Mann Unleashes His Public Enemies
I am of many minds about director Michael Mann’s Public Enemies. Based on the sprawling book chronicling the rise of monsters like John Dillenger and Pretty Boy Floyd by Bryan Burrough, the resultant film is a chaotic, at times unfocused, yet consistently enthralling piece of pop entertainment that kept me absolutely glued to my seat. It is messy and doesn’t always work, performances and set pieces rising far above much of the material creating a perplexing enigma that’s a bullet-riddled symphony of highs and lows.
Johnny Depp and Marion Cotillard in Universal Pictures' Public Enemies
It is also a movie I simply cannot stop thinking about. Almost a week later and I can’t get it out of my head, the second half in particular an exhilarating spectacle as good as anything the director has ever done. It is kinetic and exhilarating, a central moonlit shoot-out at a deserted hideaway between dogged FBI agent Melvin Purvis (Christian Bale), Dillenger (Depp) and a boisterous Baby Face Nelson (Stephen Graham) the most viscerally tense cinematic moment of the year next to Kathryn Bigelow’s The Hurt Locker.
More than that, however, is an emotional component I haven’t seen from Mann since 1992’s The Last of the Mohicans (my personal favorite of his impressive oeuvre). A penultimate scene between Dillenger’s lady love Billie Frechette (Marion Cotillard) and stoic lawman Charles Winstead (Stephen Lang) had me holding back tears, the glances between the two enough to melt my heart into tiny shards of tragic sorrow.
In a way, this is kind of odd. Who knew the relationship between the legendary bank robber and his coat check girl lover would rip me in two? I certainly didn’t, mainly because by and large I never felt the emotional connection between Dillenger and Frechette all through the first half of the picture. Their love story was to my mind nonexistent, and what she saw in him and he vice-versa was a thing I never quite felt came to crystal clear fruition.
And yet the film’s climax still managed to hit me like a freight train all the same. Even though I knew historically how this all had to come to an end (and, if you don’t, you really need to learn your Prohibition era Americana) the look on Cotillard’s face left me speechless. It was at that moment when I realized just how amazing her performance had been, how magnificent she and Depp had worked off of one another. Together, they managed to carve so very much out of so very little, the La Vie En Rose Oscar-winner in particular creating an indelible imprint so deep she burrowed straight down into my very soul.
The storyline Mann himself mainly follows is the cat and mouse follies happening between Dillenger and Purvis. Under the aegis of J. Edgar Hoover (so superbly played by Billy Crudup I wanted to see far more of him), the FBI really came of age in the 1930’s, the tactics used by the Chicago office ones still used and expanded upon even up to today.
But there was also a brutality with how they did things that harkened back to the Wild West. There were a gunslinger mentality to both lawgiver and outlaw, the gangster intent on riding his wave of crime until a cavalcade of bullets brought it to an end. As such, Depp and Bale play with their dichotomy with almost serpentine glee. They are invested fully in the material, giving their all like they haven’t in ages (especially the latter, Terminator Salvation being exhibit A as to what happens when the actor goes through the motions and collects a paycheck), each elevating the other even though they barely share the screen.
As good as all of this sounds and is, I still have reservations. Dante Spinotti’s (Flash of Genius) photography is sharp and dynamic, yet I wonder if digital was truly the way to go here. As magnificent as it can look (once again, that magnificent shoot-out in the woods wows like you wouldn’t believe), I’m not sure the material would have been better served to have been shot on celluloid.
There is something almost clinical about the high definition look of it all, and while some will say this gives it an immersive quality unlike any other film set during the era I can’t help but think the opposite. To my eyes there are times Public Enemies has an almost plastic like sheen that took me out of the storyline, and where shooting digital was the way to go on Collateral and Miami Vice I’m torn in two about it here.
Like I already said, however, Mann has so much going on and achieves such startling moments of brilliance this is still a motion picture I simply cannot stop thinking about. The screenplay’s layers reveal themselves gradually, the film having a documentary like verisimilitude that is at times absolutely electric. Mix in Elliot Goldenthal’s (Heat) stirring score and the director has at times outdone himself here, and with the remarkable emotional complexities emanating between Depp, Cotillard and Bale I almost can’t wait to see it again.
So what’s better? A sturdily constructed melodrama that plays it safe even if it gets very little wrong or an eccentric, all over the place piece of dramatic pop art that has nearly as many lows as it does highs? While the answer will be different for everyone, as far as I’m concerned the second option is the one that gets me most excited, and to say Public Enemies fits that description isn’t so much a fact as it is a trademark worthy of praise.
Film Rating: êêê (out of 4)
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