Public Enemies: Michael Mann Does the Depression

I have heard Public Enemies called a biopic, but if it is, it doesn’t follow the standard formula.  You know the drill: flashbacks of the hero’s troubled childhood. The hard work/quirk of fate that leads to prominence in his or her endeavors.  The tragic flaw (current favorite: drugs) that almost scuttles the hero’s career, but from which he or she is rescued by a good man or woman.

Director Michael Mann is not interested in any of that.  He begins his tale not at the beginning but near the end of John Dillinger’s short life, as he busts a bunch of hardened criminals out of jail.  The men have taught him to rob banks in prison — where he did nine years for a petty holdup — and now he returns the favor and becomes their leader.  They rob banks for a living: big, fat, rich banks.  And they do it in a way they don’t do it anymore — brazen, in the open, fighting their way out.

In the meantime, Dillinger (Johnny Depp) finds a woman.  Billie Frechette (Marion Cotillard) is a coat-check girl who  takes up with him because he doesn’t seem to care about her mixed heritage and three-dollar dress.  When she asks him about his past, his response sums up Mann’s approach to Dillinger’s story: “I like baseball, movies, good clothes, fast cars, whisky . . . and you. What else you need to know?”

Indeed.  What else do we need to know?  Mann is interested in the here and now, or at least the there and then, of 193os America.  We see it in little snippets of news reports, in little details of production design, and it is all refracted through the story of this self-made man. And although I don’t want to belabor the point, it’s possible to see in Mann’s Dillinger a version of the American myth.  When he says “let’s go to Chicago and make some money,” he’s every ambitious boy who dreams of fast cars, city life and loose women.  It’s robber-baron capitalism, packed into a guy from the upper Midwest.

Mann shoots the tale fast and loose, with a propulsive style that complement’s Dillinger’s headlong life.  Though doubtless carefully planned, it seems shot on-the-fly, with hand-held verisimilitude and digital grain.  Though the cinematography is not as breathtakingly beautiful as in Miami Vice, it serves the themes of hard living and dying that is the essence of the tale.

There are several thrilling set-pieces in Public Enemies.  My favorite is the fibbies’ botched capture and subsequent shoot-out with the gang at Little Bohemia Lodge .  Although most viewers would never know it, Mann shot the sequence in Wisconsin where it took place.  Much of the work is handheld, following the fleeing gang-members through the dark, and although it is chaotic, and conveys the confusion of such an event, it is just coherent enough for us to follow what is going on.

Johnny Depp is very good as Dillinger; it is a reserved performance, but with a lot going on just beneath the surface.  Although clearly not insane, he is single-minded in procuring the cash to get away, with Frechette, for good.  His penultimate scene is in a theater watching  Manhattan Melodrama; as he watches the racketeer Blackie Gallagher, his face registers recognition, uncertainty and finally,  grim satisfaction. It is some of the best acting  from him that I’ve seen.

As FBI agent Melvin Purvis, Christian Bale does a variation of his recent, reserved persona, only this time with a Midwest accent.  Is the poor fellow type-cast, or does he really play every character the same way?  Cotillard portrays well the tentative vulnerability and dawning trust of someone who has been much disappointed.  The role, however, is limited and clichéd: she actually has to say “I don’t want to wait around to see you die,” or some variation thereof. The rest of the cast is solid in relatively limited roles; I especially liked Stephen Dorff, as the shark-like Homer Van Meter, and Stephen Lang as the man who … well, that would be telling.

Public Enemies is episodic in construction: it plays like a cook’s tour of the last ten months of Dillinger’s life.  There is little character development, except perhaps a certain hardening within Dillinger’s spirit.  His motives for the multi-state spree are thinly drawn: he is as much a cipher at the end of the film as at the beginning.  We know he’s looking for that one last score, like the protagonists of 95% of the crime thrillers ever made; it would have been a stronger film if we were given more than just the hint of parental abuse to explain his turning to a life of crime.

But that wasn’t what Mann had in mind, and it has left him open to the usual arguments of style versus substance.  His films bear a distinctive style: brooding, dream-like exposition punctuated by sharp, kinetic action, all wrapped in slick visuals and moody electronic music.  This apparently irritates some folks, who go on about empty flash every time he makes a movie.  Personally, I find these arguments tiresome and intellectually lazy; too often, they’re a substitute for actual analysis.

In point of fact, Public Enemies is a solid, entertaining film that might have benefited from a little more backstory on one hand, and a little better fleshing-out of its characters on the other. It veers into brilliance in its exciting, kinetic set pieces, and is a welcome adult picture in a summer full of childish duds.  I think I’ll go see it again.