Patriots Day (2016)

Peter Berg's Patriots Day arrives as the third stop in his ongoing survey of American catastrophe, and it approaches the 2013 Boston Marathon bombing with the grim efficiency of a well-funded police procedural. Mark Wahlberg plays Tommy Saunders, a composite sergeant assembled so the audience has a pair of shoulders to ride through the chaos. The film braids actual surveillance footage into staged reenactments, and it ends with real survivors and first responders drifting through the frame, a gesture of tribute that lands somewhere between elegy and civic pageant. The craftsmanship is real. So is the restraint.

Nothing here lectures. The minority performers on screen, Michael Beach as Governor Deval Patrick, Jimmy O. Yang as the carjacked student Dun Meng, are playing people who were genuinely in the room, and the film never pauses to congratulate itself for their presence. Michelle Monaghan appears as a nurse and a wife, which is two jobs and no manifesto. The bombers are depicted as murderous brothers, not as symptoms of anything larger, which spares us the symposium a lesser production might have staged. We are handed a manhunt, a shootout in Watertown, a boat in a backyard. The film holds strong opinions about heroism and almost none about ideology.

Whether that constitutes an achievement or a well-executed avoidance is a question for another evening. Berg has made a stirring, occasionally manipulative picture that treats a city's worst week as a case to be closed, and there is a certain honesty in the refusal to editorialize. The audience is left to grieve, then to cheer, in that order, and the machinery works. A sober tribute, unclouded by sermonizing. The sommelier would call it a clean, uncomplicated vintage, and would observe, without complaint, that it tastes exactly like what it is.