Public Enemies

The year is 1933 and America is still flat on her back from the Great Depression. FDR is in the White House and Billie Holiday is on the radio, but it's brazen (and murderous) bank robbers with evocative names like Baby Face Nelson and Pretty Boy Floyd that capture the public imagination. The smartest and most PR savvy of the lot is John Dillinger, labelled Public Enemy #1 by J. Edgar Hoover, the equally publicity hungry director of the new Bureau of Investigation. Local law enforcement is repeatedly outgunned, outmanned, and outsmarted so Hoover sees an opportunity to put his agency on the map by taking down Dillinger and Co., which in fact he does, mainly by the efforts of a South Carolina lawyer-turned-lawman named Walter Purvis.

This is the basic outline of the story told in Michael Mann's new film Public Enemies starring Johnny Depp as Dillinger, Christian Bale as Purvis, and Billy Crudup as Hoover. The screenplay by Mann, Ronan Bennett, and Ann Biderman is based on Bryan Burroughs' nonfiction book Public Enemies: America's Greatest Crime Wave and the Birth of the FBI, 1933-1934. Reportedly the movie is faithful to the book in most respects though events are condensed and the timeline is altered. All of this is a perfect canvas for Mann to work his magic, which he does. This is his best film since The Insider (1999) and may be to the period crime drama what Heat (1995) was to the contemporary crime drama. Arguably Heat is the quintessential contemporary crime drama (I also think it's the quintessential contemporary Los Angeles movie, but that's a harder argument to make).

In many ways Public Enemies is a remake of Heat. And there's nothing wrong with that, if like me you're in awe of Mann's skills as a filmmaker. Above all he's a craftsman, but unlike some craftsman, he also has the ability to tell a story and generate epic emotional landscapes like no other. He's one of the few directors that has the ability to take my breath away. The parallels between Mann's imaginings of these real life characters and the fictional characters played by Pacino, De Niro, Val Kilmer, Ashley Judd and others in Heat will be obvious to fans of the former film. Additionally, both movies explore similar thematic and emotional terrain. What Public Enemies doesn't have as much of, are the moments of leisurely serenity that make Heat so unique for its genre, scenes where we get to spend time with the characters as they simply reflect, and there's no real parallel to the now legendary scene with Pacino and De Niro chatting across a coffee-shop table.

There are some reflective moments here, but Mann keeps the action briskly moving forward and ups the ante considerably in the amount of ammo consumed. Nobody can orchestrate a movie shoot-out like Mann. Or I should say, a Michael Mann shoot-out looks and sounds like no other. Public Enemies visually and sonically recreates several of the legendary tommy-gun battles between gangsters and G-Men, including the one at Little Bohemia Lodge at the actual location. Never one to shoot in the studio, Mann also returned to other famous Dillinger locales across the upper Midwest for principal photography. (Read more about that aspect of the filming here.)

Public Enemies is the third feature Mann has shot in HD and in his hands I can see digital becoming its own visual genre in the same way that black and white is. Here HD allows Mann to take familiar iconography and make it seem fresh. Scattered throughout are visual moments unlike anything I've ever seen before—the way the light looks streaming in a window or the emotional veracity of an extreme close-up. I'm assuming these were made possible by the format as well as the imagination and skill of Mann and his DP Dante Spinotti.

What about Johnny Depp? Depp is a movie star writ large. One never forgets who we're watching here, yet he turns in good work. Mann uses the persona to serve the film and character much as he did with De Niro and Pacino in Heat. Christian Bale is good too, though I half expected him to morph into the dark knight at any second. Every part is well cast in fact. If there's a surprise, it's French actress Marion Cotillard playing Dillinger girlfriend Billie Frechette. Of course you have to have a love interest for Johnny Depp! Nevertheless, she and Mann take what could have easily seemed a tacked-on part and turn it into something more.

Throughout Public Enemies Mann reminds the audience that we are in fact watching a gangster picture—one of the three home-grown genres (along with the western and the musical) that have so defined Hollywood and American pop culture. Tackling this genre must be daunting, like an actor taking on Hamlet or a jazz trumpeter blowing "St. Louis Blues". In other words, you have to reckon with what's come before. This certainly won't be the last word on the Hollywood gangster pic, but Mann has added another worthy addition to the corpus. Of course the title can't help but bring comparisons to William Wellman's The Public Enemy made two years before the events of this film took place. Indeed Cagney's memory is explicitly evoked when Nelson, played by Stephen Graham, does a boozey impression. "Wanna hear my Cagney?"

The bare facts of Dillinger's demise are well known. On his last night on earth he saw a gangster picture. Not a Cagney picture as it turns out. Instead he went to the Biograph Theater that night to see Manhattan Melodrama starring Clark Gable, William Powell and Myrna Loy. Purvis had been tipped off by prostitute Ana Cumpanas ("the lady in red") that Dillinger would be there that night. As Dillinger, Cumpanas and another lady friend watched the movie Purvis and his men surrounded the theater. The rest is history.

As Mann cuts between the movie we're watching and the movie Dillinger is watching, he turns this public enemy's final act into a grand demonstration of the heightened reality and emotional power of cinema. Bravo!