Public Enemies

Spoilers ahead, but given that you already know how the movie ends... anyway, you've been warned.

Here's the problem with Michael Mann's new Public Enemies: He's already made this film. It was set in present-day Los Angeles, it starred Robert De Niro and Al Pacino, it was called Heat and it was definitely one of the finest crime films (and arguably one of the best dramas) ever made. Public Enemies, sadly, is not the evolutionary advancement from Heat that you might expect given the fifteen-year gap between the two. That isn't to deny the film its charms, as it is in at least one respect superior to the earlier film, but it is something of a hollow victory.

Public Enemies, like Heat, is the story of a charismatic crook and the lawman out to catch him. In this case, the crook is Depression-era bank robber John Dillinger, and he's played with ruthless charisma by Johnny Depp. The lawman is FBI agent Melvin Purvis, played by our generation's Stoic Incarnation of Justice, Christian Bale. And already we've come to the first respect in which Public Enemies doesn't live up to Mann's own precedent: we're not really given enough material to get into the heads of either of these men. Dillinger is funny, charming, deadly and possessed of a deeply guarded sentimentality; the much more thinly-drawn Purvis is relentless, efficient and moral. But that's all we learn. Although they get one scene together, it's nothing like the famous coffee-shop conversation between De Niro and Pacino; it's just Depp in a jail cell and Bale coming by with a tight-lipped smile to inform him that he'll only get out of it on his way to the gallows, which Depp smirks off. There's no spark, no sense of recognition or understanding of each other - just the lawman on one side of the bars and the crook on the other.

There's at least a reason for this. With Heat, Mann was free to write and shape the characters as he pleased - while both De Niro's Neil McCauley and Pacino's Lt. Vincent Hanna were based on composites of criminals and police officers Mann knew or had read about, he was free to give them relationships, character traits and choices which played neatly into the overall storyline. That's not the case in Public Enemies, with its cast of real characters with real names and real histories. Mann is a careful director, and that care shows through in every facet of the movie - but unfortunately, it also has the effect of neutering it, since in the interest of historical accuracy he refrains from giving Dillinger or Purvis all that much in the way of real character. The supporting cast is mostly hamstrung by the same requirement - although well-cast, most of the supporting actors seem a bit lost in the big, sprawling storyline. Even Oscar-winner Marion Cotillard is left floundering a bit as Dillinger's lover, Billie Frechette - she has the beginnings of an interesting backstory but her main character trait seems to be a love for Dillinger that's never explained or explored in any great depth. The two exceptions are Peter Gerety (who fans of The Wire will recognize as Judge Phelan) playing a grandstanding attorney who helps Dillinger out of a tight spot, and Billy Crudup (thankfully normal-sized, clothed and not blue), playing the incompetent, paranoid J. Edgar Hoover with just the right tightness of facial muscles and 30s speech patterns. Hoover apparently hounded Purvis out of the Bureau after Dillinger's death as he viewed him as too popular (and therefore a threat to Hoover himself); sadly, that dynamic doesn't present itself here, as the relationship between the men on the bleeding edge of the law and their office-bound superiors is a dynamic not explored in Heat which could have really set this movie apart.

The ambitious scope doesn't help either; Mann sticks to the last year of Dillinger's life, but it was an eventful one and there are a lot of banks to rob and subplots to cover. That robs the film (if you'll pardon the pun) of the propulsive, right-now feeling that Heat and other crime dramas set over a shorter period have working in their favor.

The other major problem is the sound. One of the few naturalistic directors working with big-budget Hollywood movies today, Mann apparently didn't use any studio sound at all, which should help immerse you in the movie but unfortunately often leaves you wondering whether there isn't more going on that you just missed because someone next to you was breathing. It was one of the few movies I've ever seen in a theater and wished I'd seen instead in my own living room, where I could have rewound certain sections to see if they contributed to the overall story or were just color. Granted, that might have been partly the fault of the (small, crowded, low-rent) theater I was in, but when a movie's budget is in the tens of millions, it shouldn't be an issue.

It's not all bad news - even as we're wondering what exactly is driving him, Johnny Depp is great fun to watch - he's cold and ruthless, but strategically deploys humor and lightheartedness just in time to prevent the movie from sinking under the weight of its self-seriousness. Then there's the fact that no director is quite as good at staging shootouts as Michael Mann - there are quite a few in this movie, particularly a brutal nighttime battle at the Little Bohemia Lodge, a motel in the middle of a Wisconsin pine forest. I'll cop to a bit of confusion at the end of that scene, but otherwise it's nearly as good as the ludicrous bank robbery setpiece in Heat (which is my pick for Best Action Scene Ever Of All Time). And of course, there's the cinematography. Oh lord, the cinematography. This is without a doubt the best-looking film I've seen since... honestly, I can't remember the last time I saw a film so visually amazing. Children of Men comes to mind, but the source of its visual splendor was technical genius; you admired the sheer outrageousness of staging a battle between rebels and a tank brigade across sixteen blocks or a ruined port city, but in Public Enemies, Dante Spinotti's digital camerawork just oozes beauty and craft in every way, from the reflective shine on the freshly polished hood of a V-8 Ford getaway car to the way Dillinger swoops elegantly past the camera as he leaps over a bank counter. Most action directors would slow that shot down and linger over it for precious seconds; Mann throws it at you in a moment and if you miss it, it's your loss. His willingness to tell a story that you may seem a bit confusing at first viewing is another mark in Mann's - and the film's - favor.

Finally - and this is something that usually nags me about movies, because most of the films I watch tend to involve some level of violence - this is a film that takes violence seriously. To some extent it has to, since these aren't aliens or generic baddies or SS-uniformed extras being blown away; they're representations of real people who lived and died. But Mann steers clear of the two dangerous poles of filmed violence: he doesn't make live-action cartoons like Michael Bay or John Woo with their prepubescent fantasies of thunder and lightning which doesn't acknowledge the real damage being done. Nor does he fetishize it like Eli Roth or Zack Snyder, who seem to agree that killing people is awesome and have the frankly twisted notion that what's really cool about it is the way that bones break and blood splatters and so on, and therefore linger over scenes of torture because they want to see how much they can get away with. Here, there's a combination of brutality (a couple of scenes of Dick Cheney's kind of "enhanced" police interrogation; pretty detailed shots of bullet wounds, etc.) and glamour (squealing tires, BAR's and tommy guns spitting crosses of flame at each other) that achieves the difficult goal of acknowledging both the excitement and terror of a Depression-era life of crime.

That glamorous side can't be ignored in telling this story. The criminals weren't driven just by the desire to beat the system, just as the cops weren't driven solely by steely-eyed desire for justice. Christian Bale's character misses that subtlety, which is partly down to writing and partly to acting (seriously, he's a good actor - just watch The Prestige if you don't believe me - but he really needs to stop taking these Asskicking Personification of Justice roles; it's getting boring). There's another great glamour scene, much remarked upon by other reviewers, in which Dillinger strolls into the "Dillinger Bureau" of the Chicago police force and has a look around, even asking the cops there who's winning the baseball game they're listening to. But that wasn't what struck me the most. The scene that said the most to me was at the very end (which I'm going to describe now - you've been warned).

Stephen Lang plays Charles Winstead, one of the hard-ass Southwestern lawmen brought into the operation by Purvis after Dillinger's gang kill a few inexperienced, accountant-type G-men. He's a taciturn, blue-eyed man the Marines of Generation Kill would refer to as a "stone killer." In the movie's version of events (and on this point there's some historical confusion), he's one of the two who finally bring Dillinger down with a few well-placed pistol shots fired through a crowd of departing moviegoers one summer night on a downtown Chicago avenue. Afterwards, he goes to visit Billie Frechette, who's already locked up as a Dillinger accomplice, to whom he - without using one more word than necessary or changing his catatonic inflection one bit - offers a cigarette and then passes on Dillinger's last words: a callback to the first time he met her. As she quietly sobs in recognition, he watches sympathetically for a moment, then stands up, doffs his hat, and leaves without another word. It's a hell of a scene. Another director would have put Christian Bale there, and amped up the hysterics a bit. But not here; here, we get a character with no more than ten lines in the entire film walking us through the door. And with that, we know that there's a whole world of astonishing stories that this movie just hints at; Billie Frechette has one and Charles Winstead has one and you get the strong sense there's another down every darkened alley and Depression-hit street in this film. I just wish the ones we actually got from the movie lived up to that feeling.