Writer and director Peter Berg displays a healthy attention to detail with Patriot’s Day but not only does he not see the forest for the trees, his message of love often sounds more like hate.
Michael Bay loves sunsets.
Every director with a recognizable style has their little obsessions. Not stylistic flourishes so much as minor insights into the director’s subconscious. Michael Mann likes the colour blue. Peter Jackson is fond of decapitating things. Steven Spielberg fixates on absentee fathers. Michael Bay loves sunsets.
Peter Berg is terrified of jihadists.
On the expansive list of human fears it’s not the most unreasonable but Berg’s mind seems particularly preoccupied by them. They’ve been a central aspect of three of his past six films. The first being 2007’s The Kingdom followed by 2013’s Lone Survivor and now Patriot’s Day. While The Kingdom was a, relatively, balanced echo of a post-9/11 battlecry, Lone Survivor was a decidedly more patriotic venture. It was a foreshadowing of the following year’s US domestic smash hit, and fellow muslim-insurgent-shooting-gallery movie masquerading as a war film, American Sniper but it also marked the start of Berg’s foray into jingoism.
Patriot’s Day is the third film in a row of Berg’s about a recent true story of American heroism in the face of loud explosions which also features Mark Wahlberg in the lead role. The first being Lone Survivor (about the ill-fated Operation Red Wings which claimed the lives of eleven US Navy SEALs in 2005) followed by 2016’s Deepwater Horizon (about the explosion of the drilling platform which resulted in the famous BP oil spill catastrophe in 2010). Patriot’s Day recounts the events surrounding the Boston marathon bombings, and subsequent manhunt for the perpetrators, in 2013 but it contains significant differences from the other two films. The primary difference being that Mark Wahlberg is, for the first time, playing a fictional character inserted into the course of events rather than a real figure involved in the events. It’s also quite structurally different from the first two, which contained a ramp-up first half that introduces the characters before diving into an action-packed second half of disasters and things that go boom. Patriot’s Day is full of much more dialogue-driven scenes that somehow end up feeling a lot more fake.
Stylistically, Berg has been on an ever-hastening mission to be Michael Bay’s clone but with all the fun sucked out and replaced with a sombre kind of sanctimony. If you’d seen early footage from Patriot’s Day and thought this may be a more restrained attempt by Berg at complex emotional drama, and that there’s no way that you could Michael Bay the Boston bombings, then you, like me, were resoundingly incorrect. Patriot’s Day is a loud, shouty, bullet-riddled, fireworks display of a film and, as a thriller, it works well enough.
Cinematographer Tobias Schliessler has worked with Berg enough times to know that he wants to cut it to ribbons in the editing room, just like a Bay film, and he’s able to make the most of a grittier, street level, handheld look. Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross’ score is also thoroughly decent, not exactly their most original work together but it brings out a lot of the anxious moods and themes of digital surveillance. The problem is that not much else in the film is as adept. Patriot’s Day is a film painted in the broadest strokes. It has an unshakable sense of duty in letting you know what happened but no inclination to explore why. It wants you to know that there are good things and bad things and rather than letting you figure out what those things are it’s going to tell you what they are in the most certain of terms. Terrorists are bad. Okay? You got that? No? Well don’t worry because Peter Berg will make sure you know.
But if there’s one thing that Peter Berg hates more than islamic terrorism it’s millennials. Damn disaffected, pot-smoking, millennials. Their hatred of America and love of marijuana knows no boundaries I tell you. None more so than Rolling Stone cover boy Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, played by by Alex Wolff who actually delivers a decent performance when you consider that his only direction was to be as annoying as humanly possible.
The representation of the Tsarnaev’s as a brutish and patriarchal older brother exploiting an impressionable and whiny sibling is neither uninteresting nor unfounded. In fact they may have the most interesting relationship in the entire film and, if the film had focussed on them, it may have been the better for it. But they’re there for one reason and one reason only, to be inhuman antagonists. Because they’re bad people. Get it? I know that may be a difficult concept to grasp, terrorist bombers being bad, but Berg simplifies it for you. You don’t have to do anything as tricky as just simply take it as a given that they’re aggressive and cowardly because you’re a regular human being and that just seems kind of obvious from the available information, the score will hiss and crackle when they’re introduced to let you know that those terrorist fellas are up to no good. Other characters will bluntly state that they’re monstrous cowards even though those statements have no real relevance to the conversations that they’re having. Which is representative of Patriot’s Day chief flaw, meaning that it feels less like a narrative film and more like an incredibly expensive memorial video with product placements.
The film wants you to know that the bad guys are bad but, more than that even, it wants you to know that the good guys are good; and only good. In the opening scenes, before the bombs go off, you’re introduced to the films main characters who, aside from the Tsarnaevs, are either victims of the bombings or involved in the manhunt. Which is concerning, for several reasons. Firstly because it reinforces this sheep and wolf mentality that the film seems to have and secondly because, for a film that fashions itself as an emotional tribute to people who died in a bombing, its violence is very stylized and increasingly revelled in as the film goes on.
Berg’s emulation of Michael Bay isn’t just about fast cut editing and explosions it also really doubles down on Bay’s use of militaria but delivered without any of the joy and intentional ridiculousness that makes Michael Bay’s films entertaining. Bay isn’t really concerned by politics, he’s not that interested in human beings altogether, but Berg very much is and if there’s one thing that films which receive subsidies from the US government for positive representation of the military and law enforcement always seem to conclude it’s that tragedies which befall America only happen because the already $600 billion defence budget isn’t big enough. Patriot’s Day is very impressed with the US government’s surveillance powers and anti-terrorism apparatus but simultaneously doesn’t see any irony in it being continually outwitted by two self-taught insurgents. They probably just needed more money.
Berg also makes sure that Wahlberg’s already somewhat Christ-like Bostonian mascot equates the struggle to holy war. A point which feels extra worrisome considering that, unlike Lone Survivor or The Kingdom, Patriot’s Day contains no concluding moment that specifies in some small way that the film is aware of the fact that the antagonists did not represent an entire religion in their actions and while there are depictions of muslims outside of the Tsarnaevs, none of them are positive. A fact made incredibly noticeable by how positive everyone else’s representation is.
I’m not suggesting that victims of the marathon bombings have anything to hide, or deserve to have their lives scrutinised, but they are real people and no person’s reality is as fluffy and wonderful as Berg makes theirs out to be before the bombings. Everything about their lives is going great, they have no worries, they constantly smile and joke in their introductory scenes. Rachel Brosnahan’s nurse recounts a story of a patient who died earlier that day and she still seems kind of happy about it. There was no evil in the world before that fateful moment. Which brings us to the biggest, and probably worst, part of Patriot’s Day - Mark Wahlberg.
One immutably positive thing about the film is a large chunk of the performances from actors portraying real life figures. Both Kevin Bacon and John Goodman, particularly, are able to lend a raw level of emotion to their characters which makes their decisions in the film believable and relatable. Wahlberg plays the fictional Tommy Saunders, a Boston PD detective who’s conveniently been demoted to crowd control for being too much of a lovable hothead. Berg’s relationship with Wahlberg has been an odd one, transforming Wahlberg each time into some kind of American Jesus who’s beaten bloody by the sins of the world before taking the full weight of America’s collective soul upon his shoulders and having a good, cathartic, cry. It comes off as a little bizarre and very vain when you consider that what they were going for was realism, particularly here where Wahlberg really plays to the image of himself as a multi-million dollar superstar who’s somehow also emblematic of the working class spirit of America. There is little that Tommy Saunders can’t do. In the immediate aftermath of the bombings he appears to be the only authority figure capable of taking charge and there’s even a scene where he gets called in to Sherlock his way through a recreation of the crime scene because the FBI is no match for Tommy’s savant-like street knowledge.
If you’re able to view films without having the meaning behind the images that you’re being shown clouding your vision then you will probably enjoy Patriot’s Day as a sensationalist thriller. One which needs to create a sense of urgency by making it seem that the terrorists are going to blow up all of Times Square if Mark Wahlberg doesn’t stop them in time (rather than just letting the horror of its meticulously detailed bombing scene speak for itself) and wrapping its villains in menacing tones, screeches and sound effects (even adding a gun cocking sound effect to the pressure cooker bomb, presumably because someone thought it didn’t look scary enough).
Odds are that there’s quite a decent number of people who can, and will, overlook these things because Patriot’s Day is a reaction to an event rather than a comment on it. It has the demeanor of a film made for people who see all media as one big lie and the viewer’s job is to just choose the lie which reinforces what you believe. So if you’re idea of a great cinematic experience is to pay to sit down and be told a series of things that you already know then, by all means, go ahead. Words like propaganda and islamophobia are not ones that should be used lightly but Patriot’s Day comes perilously close to earning them.
Patriot’s Day will be released in UK cinemas on February 23rd.
