Public Enemies

[Mister Tee]

Variety.

Public Enemies
By TODD MCCARTHY

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.

[Sabin]

Slant weighs in.

PUBLIC ENEMIES -- **1/2/****

By Nick Schager

art icy Heat noir, part The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford reverie, Michael Mann's Public Enemies casts the fast life of notorious '30s bank robber John Dillinger as one defined by the symbiotic relationship between crime and celebrity, gangsterdom and cinema. Mann's predilection for both icons and daring heists makes him well suited to adapt Bryan Burrough's exhaustively researched tome about law enforcement efforts to catch Dillinger and the rest of the era's bandits. The director doesn't skirt on his source material's factual details, but he opts for his trademark cool, dreamy romanticism in depicting Dillinger's escapades in and around Chicago, from a 1933 prison breakout, through various incarcerations and escapes, to his 1934 death. Embodied by Johnny Depp with preternatural poise and cool, Dillinger stands at a remove from his own life, his bemused smiles and hard stares key elements of a deliberate act of performance. Whether sticking up imposing granite banks or assertively wooing coat-check girl and future paramour Billie Frechette (Mario Cotillard), this Dillinger seems constantly aware that he's playing a role for an adoring citizenry, his persona— crafted with an eye toward courting favorable public opinion—at once the byproduct of, and inspiration for, big-screen genre larks like Manhattan Melodrama (featuring Clark Gable sporting a Dillinger-esque mustache), which he attends on the night of his demise.

As Andrew Dominick did with Jesse James, Mann envisions Dillinger less as a flesh-and-blood human being than as a near-supernatural archetype, and as in Assassination of Jesse James, his initial means of achieving those ends involves pensive, haunting close-ups of the man set against expansive gray countryside backdrops. Mann idealizes Dillinger while recognizing that, in doing so, he's partaking in a long cinematic tradition. Yet until a finale in which Dillinger, while leaving a movie theater, is felled by cops working for Christian Bale's agent Melvin Purvis (who is handpicked by J. Edgar Hoover to make headlines by capturing Dillinger and, in doing so, drum up public support for his stymied plans to create a federal police force), Public Enemies only cursorily addresses its two opposite-sides-of-the-law protagonists' kindred relationship to the spotlight. The image of a captured Dillinger driving past cheering admirers lining the streets, or of Purvis and Hoover putting on a show for media cameras, certainly makes plain this subtext. Mann's interest in fully exploring such issues, however, is ultimately fleeting, the fame-related dynamic that's glimpsed now and again too faint to register as more than a tantalizing but underdeveloped suggestion.

Sensual muscularity characterized the director's undervalued Miami Vice, and traces of that eroticism bubble up during Mann's action centerpieces here, in which angular widescreen framing and strapping camera movements (anxiously scored to Otis Taylor's banjo-infused "Ten Million Slaves") capture, and celebrate, the grace and power of human physicality. During Purvis's nighttime raid on Dillinger and Babyface Nelson's (Stephen Graham) post-heist forest safehouse (culminating in a rapturous shot of Nelson's blaze-of-glory last stand), the filmmaker reconfirms his capacity for visually encapsulating defiant masculinity. Structured around opposing poles (the stoic Purvis and the charismatic Dillinger), Public Enemies feels leathery hard, even as Dante Spinotti's HD cinematography drenches the proceedings in sumptuous sepia-toned hues and rich, dark blacks. Nonetheless, whereas Mann's high-def aesthetic turns shadows luxurious, it falters badly with bright light, resulting in blown-out, pixilated whites that impart a distracting, illusion-defiling sense of watching history up-close-and-personal through the filter of a cruddy camcorder.

While devoid of the sexy steel-blue sheen of Heat, Public Enemies manages to otherwise hew to that crime epic's narrative template, condensing and simplifying its thematic lynchpins in ways not so much egregious as merely uninvolving. Echoing Robert DeNiro's Neil McCauley, Dillinger is a man driven by ritual (note a quick early scene of him cleaning and assembling his machine gun) and beholden to a code of honor involving loyalty to comrades (beautifully evoked in an opening shot-countershot sight of him clinging to a dying cohort as they escape jail via car) and, as his pal Red (Jason Clarke) reminds him, the avoidance of dames. Dillinger ignores this last rule to pursue Billie, a romance lavished with sumptuous visual gestures (a horse-track sequence has a soft, sunny warmth that's swoon-worthy), but one that comes off as tacked on and thin, with Billie's initial, wary facial reactions to Dillinger's cocky bluster suggesting complications that never materialize. Theirs is an affair constructed with rote Hollywood-ish brushstrokes, making it seem driven not by passion or logic but by screenwriting necessity, and though this too might be chalked up to Mann's desire to intentionally allude to the real-life tale's cinematic influences, their central amour proves underdramatized and phony.

With its focus on men striking back at banks during economically treacherous times, and federal law enforcement's decision—depicted as being advanced not by Hoover but Purvis—that the apprehension of ruthless criminals requires the employment of equally ruthless men and methods, the story is primed for contemporary parallels. However, Mann more or less ignores the former issue (the Depression wracking the country is never seen, thus undercutting the film's ability to properly explain Dillinger's celeb appeal) and treats the latter issue with sermonizing melodrama that culminates in a bit of "Good Guys Don't Torture" corniness. More problematic still, Dillinger is just a dashing cardboard cutout of a noir protagonist, damned regardless of whether he sticks to or strays from his chosen path (i.e. his true nature). And Purvis, despite suitable intensity from Bale, is even more one-dimensional, bestowed with only two traits (determination and by-the-books morality) and asked mainly to serve as the more-alike-than-dissimilar foil for Dillinger's intimidations during their sole, Heat-photocopied conversation. Arriving at roughly the midway point, it's a face-to-face showdown primed to explode, but as with too much of Mann's Public Enemies and its tangled life-imitating-art-imitating-life concerns, it fizzles at the moment of detonation.