Public Enemies

Cast: Johnny Deep, Marion Cotillard, Christian Bale

Director: Michael Mann

Writer: Michael Mann, Ronan Bennett, Ann Biderman, Bryan Burrough (Book)

Public Enemies is Hollywood’s heartless recreation of John Dillinger’s brief stint into bank robbery; before his death on the streets of Chicago. Director Michael Mann teams with Johnny Deep, Marion Cotillard, and Christian Bale for another of his voyages into the underworld of crime.

Dillinger may be public enemy number one but considering the pluralization of the title we are to assume Mann intended FBI director J. Edgar Hoover as his second target.  Hoover sends out Melvin Purvis, played by Christian Bale, to capture not only Dillinger but Baby Face Nelson as well.  Bale mutters and forces out his lines like he’s stuck in Gotham city.  He renders Purvis passionless.  While Dillinger succeeds in his plans to do wrong, Purvis fails in his to do right.

Mann’s Dillinger is a smooth model of a classic criminal.  Not in the psychopathic way but more in the early Hollywood gangster fantasy sort of way.  Depp plays his role with cool detachment.   Mann never reaches into the depths of Dillinger; he is satisfied with the sharp tongued, romanticized, and ultimately uninteresting crime figure left on the screen.  Depps lines consist of words and phrases such as “everything”, “all the time”, and “everywhere”.  Dillinger wants everything, his desires are laughably faux poetic while remaining too simplistic for us to grasp or even care about.  Mann’s world is nothing short of a gangster utopia.  His action scenes are shot and edited well but with intermittent forays into a greeting card love story the movie falters.

Marion Cotillard has done a fascinating job as Dillinger’s love interest Billie Frechette.  She keeps the movie from being horrendously boring.  Her character is at once  brutally articulate and sickeningly loyal and the next hopelessly bland (bland in a good way, if that’s possible).  And while Frechette is not exactly a well written female character the fact that Cotillard makes her sparkle is a testament to her acting ability. Contrary to the character Cotillard can not save what suffices for a relationship in the film.  There is nothing to make us feel or care for Dillinger and Frechette as a couple.  Their unending loyalty feels like a device rather than a natural occurrence.

When a movie dramatizes a well known historical event it must make a constant effort to spotlight what it takes to get to that inevitable end.  The movie lacks any suspense or new insight into the legend of John Dillinger.  It’s a history channel special filmed in HD.  I for one am not a fan of HD, I’ve always loved the grainy texture of film, and for Michael Mann to shoot Public Enemies with HD cameras he loses the honesty and clarity of film.  Some critics have said the film is great because it is not about “who John Dillinger really is” but about how the public perceived him.  That maybe so but even if it is then the movie is telling us nothing we don’t already know; and to not have another layer to the film is a death sentence.

Overall the movie lacks the qualities that drive us deeper.  It’s nice to look at but leaves us with nothing to remember.  It is a monumentally better directed, edited, and certainly more tactful Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen.  Nonstop action that means next to nothing. With relationships that mean even less.

2.5 out of 4

Tyler