of his head. I imagine he’d refer to this scene as the height of his acting career, and in it, he’s probably playing on the real emotions he felt when he heard about the attack.
What surprises me most is the subtle attempt – as I read it, on the part of the filmmakers – to transform Saunders from an individual character into something almost metaphorical. He almost exists on a purely thematic level (and not just at the absence of other levels). Patriots Day is a Hollywood movie with a budget big enough to accommodate Mark Wahlberg’s salary, and that means at least two things: it tells a straightforward story, and it isn’t especially courageous. Therefore, Hollywood wisdom suggests we need a protagonist driving the action. Only lower-budgeted, slightly more experimental material like Hulu’s Dopesick and even arguably The Wire manage to go without protagonists. Saunders is in almost every scene: at the Marathon, at the hospital, in the neighborhoods during the manhunt. In real life, though, there were cops at each of these scenes, confident and wounded. The difference between reality, where it was a variety of cops, and the movie, where it’s Mark Wahlberg, is mostly a matter of continuity – even emotional continuity.
It is not, I don’t think, necessarily insulting, because far more compelling than Saunders’s characterization as a guy with a past is how he’s useful in the investigation because he knows the area. What elevates him to protagonist level in the narrative is something that all Bostonians have. As we see later with the cop on the roof, these are people who are obnoxiously proud of where they come from. And I really appreciated when Saunders is standing on the recreated crime scene and identifying the storefronts with possible surveillance footage. There’s no way it happened like that, but this is actual procedure in a police procedural. That’s like my holy grail.
In real life, law enforcement waited a long time to release the infamous surveillance photos of the Tsarnaev brothers, and in the movie, this is depicted as a series of shouting matches between cops and the FBI and the governor. In arguing for the potentially premature release of such sensitive material, Saunders notes that they need to let the people of Boston work with them, not against them. The ending titles of the film are sure to honor the people of Boston, both specific individuals like Dun Meng as well as the abstract community. This is who I think Saunders is meant to represent: he’s the city itself – and that’s both admirable and preposterous.
Could this movie have worked without a protagonist, or with a real-life character in the lead, like Ed Davis or William Evans or even Deval Patrick? Richard DesLauriers has far more of an arc than Saunders does. So I’d say sure, it probably would. But that might threaten to turn this story of the city into a story of the individual. The Mark Wahlberg monologue may not be poetic or especially wordy, but I think that seeing this character be so vulnerable works as a cipher. We can see ourselves in his pain. We can, if we’d like, see ourselves in the confidence he exudes at the attack site. It’s the same strength demonstrated by Jessica and Patrick in recovery, by Dun Meng in escaping the hostage situation, by a cop managing to quip “I’ll tell you, that boat ain’t gonna float” during a tense standoff. The thematic function “Saunders” serves in the narrative is to connect these people, yes, as Boston Strong, but as something else, too.
What would usually come off as painful, ironic lip service in a movie is the discussion of Islamic extremism. Everyone’s first guess is that it’s al-Qaeda, especially as there was a recent attack elsewhere. Before the manhunt commences, Mayor Tom Menino advises law enforcement to be careful with the door-kicking. “We’ve got laws,” he says. “People still have rights.” Undoubtedly, the specter of 9/11 hangs over the response to this terrorist attack, but that’s actually a good thing. It turns out, we learned a lot from that dark time, as the PATRIOT Act and hate crimes proved generally unpopular with the American people.
In the thesis scene, something inevitable in movies like this, a cop asks Saunders if these kinds of tragedies are preventable. Saunders gives more of a traditional monologue in response, talking about how Nurse Monaghan was told by her doctor she couldn’t get pregnant and when they returned home from the hospital, they saw young children playing in the street. I know I should hate this monologue, but I don’t really. The point – and how he winds his way there is a feat of screenwriting acrobatics – is that prevention may not be possible, but as long as we love each other, they can never win.
In her book Strongmen: Mussolini to the Present, Ruth Ben-Ghiat notes that Muammar Gaddafi “did not hesitate to play on Western fears of dark and fertile forces endangering White Christian civilization, especially when Muslims came to symbolize the enemy after the 9/11 terrorist attacks in America.” I can buy an idiom like “if X, then the terrorists win” provided it’s accurate to the terrorist playbook. But even more so, “love” is such a better moral conclusion than vengeance. We remember the Boston Marathon bombing as a tragedy, unambiguously so, uncomplicatedly, in part because it didn’t become something else.
The end of the film gives way to a documentary sequence, featuring interviews with the real Ed Davis and Jessica Kensky and everyone, reiterating with their own voices the simple but welcome message. By this point, I was in tears. And it wasn’t the good kind of cry like with Godzilla Minus One, which is a movie that seemed to speak to me and my specific concerns. This is a cry that turned me into all those national critics persuaded by Hollywood trickery. But I can’t escape that. I watched Patriots Day not as someone “from New England” but as an American – and, crucially, an American of the world.
Admittedly, that’s a lot to watch a movie.
A less persuaded viewer might ask, at that point in the very long runtime, why the whole thing wasn’t a documentary. There are documentaries about the Boston Marathon bombing, as well as 2017’s Stronger, which is nowhere near an action movie like Patriots Day. I think it’s something to do with the preservation of emotional memory, that each of these projects can help us return to that time and feel what the people must have felt, and they accomplish this with divergent means.
As a thriller, Patriots Day preserves not only the horror and sadness, but the intensity, best exemplified in the third phase which plays to the director’s strengths. The gun battle in Watertown is a breathtaking action sequence approaching Bigelow. The cops never see who they’re shooting at, and we feel the sprays of glass and splintered metal because everyone is simply too close to the exploding cars. The silent decision-making of Dun Meng before his escape is extremely tense. I’d never begrudge anyone their aversion to this particular, peculiar approach, but I found Patriots Day surprisingly, even remarkably effective. I think the film is worth studying, at least for, you know, the next time we do this.
A Generic Wonderful 