When he sets his mind to it, director Peter Berg can tell a helluva story. And with his three consecutive collaborations with Mark Wahlberg (including DEEPWATER HORIZON and LONE SURVIVOR) all based on true events), Berg has found a partner who brings out some of the best qualities as a filmmaker and put to rest some of his more alpha-male inclinations, despite the fact that Wahlberg is portrayed as an absolute hero in all three. Based on the events surrounding the 2013 Boston Marathon bombing, PATRIOTS DAY is easily their finest work together because it doesn’t attempt to be any more dramatic than the real-life events clearly were. Although Wahlberg is playing a fictional, composite character, he still manages to find the right note to represent the heart, soul and street smarts of the Boston police force in the city’s most trying days.
As much as the bombing has already been covered and analyzed a great deal since it occurred (including in a recent HBO documentary MARATHON: THE PATRIOTS DAY BOMBING), Berg and his team of writers find a way of making things feel as if they’re unfolding before our eyes. Using various visual formats from standard movie camera, to surveillance footage (both real and staged), PATRIOTS DAY makes it clear from the start that it wants to tell the story not just of heroes but of ordinary citizens who found the courage to defy the two men that carried out the attack. Wahlberg’s Sgt. Tommy Saunders is established as a regular cop. He’s got a bum knee, is working off a mild punishment for injuring another officer in a fight, and is none too happy that he has to dress like a “clown” in a fluorescent green vest at the marathon’s finish line.
PATRIOTS DAY is constructed as parallel stories of some of the key players in these 100-plus-hour ordeal (Berg always tells us the time, place and number of hours after the bombing in each new scene). Some of the characters we follow, we know right away what their role is in this drama; others we don’t find out about until deep into the film, so instead we simply observe them going through the same time period living their normal, often mundane, lives. And then the bombing or bombers intersects with their lives, and things are never the same. There are victims of the blasts who lost limbs; there is an MIT campus police officer (Jake Picking) who has just asked out a grad student on a first date; there’s Chinese-born Dun Meng (the tremendous Jimmy O. Yang), who was carjacked and taken hostage by the bombers; and there’s Watertown Police Sgt. Jeffrey Pugliese (J.K. Simmons), who faced off against the bombers in an inconceivable shootout on a quiet suburban street.
Berg also spends a surprising amount of time with his lens on the bombers, the younger brother Dzhokhar Tsarnaev (Alex Wolff) and older Tamerlan Tsarnaev (Themo Melikidze), and while he doesn’t dig deep into their personal politics, it’s clear that one is far more religiously motivated, while the other seems more in it for the thrill ride. The two are also sometimes accompanied by Tamerlan’s white convert wife Katherine (played by an almost unrecognizable Melissa Benoist (TV’s Supergirl), who provides one of the film’s most eerie moments near toward the end of the story.
The actual bombing re-creation happens about 30 minutes into this 130-minute film, so the bulk of the production focuses on the meticulous manhunt, led by FBI Special Agent Richard DesLauriers (Kevin Bacon), aided by Police Commissioner Ed Davis (John Goodman), Superintendent Billy Evans (James Colby) and Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick (Michael Beach). With so much destruction (human and property), it’s almost impossible to fathom how the investigators collected and dissected so many clues, but Berg takes the time to map out the painstaking work all parties went through to make it happen, complete with false starts, infighting, and egos being trodden upon.
The screenplay always finds a way to keep Saunders in the mix and on the front lines of tracking the bombers down, but this seems like a small concession to make for a story told so authentically, thanks in large part due to cinematographer Tobias A. Schliessler’s attention to detail, giving us a you-are-there feeling that only adds to the tension. Wahlberg gets a chance to tap into his emotional side when he stops home to change, bathe and rest briefly, and is overwhelmed with questions about the bombing from his wife’s family (she’s played by Michelle Monaghan). He has a quick cry, a fleeting dip in the tub, and he’s back on the job.
Another surprising misstep in PATRIOTS DAY is the unmemorable score by Oscar winners Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross (THE SOCIAL NETWORK, GONE GIRL). When the bad guys are on screen, there’s a villainous theme; when they aren’t, it’s fairly standard-issue strains of nobility. It’s a detail made all the more noticeable by how much the film gets right, and it certainly doesn’t tank the film in the process.
Perhaps because I never really watched many police procedurals on television, I haven’t grown tired of seeing them on the big screen. PATRIOTS DAY certainly has the better-known facts of the case carefully reproduced, but it also provides details that I simply was never aware of or had completely forgotten. By simply allowing the events to unfold with little to no embellishment, Berg and his team have given us both a terrific docudrama and a tribute to every brand of hero that stepped up during these unsettling and horrifying days. If it’s not too soon for you to relive these moments, this one is well worth checking out.
