Patriot's Day

Patriot's Day is the second collaboration based on a national tragedy between director Peter Berg and star Mark Wahlberg in roughly three months after late September's Deepwater Horizon.  And while it suffers from a few of the narrative problems that the earlier film did (both are so focused on giving a minute by minute recreation of the tragedy and aftermath that a few characters are not as fleshed out as they should be), this is the better of the two films.  It's much more powerful emotionally, and does a better job of making us care about the people at the center, unlike Horizon, which was technically excellent, but felt hollow on an emotional level to me.

The film works as an almost hour-by-hour study of the events of the 2013 Boston Marathon Bombing, starting on April 15th, and leading through the following days covering the manhunt for the people responsible.  The story takes a kind of multi-perspective narrative, introducing us to a wide variety of characters whose lives will be changed in one way or another during the events to come.  But, the main focus is Boston police officer Tommy Saunders (Wahlberg), who the filmmakers created for this dramatization, so that a main character could be present for all the major events that are covered.  The movie was supposedly made up of two separate scripts covering the event, and at times it shows, as the movie does try to shoehorn in a few too many characters and side plots.  But, when the movie does work, it works beautifully.

Berg shows a real eye for detail here, faithfully recreating events almost exactly as they happened, apparently.  At times, he seems to be using actual video and hidden camera footage, mixing it in with his dramatic reenactments.  People who watched the actual events unfold almost four years ago will likely recognize a lot, as Berg seems obsessive about recreating each detail about the actual tragedy and the police investigation that followed.  Aside from Wahlberg's fictional cop, a few real life officers and investigators like Police Commissioner Ed Davis (John Goodman), FBI agent Richard DesLauriers (Kevin Bacon) and police Sgt. Jeffrey Pugliese (J.K. Simmons) are portrayed in supporting roles.  It is kind of odd that these real people involved in the event have to take a backseat to a made up one, but at least these veteran actors get to deliver some strong performances here.

What was most interesting to me personally is how the film handles the two responsible for the bombing, brothers Dzhokhar (Alex Wolff) and Tamerlan Tsarnaev (Themo Melikidze), along with Tamerlan’s wife, Katherine Russell (Melissa Benoist).  This is the aspect of the story that has been given the least amount of attention in the media, so it's interesting to see how they watch the manhunt unfold on TV, and then begin to plan their next move.  Patriot's Day obviously has to walk a fine line here, as the filmmakers don't want to make these people out to be sympathetic, but at the same time it has to give them some kind of motivation for what they did.  The filmmakers have pulled this off for the most part.  These are clearly people capable of evil and great harm, but you can also sense a kind of bond that becomes all the more strained as the police close in on them. 

And even if the narrative does become a bit jumbled as it jumps from various subplots concerning innocent people involved in the disaster, like a married couple who get sent to separate hospitals at first, or a father separated from his young son, the movie does still manage to generate emotion out of these somewhat underwritten characters.  Yes, it would be impossible not to sympathize with them in just about any way, shape or form, but the movie does give them a few nice moments during the opening scenes, introducing them to us before the fateful event, and letting us get to know them.  It helps that the film closes out with a mini documentary, showing the actual people, and giving them a chance to tell their story probably better than the dramatization ever could.

Patriot's Day is just as imperfect as Deepwater Horizon was, but I found myself more emotionally involved here.  Yes, it is very messy in a lot of ways, but its effective and emotionally potent when it needs to be.  A filmed documentary like the one this closes with probably would have been a better choice to tell all the stories that this film wants to tell, but it does enough to honor the real people who were involved in just about every way.

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