Boston’s hour

Many Americans experienced the tumultuous unfolding of the 2013 Boston Marathon bombing and the subsequent four-day manhunt over a series of tweets, smartphone clicks, and broadcast news reports. But for Bostonians who lost a limb from the explosions, or who remember peering out behind locked windows at full-geared police and armored vehicles prowling their neighborhoods, the event hit all too close to home. The docudrama Patriots Day (earning its R rating for violence, foul language, and some drug use) revives the psychological intensity of the terror attack for those who only read about it from afar.

Writer-director Peter Berg said he knew it would be a gamble to make Patriots Day so soon after the tragedy: Could he dramatize a still-raw story and extract its emotional essence, without sensationalizing it into an action thriller? How to capture the real presence and danger of U.S.-based terrorism, without stoking more hatred and fear? Berg toes these fine lines by weaving the humdrum of Boston civilian life—with its mundane activities and ordinary dialogue—into a well-researched sequence of events, allowing suspense to cumulate with little embellishment.

Boston native Mark Wahlberg plays the fictional Boston police Sgt. Tommy Saunders, the quintessential law enforcement officer. He’s a gruff, temperamental, big-hearted man with a bum knee, the kind of guy who flares up at his superiors for letting the corpse of an 8-year-old boy lie for hours at the crime scene. It’s through his eyes that we sense the exhaustion, perseverance, and mistakes of the first responders. He’s there at the marathon finish line when the explosions go off, then weeping to his wife at home, and with barely a wink of sleep, back on the streets in pursuit of the suspects—all while trying to process what’s happened to the city he loves.

Besides Saunders, most other characters are based on real people: Young newlyweds Patrick Downes and Jessica Kensky (Christopher O’Shea and Rachel Brosnahan) both lost a leg to the bombing; MIT police officer Sean Collier (Jake Picking) died from multiple gunshot wounds when he refused to give up his gun to the terrorists; Chinese immigrant Dun Meng (Jimmy O. Yang) was held hostage by the Tsarnaev brothers but escaped to call 911. These faces, and many others, together form a collage of Boston, the city that rallied under the banner “Boston Strong” in demonstration of resilience against the threats of terror.

The movie practices restraint in depicting bombers Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, humanizing them enough to make them believable without downplaying their cruelty. Younger brother Dzhokhar (Alex Wolff) is like an average 19-year-old college sophomore—but with a stone-cold heart. On the day after the bombing, he whines about having to interrupt his video games to fetch his nephew’s milk, then later whines again when his brother won’t let him drive the shiny new Mercedes-Benz SUV they’ve hijacked. Meanwhile, older brother Tamerlan (Themo Melikidze) is the mastermind, driven in his ideology of twisted justice and prone to violent, sometimes petty tempers. The film avoids diving too deeply into the rationale behind their motives, sticking to the main goal of recognizing the heroes rather than the villains.

In one scene, a fellow officer asks Saunders, “You think this [expletive] is preventable?” Saunders answers no, then adds, “But what they can’t stop is our hearts and our lovingkindness.” When terror strikes, love responds. Some would call it trying too hard to spin positivity into a horrible event. But in this national climate of fear and disunity, of distrust and anger toward law enforcement and people groups, it’s nice to believe that moments of community, courage, and self-sacrifice do still exist despite—perhaps even because of—the chaos surrounding us.