Reviews: Public Enemies
July 2, 2009 by admin
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Reviews: Public Enemies
With a suave Johnny Depp making a rare appearance as an actor in a role rather than a piece of décor, there is definitely going to be a measurable constituency for Public Enemies, Michael Mann’s frequently taut but ultimately unsatisfying new gangster picture. One person who shouldn’t be cheering though (unless he has profit participation) is Bryan Burrough, whose revisionist history of the Depression-era gangster Mann based his film on. For there were two things that made Burrough’s book a radical departure from previous compendiums of gangster lore. One was an adamant refusal to glamorize stick-up men and kidnappers as much more than nihilistic thugs. The other was Burrough’s revelatory and convincing demonstration that the ’30s underworld was not populated by thrill-seeking existential anti-heroes (as so many movies would have it), but rather a seething Diaspora of inter-related and frequently improvised alliances, with the Barker, Karpis, Barrow, Nelson and Dillinger gangs all breaking apart and recombining under the pressure of federal manhunts like so many interchangeable parts.
Mann has pretty much chucked both of those insights and made instead something we’ve had at least three times before: a Dillinger picture, and one that like so many of Mann’s movies alternates between movie-movie silliness and aesthetic brilliance not just scene to scene but almost line by line. For if Mann is intermittently one of our best filmmakers, he’s also consistently one of our most contradictory—stylish and ham-fisted, audacious and cliché-driven, and torn between wanting to be an auteurist cineaste and having the crassest kind of mainstream success. Much of the violence in Public Enemies is vigorous but workmanlike, and punctuated by a handful of amazing set pieces—the opening jailbreak, say, or Mann’s exceptionally factual and fluid recreation of the FBI’s Little Bohemia catastrophe, where a carload of civilians was shot up by overeager federal gunfire as Dillinger and Babyface Nelson ran for their lives through the rural night.
There is no contemporary director, including Martin Scorsese, who understands the tropes of the crime film more intuitively than Mann; Public Enemiesis like a Strunk and White grammar manual on the form and its themes, and this means that unlike Burroughs’ book, the film traffics in glamorization and existential anti-heroics almost exclusively. And that’s fine, because movies and books are different mediums, but it would be even better if Mann had more to add to the canon then his characteristic crisp editing and stunning sound design, or the fleet and versatile cinematography of frequent collaborator Dante Spinotti—all technical excellences, but unable to fully mask the shopworn conceits that give such an irregular beat to this movie’s heart.
Maybe it’s Depp that undoes things – a likable actor striving here to be loved, and no more virile with a machine gun in his hand then he was wearing a fright wig and scissors. I find myself panning two Depp performances in a row by saying this, which is odd to me because I genuinely like him as a performer, even if he is far more the heir to the Marlon Brando who wore self-designed pig make-up as an industrialist in The Formula than he is to iconic Brando primitives like Stanley Kowalski and Terry Malloy. I like Jackie Chan too, but that doesn’t mean I’d want to see him play Al Capone. And for all his statuary handsomeness and his high Cherokee cheekbones, Depp is, like Chan, instinctively a comedian—not a Cagney, but a more eccentric Cary Grant, and just as likely as Grant was to be miscast because he draws at the box office and just looks so damn much like a leading man.
Depp has his moments, especially in the softer and more reflective passages of the film. There’s a wry and wholly invented scene of Dillinger sneaking into the squadroom of the Chicago P.D.’s Dillinger Squad, where, as Dillinger counts up his dead friends and the oblivious men tasked with killing him listen to a ballgame, Depp achieves a wordless wistful grace. Mann makes absolutely brilliant use of Manhattan Melodrama, the Clark Gable gangster movie Dillinger watched just before he died, using elliptical editing to create a kind of Greek chorus of outlaw longing, loss and acceptance out of the found footage on the Biograph Theatre’s screen, while Depp mirrors each emotion with just the subtlest shifts of eye and face.
As he did in Heat and Manhunter, Mann gives special weight to the relationship between the crook and the cop who’s following him, and so it’s useful to measure Depp against Christian Bale’s more limited screen time as FBI agent Melvin Purvis, the Inspector Javert to Depp’s Jean Valjean. For my money, Bale never hits a wrong note—he is brisk, vulnerable, decisive and overwhelmed, all by turns, and we are left intrigued by the suggestion in his tight smile that there are aspects of Purvis he can’t give to us, because so much of this man’s inner life is to himself unknown. Purvis is the soulless company man Public Enemies sees as an emblem of the conformist forces that always crush the free spirit Depp’s Dillinger is thought to be. But Bale seems to have slipped that geriatric formulation a Mickey Finn by giving Purvis a soul anyhow, even if it’s on the sly.
Would that the same could be said about Marion Cotillard’s very sanitized Billie Frechette, a ghostly vapor of a character despite the inordinate screen time devoted to the Frechette/Dillinger romance. Mann was probably obliged by market realities to squander so much running time on a relationship that is essentially static and fully established the first time Dillinger and Frechette make eyes at each other—somewhere in the bowels of Universal Studios there just has to be a memo from Ron Meyer to Michael Mann saying, when it comes to female audiences, guns don’t “test.” But Mann’s vision of the world is masculine to the core, and he compounds his fundamental disinterest in Frechette by making her into a bizarre amalgam of ’30s clichés about female dependence and the feminist clichés that replaced them. This leaves Cotillard’s Billie with little to do but resist Dillinger for a few lines when he takes her for granted, and then tumble into his arms the minute he avows commitment and says something nice. Mann only really seems comfortable with Billie when she’s being tortured for information by a villainous fed; the rest of the time, it’s enough for Dillinger to yearn for her, or for Cotillard and Depp to make goo-goo eyes.
Well, here are a couple of things we know about the actual people these two love struck high school kids are being made to represent. Billie was already firmly implanted in the outer margins of the criminal class by the time she met Dillinger. She had danced professionally in nudie clubs, likely taken various lovers and impulsively married a third-rate hoodlum boyfriend named Wellington Spark the night before he was taken away to Leavenworth to serve time for mugging a mailman—exactly the kind of mundane bush league hold-up that set Dillinger on the path to big time criminality in his earlier, less ambitious days. In other words, the historical Billie represents a far more tragic and complex vision of fringe life during the Depression era than Mann’s movie ever gets near. For if Billie went astray because she was blinded by love, it was something other than Dillinger’s smile that poked her eyes out.
Dillinger was a charming psychopath who killed easily and liked risk. He reveled in his notoriety and even played to it where he could, something Public Enemies flirts with as required but ultimately never does more than display. He is also alleged by some to have had an enormous penis, which is folklore most likely, but of an interesting caste the still-chaste world of American cinema is unlikely to pursue.
There have been a minimum of three previous screen Dillingers, and if we imagine each of them as carrying around Dillinger’s mythical endowment, here’s what could be said of them: Lawrence Tierney, the 1945 original, played Dillinger as if he wanted to beat you to death with it. Warren Oates, the rambunctious Dillinger of John Milius’ 1973 do-over, performed as if the phallus was packing him. Mark Harmon, the TV movie gangster of 1991, was a Dillinger who had misplaced it and seemed relieved by that fact. And Johnny Depp? He’s a Dillinger who would apologize before taking it out, and then ask his lover to let him know if he’s hurting her so he can behave more tenderly. He should be a big hit with “the ladies.” But just where on earth do they keep “the ladies” nowadays?
Distributor: Universal
Cast: Johnny Depp, Christian Bale, Marion Cotillard, Stephen Lang
Director: Michael Mann
Writers: Ronan Bennett, Michael Mann and Ann Biderman Producers: Michael Mann and Kevin Misher
Genre: Gangster Drama
Rating: R for gangster violence and some language
Running time: 140 min
Release date: July 1, 2009
Reviews 2: Public Enemies
A Universal release of a Universal Pictures presentation in association with Relativity Media of a Forward Pass/Misher Films production in association with Tribeca Prods. and Appian Way. Produced by Kevin Misher, Michael Mann. Executive producer, G. Mac Brown. Co-producers, Bryan H. Carroll, Gusmano Cesaretti, Kevin de la Noy. Directed by Michael Mann. Screenplay, Ronan Bennett, Michael Mann, Ann Biderman, based on the book “Public Enemies: America’s Greatest Crime Wave and the Birth of the FBI, 1933-34,” by Bryan Burrough.
John Dillinger – Johnny Depp
Melvin Purvis – Christian Bale
Billie Frechette – Marion Cotillard
“Red” Hamilton – Jason Clarke
Agent Carter Baum – Rory Cochrane
J. Edgar Hoover – Billy Crudup
Homer Van Meter – Stephen Dorff
Charles Winstead – Stephen Lang
Michael Mann ambitiously tries to forge the historical, iconographic and cultural aspects of American gangsterdom in “Public Enemies,” with results more admirable than electrifying. Centering on bank robber John Dillinger, the most publicized of the many Depression-era outlaws whose transgressions fostered the rise of the FBI, Hollywood’s specialist in great-looking crime stories has put images on the screen that are compelling to watch even though the overall impact is muted. Oddly, too, the film is somewhat shortchanged by its great star, Johnny Depp, who disappointingly has chosen to play Dillinger as self-consciously cool rather than earthy and gregarious. With dark commercial clouds currently hovering over expensive big-star vehicles and period pieces, Universal has no choice but to push the film hard as a glamorous gangbuster entertainment, which it is only in part. Mid-level biz is most likely.
For all his celebrity, Dillinger has only fronted two previous Hollywood features, and low-budgeters at that: Max Nosseck’s undistinguished, wildly fictional 1945 Monogram cheapie starring a tough Lawrence Tierney, and John Milius’ uneven 1973 AIP effort in which Warren Oates’ performance emphasized the anti-hero’s folksy and funny sides. Neither is very satisfactory, leaving a void “Public Enemies” endeavors to fill with a full-canvas approach that, inspired by the enormous detail provided by Bryan Burrough’s terrific 2004 book, hews with considerable, although not complete, fidelity to the historical record.
Like other Mann films, this one offers a lot of ominously rumbling, meticulously embroidered downtime occasionally interrupted by spasms of violence and action. After briefly alluding to Dillinger’s prior nine-year prison term, the yarn begins cracklingly with the outlaw engineering the mass escape of old cohorts from the Indiana State Penitentiary. The year is 1933, “the golden age of bank robbery,” as a front title puts it, a time when the public readily extended its sympathy to robbers who preyed upon the banks, which many blamed for their financial distress.
The specific sociopolitical conditions of the time are crucial to the story, but one big thing almost entirely missing from “Public Enemies” is the Depression itself. It’s suggestive of where Mann’s true interests lie — or perhaps, where they don’t — that one almost never sees poverty, desperation or even poor grooming; everyone here wears fabulous clothes and almost always looks their very best. Dillinger most frequently robbed banks in small or medium-sized towns, but here he only bothers with vast marble palaces of impeccable design.
In Depp’s unavoidably attractive impersonation, Dillinger is a personable, somewhat low-key guy who’s loyal to his pals and alluring to the ladies, particularly to nightclub coat-check girl Billie Frechette (Marion Cotillard), who quickly becomes his companion. Advised by his smart criminal cohort Alvin Karpis (Giovanni Ribisi) that “what we’re doin’ won’t last forever,” Dillinger replies that he has thoughts of doing nothing else because he’s “having too much fun.”
Karpis proves correct, however, since J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI quickly mobilizes to address the mayhem at large in the country’s heartland. Hoover (Billy Crudup, disarmingly good) appoints tight-lipped straight arrow Melvin Purvis (Christian Bale) to run his Chicago office. Purvis and his crew inexorably put the screws on, just as the city’s organized crime syndicate, run by Al Capone’s old No. 2, Frank Nitti (Bill Camp), becomes annoyed by the FBI scrutiny aroused by Dillinger and other loose cannons.
So “Public Enemies” emerges as a formidable tapestry documenting the indelible seismic shifts of large criminal and law enforcement entities that significantly define an era. As before in Mann’s work, there is a magisterial inevitability to the way the opposing forces gradually converge until violent confrontation is inevitable, a style that justifies the time and attention to detail involved in creating it.
The methodical approach makes the violence particularly startling. The highlight here is a nocturnal attack by Purvis’ team on Dillinger, “Baby Face” Nelson (Stephen Graham) and others holed up at the remote Little Bohemia lodge. Much attention is paid to the quality of the gunshots, the sounds really pop, and Dante Spinotti’s HD cinematography excels at rendering the darkest possible nighttime blacks upon which the gun blasts expode with bursts of white light.
Script by Irish scribe Ronan Bennett, Mann and Ann Biderman dives intelligently and deeply into its subject, although it is Mann’s way to deliberately pare connective tissue, a strategy magnified here by the unintelligibility of a fair amount of dialogue. The chilliness verging on artiness of the style suggests a director bent on suppressing his instincts as a popular entertainer, which would actually be fine if balanced by a warm central performance. Curiously, though, after letting loose in the “Pirates of the Caribbean” pictures and other films, Depp reverts to a more withdrawn, self-regarding posture, portraying Dillinger as a man who, having discovered his role in life, determined to play it according to a script of his own devising.
Bale plays Purvis as a clenched stoic trying to keep his deep tension bottled up, while Cotillard, speaking English with just a slight accent, is lovely and fine as the lady who wins the bad man’s heart.
Clad in similar suits and large coats, topped by virtually identical haircuts and given few opportunities to pop out of the backgrounds (it’s a variation on the “Black Hawk Down” syndrome), even some of the known secondary players can be difficult to identify. Still, one who does shine is Stephen Lang, from Mann’s old “Crime Story” TV show, terrific as the lawman who utters the film’s final lines. Ribisi as Karpis, Peter Gerety as Dillinger’s shrewd showboating attorney and Branka Katic as the woman who betrays the outlaw to the feds all have their brief moments.
Mann’s decision to shoot in HD rather than film again has its plusses and minuses; the detail and depth of field are phenomenal in the dark scenes, but the bright flaring, occasional unnatural movements and excessive detailing of skin flaws remain annoying, as does the insubstantiality of the images compared to those created on film. Digital may represent the future, but the future is not entirely here yet, and the pictorial qualities of Mann’s films prior to “Collateral” remain decisively superior to the recent trio.
Other production qualities are exceptional across the board, and extensive location work in Illinois and Wisconsin pays off in physical authenticity. Elliot Goldenthal’s brooding score combines with period music to create an effectively eclectic soundtrack.
Camera (color, widescreen, HD), Dante Spinotti; editors, Paul Rubell, Jeffrey Ford; music, Elliot Goldenthal; music supervisors, Bob Badami, Kathy Nelson; production designer, Nathan Crowley; supervising art director, Patrick Lumb; art director, William Ladd Skinner; set designers, David Krummel, David Tennenbaum, Jeff B. Adams Jr., Karen Fletcher Trujillo, Robert Woodruff, Kevin Depinet, Scott Matula; set decorator, Rosemary Brandenburg; costume designer, Colleen Atwood; sound (DTS/SDDS/Dolby Digital), Ed Novick; supervising sound editors, Laurent Kossayan, Jeremy Peirson; re-recording mixers, Kevin O’Connell, Beau Borders; special visual effects, Illusion Arts, VFX Collective, Hammerhead, Invisible Effects, Wildfire Visual Effects, Pixel Playground, Lowry Digital; visual effects supervisor, Robert Stadd; special effects supervisor, Bruno Van Zeebroeck; stunt coordinator, Darrin Prescott; associate producer, Maria Norman; assistant director, Bob Wagner; second unit directors, Michael Waxman, Bryan H. Carroll; second unit camera, Gary Jay; casting, Avy Kaufman, Bonnie Timmermann. Reviewed at Los Angeles Film Festival (Centerpiece Screening), June 23, 2009. MPAA Rating: R. Running time: 140 MIN.
With: John Ortiz, Giovanni Ribisi, David Wenham, John Michael Bolger, Bill Camp, Matt Craven, Don Frye, Stephen Graham, Peter Gerety, Shawn Hatosy, Spencer Garrett, John Hoogenakker, Branka Katic, Domenick Lombardozzi, Ed Bruce, James Russo, Christian Stolte, Channing Tatum, Carey Mulligan, Casey Siemaszko, Lili Taylor, Leelee Sobieski.
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Reviews 3: Public Enemies
By 1933 the Depression was in full swing, and bank robber John Dillinger (Johnny Depp) was something of a celebrity. (Note: The previous sentence sounds more fun if you read it in an old-timey radio voice.) The film begins with Dillinger’s escape from prison in Michigan City, Ind., depicts his romance with Billie Frechette (Marion Cotillard) and pursuit by FBI Agent Melvin Purvis (Christian Bale), and leads up to Dillinger being gunned down outside Chicago’s Biograph Theater in 1934.
The buzz: Expectations are high, and “Public Enemies” could score the rare hat trick of becoming a summer blockbuster, critical favorite and Oscar contender. In the meantime, is director/co-writer Michael Mann’s latest crime drama closer to his extraordinary “Heat” or dull “Miami Vice”?
The verdict: Were so many details used on the production design that none were left over for the story? Sure, “Public Enemies” looks great, with Chicago (and parts of Indiana and Wisconsin) gloriously turned back to the ’30s with razor-sharp precision. The script just isn’t there. From Dillinger’s background and supposed popularity—little is said, less is shown—to Purvis having clean-cut officers replaced with more qualified southern lawmen, everything feels underwritten, strangely edited and poorly explained. And despite very good performances from Depp and Cotillard, Dillinger’s interest in Billie never translates from innocuous pick-up to true love.
Did you know? Dillinger demonstrates that if a public service announcement advises you that a wanted criminal could be sitting to your left or right, the guy that doesn’t look is probably guilty. Watch out!
Reviews 4: Public Enemies
“I rob banks,” John Dillinger would sometimes say by way of introduction. It was the simple truth. That was what he did. For the 13 months between the day he escaped from prison and the night he lay dying in an alley, he robbed banks. It was his lifetime. Michael Mann’s “Public Enemies” accepts that stark fact and refuses any temptation to soften it. Dillinger was not a nice man.
Here is a film that shrugs off the way we depend on myth to sentimentalize our outlaws. There is no interest here about John Dillinger’s childhood, his psychology, his sexuality, his famous charm, his Robin Hood legend. He liked sex, but not as much as robbing banks. “He robbed the bankers but let the customers keep their own money.” But whose money was in the banks? He kids around with reporters and lawmen, but that was business. He doesn’t kid around with the members of his gang. He might have made a very good military leader.
Johnny Depp and Michael Mann show us that we didn’t know all about Dillinger. We only thought we did. Here is an efficient, disciplined, bold, violent man, driven by compulsions the film wisely declines to explain. His gang members loved the money they were making. Dillinger loved planning the next job. He had no exit strategy or retirement plans.
Dillinger saw a woman he liked, Billie Frechette, played by Marion Cotillard, and courted her, after his fashion. That is, he took her out at night and bought her a fur coat, as he had seen done in the movies; he had no real adult experience before prison. They had sex, but the movie is not much interested. It is all about his vow to show up for her, to protect her. Against what? Against the danger of being his girl. He allows himself a tiny smile when he gives her the coat, and it is the only vulnerability he shows in the movie.
This is very disciplined film. You might not think it was possible to make a film about the most famous outlaw of the 1930s without clichés and “star chemistry” and a film class screenplay structure, but Mann does it. He is particular about the way he presents Dillinger and Billie. He sees him and her. Not them. They are never a couple. They are their needs. She needs to be protected, because she is so vulnerable. He needs someone to protect, in order to affirm his invincibility.
Dillinger hates the system, by which he means prisons, that hold people; banks, that hold money, and cops, who stand in his way. He probably hates the government too, but he doesn’t think that big. It is him against them, and the bastards will not, can not, win. There’s an extraordinary sequence, apparently based on fact, where Dillinger walks into the “Dillinger Bureau” of the Chicago Police Department and strolls around. Invincible. This is not ego. It is a spell he casts on himself.
The movie is well-researched, based on the book by Bryan Burrough. It even bothers to try to discover Dillinger’s speaking style. Depp looks a lot like him. Mann shot on location in the Crown Point jail, scene of the famous jailbreak with the fake gun. He shot in the Little Bohemia Lodge in the same room Dillinger used, and Depp is costumed in clothes to match those the bank robber left behind. Mann redressed Lincoln Avenue on either side of the Biograph Theater, and laid streetcar tracks; I live a few blocks away, and walked over to marvel at the detail. I saw more than you will; unlike some directors, he doesn’t indulge in beauty shots to show off the art direction. It’s just there.
This Johnny Depp performance is something else. For once an actor playing a gangster does not seem to base his performance on movies he has seen. He starts cold. He plays Dillinger as a Fact. My friend Jay Robert Nash says 1930s gangsters copied their styles from the way Hollywood depicted them; screenwriters like Ben Hecht taught them how they spoke. Dillinger was a big movie fan; on the last night of his life, he went to see Clark Gable playing a man a lot like him, but he didn’t learn much. No wisecracks, no lingo. Just military precision and an edge of steel.
Christian Bale plays Melvin Purvis in a similar key. He lives to fight criminals. He is a cold realist. He admires his boss, J. Edgar Hoover, but Hoover is a romantic, dreaming of an FBI of clean-cut young accountants in suits and ties who would be a credit to their mothers. After the catastrophe at Little Bohemia (the FBI let Dillinger escape but killed three civilians), Purvis said to hell with it and made J. Edgar import some lawmen from Arizona who had actually been in gunfights.
Mann is fearless with his research. If I mention the Lady in Red, Anna Sage (Branka Katic), who betrayed Dillinger outside the Biograph when the movie was over, how do you picture her? I do too. We are wrong. In real life she was wearing a white blouse and an orange skirt, and she does in the movie. John Ford once said, When the legend becomes fact, print the legend. This may be a case where he was right. Mann might have been wise to decide against the orange and white and just break down and give Anna Sage a red dress.
This is a very good film, with Depp and Bale performances of brutal clarity. I’m trying to understand why it is not quite a great film. I think it may be because it deprives me of some stubborn need for closure. His name was John Dillinger, and he robbed banks. But there had to be more to it than that, right? No, apparently not.
Reviews 5: Public Enemies
There’s something almost old-fashioned about Michael Mann’s Public Enemies, a mostly factual re-telling of the descent and death of John Dillinger (Johnny Depp), one of the 1930s most infamous bank robbers. More drama than thriller, the movie does a slightly better job with period detail than with character building. While Dillinger is sympathetically portrayed, he falls just short of full three-dimensionality, with the character never quite emerging from the shadow of the real-world legend. Dillinger’s pursuer, Federal agent Melvin Purvis (Christian Bale), fares worse: he’s a perfect stereotype of the grim, humorless lawman, bent on delivering justice to criminals by using the business end of a firearm. That’s not to say Public Enemies is by any means a bad film; on the contrary, it’s quite engaging. It is competently constructed and often compelling, but it will not be mentioned in the same breath as some of its classic predecessors.
Obvious candidates for comparison are Arthur Penn’s 1967 touchstone, Bonnie and Clyde, and Brian De Palma’s 1987 The Untouchables. Public Enemies lacks the fire and energy of the former and the operatic grandeur of the latter. Mann’s approach to this story is businesslike and low-key; he’s not trying for something epic. His goal is to demythologize Dillinger – something at which he is only partially successful. Public Enemies’ Dillinger is not about crime and money. Instead, he is driven by love and compulsion. The only thing more important to him than robbing banks is coat-check girl Billie Frechette (Marion Cotillard).
Public Enemies, which derives much of its factual information from Bryan Burrough’s non-fiction book of the same name, begins with Dillinger’s audacious jailbreak from a prison in Lima. At the time, some of Dillinger’s best-known robberies are behind him, and he is already one of America’s most celebrated gangsters. After his escape, he and his gang head to ground in Chicago, where the post-Capone mob offers him sanctuary and protection. During this period, he becomes involved with Frechette, who he views as the love of his life. Meanwhile, Dillinger has become an obsession for FBI honcho J. Edgar Hoover (Billy Crudup), who appoints Purvis as the head of the Chicago office with the primary directive of tracking down Dillinger. Purvis’ initial efforts are bloody and ineffective, but he learns from his mistakes and soon brings on board a group of hardened Texas Rangers like Charles Winstead (Stephen Lang) to turn the tide.
Dillinger is again caught and imprisoned, this time in Crown Pointe at a jail so tightly guarded it is deemed to be escape-proof. Dillinger has little trouble freeing himself, departing the grounds in the stolen car of the town’s sheriff. Upon his return to Chicago, however, he discovers that the climate had changed. The syndicate, now run under the auspices of boss Frank Nitti, perceives bank robbers like Dillinger as loose cannons who are bad for business. The gangsters no longer offer aid or shelter to Dillinger; in fact, they conspire against him. He again hooks up with Frechette, but their reunion has an unhappy conclusion. Circumstances force him to join forces with the likes of Baby Face Nelson (Stephen Graham), but a gradual narrowing of his options leads to his eventual demise after being betrayed by “The Lady in Red” at the Biograph Theater on July 21, 1934.
Mann injects a little too much of himself into the film’s style. In particular, most of the movie is shot using hand-held cameras and, while this works well to enhance the sense of chaos and confusion during certain scenes, its overuse becomes distracting and at times off-putting. Directors often forget that frequent swish-pans and the lack of a stable plane can result in nausea for a certain portion of the movie-going public, and there are likely to be some queasy stomachs during the course of Public Enemies. Camera movement issues aside, the film is beautifully mounted, with many scenes being shot in the actual locations where events occurred some 75 years ago.
The director’s objective is to emphasize drama over suspense and, as a result, the kind of fast pace and narrative momentum often associated with a thriller is absent here. However, there are individual scenes in which Mann ratchets up the level of tension. The most apparent of these is a seemingly throw-away sequence: after escaping from the Crown Pointe jail, Dillinger and his pals sit at a red traffic light in the stolen car in plain view of everyone in town, including law enforcement officials. It seems that the light will never turn green; endless seconds tick by. Passersby turn to look at the car. The scene, intentionally drawn-out for maximum effect, is as agonizing as De Palma’s famous homage to The Battleship Potemkin’s Odessa Steps in The Untouchables. Another standout sequence in Public Enemies is more effective for comedy than suspense, and involves Dillinger’s reaction in a movie theater to an on-screen announcement warning the audience to be on the lookout for him, America’s “Public Enemy #1.”
Perhaps with the idea of replicating the kind of classic confrontation between Law and Criminality depicted in Heat, Mann cast strong actors as Dillinger and Purvis. Although both Depp and Bale bring forceful personalities to their role, only the former is given the opportunity to sear the screen. Bale’s character is too thinly-drawn for him to be able to do much beyond glowering and looking serious. Depp’s ferocious intensity reminds us that he is capable of riveting the attention even when not playing the kind of odd, off-kilter roles that have become his specialty over the years. The spotlight is often stolen (even from Depp) by Marion Cotillard, whose interpretation of Frechette is so beguiling that it’s easy to understand why someone as hard-bitten as Dillinger might be attracted to her. And Billy Crudup’s supporting performance as J. Edgar Hoover is brilliant.
Burrough, the author of the source material, has admitted that, although the movie takes a certain amount of artistic license with history, it is the most factual telling of Dillinger’s story thus far to appear on screen. Mann does not overglamorize the bank robbing lifestyle, although he shows the gap between how Dillinger is viewed by law enforcement officials (as a dangerous man who needs to be stopped at all costs) and by the general public (as a Robin Hood-like figure). Public Enemies also touches none-too-subtly on a topic of some contemporary concern: what constitutes an “unacceptable practice” in extreme interrogations. This is raised twice during the course of the film, most notably when Frechette is battered and beaten in an attempt to force Dillinger’s location from her. Finally, there is a nod to America’s fascination with the lurid. After Dillinger is shot dead, a massive crowd gathers to view the spectacle.
Although Public Enemies does not ascend to the heights of Bonnie and Clyde or The Untouchables, it is nevertheless an effective depiction of the final months of the life of one of the United States’ most infamous criminals. Of all the cinematic versions of Dillinger’s life and/or death, this is the most dramatically compelling. It’s an imperfect motion picture but Depp and Cotillard are compulsively watchable and there’s enough intrigue and historical veracity to make the 140 minutes pass quickly. If you can overcome issues associated with the hand-held camerawork, Public Enemies is solid in both its storytelling and the way in which the narrative is represented on screen.
