By Caitlin Coody, Staff Writer
April 15, 2013 was supposed to be another beautiful day for the Boston Marathon.
Unfortunately, beautiful had a different definition for the Tsarnaev brothers, the bombers of the Boston Marathon bombing.
The directors, Peter Berg and the actor Mark Wahlberg, have collaborated once again to create the docudrama of the season. “Patriots Day” takes the audience back to the morning of the bombing and into some of the lives affected on April 15.
The movie starts off with viewpoints of different families getting ready on the morning of the explosions. Although, Wahlberg’s character, a police detective who’s working off a suspension by doing uniformed duty at the marathon, is a fictionalized composite, almost all of the other characters —from Gov. Deval Patrick of Massachusetts to the newlyweds played by Rachel Brosnahan and Christopher O’Shea —are based on real people.
Berg and Wahlberg even give an insight to the Tsarnaev family having a dispute over milk for Tamerlan and Kathrine Russell’s (Melissa Benoist) toddler daughter, Zahira. This is about as humanizing as the depiction of the terrorists gets.
The Boston police get slightly irritated when the F.B.I. team led by Richard DesLauriers (Kevin Bacon) shows up. The film does a good job at showing how easy ideas can fall through the cracks as well as what can be accomplished when multiple agencies try to collaborate.Instead of focusing on Tamerlan’s ideology behind the attack, the movie concentrates on the community that the bombings intended to tear apart, and how Boston and its surrounding towns came together, imperfectly but with a determination, to apprehend the culprits.
All the actors here are terrific, but those in the law enforcement roles — Mr. Wahlberg, Mr. Bacon, John Goodman, J. K. Simmons and Jake Picking among them — are particularly convincing. The movie also provides a simultaneously chocking and disheartening account of how much havoc a pair of, determined, heavily armed vile beings can wreak, especially in a shootout scene between the brothers and the police.
At the end of the movie, there is a segment featuring interviews with the real figures fictionalized in the movie, which moved the crowd into tears, if they weren’t already.
In the words of Pulitzer Prize-winning film critic, Roger Ebert, movies allow us to enter other minds, not simply in the sense of identifying with the characters, although that is an important part of it, but by seeing the world as another person sees it. “Patriots Day” was well directed overall and the order Berg and Wahlberg chose was beyond admirable.