Public Enemies

Here's my dilemma: I really enjoyed watching this film because I love gangster films. The cars, the hats, the tommy guns--I can't get enough of that stuff. But Public Enemies really isn't a very good film. In fact, it's the biggest disappointment of the summer for me (so far), because I had such high hopes for it. A terrific subject, a talented director, one of the most interesting actors on the screen today--how could it miss? It missed. It missed because its aim was off. Its aim was off because...well, see below. Sigh.


PUBLIC ENEMIES

The gangster film is more connected to the American psyche than any other movie genre, with the exception of the western. Together, these two genres explore opposing sides of the myth of America as the land of opportunity. The western celebrates the openness of America as wilderness waiting to be explored, tamed, and settled by law-abiding citizens: opportunity beckons in the spread of civilization west and the suppression of those elements opposed to it (outlaws, Native American tribes). The gangster film examines the consequences of that civilization several generations later, as wide open prairies and equal opportunity have been replaced by cities teeming with poverty, corruption, and a class structure that denies the promise of the American Dream to many. Opportunity exists for the latter chiefly in the form of crime: attacking the social order that has trapped them in the lower depths. One might almost consider the gangster film an inverted form of the western, in this regard.

The great virtue of Public Enemies, director Michael Mann’s new biopic of Depression-era bank robber John Dillinger (Johnny Depp), is that his film is aware of this intersection of mythologies and has the good sense to exploit it. Unfortunately, that is one of its only virtues, for in nearly every other way Enemies is a misfire. There is certainly nothing wrong with the project itself. Dillinger is one of America’s great criminal figures, and a new treatment of his life for a new generation of moviegoers is definitely wanted, especially since previous film biographies (1945, 1973) have seriously missed the mark. But Mann, who co-wrote the screenplay with Ronan Bennett and Ann Biderman, takes a strangely diffident approach to his colorful subject, with the result that Dillinger once again eludes capture.

The film recounts the familiar highlights of his storied 1933-1934 crime spree, robbing banks throughout the Midwest with astonishing ease. Along the way, he falls in love with Billie Frechette (Marion Cotillard), a coat check girl he meets in a Chicago nightclub, and catches the attention of the Bureau of Investigations in Washington, D.C. Its young, ambitious director, J. Edgar Hoover (Billy Crudup), commits his crime-fighting unit (soon to be the F.B.I.) to hunting down Dillinger by appointing special agent Melvin Purvis (Christian Bale) head of its Chicago office. As a result, Dillinger, named Public Enemy No.1, finds it increasingly difficult to operate. He engineers a daring break from an Indiana jail but is so hot afterward that former allies abandon him, leaving him few places to hide out. After an especially bloody bank job, he holes up at the Little Bohemia resort in Wisconsin with his gang, but Purvis tracks him there and what follows is one of the most famous, and widely imitated, shoot-outs in American criminal history. Despite having his cabin surrounded by G-men, Dillinger shoots his way free and escapes, humiliating Purvis and increasing his determination to catch him. That occurs one night outside the Biograph Theater in Chicago, when Dillinger is gunned down by Purvis’s men after leaving a showing of Manhattan Melodrama, a gangster picture in which Clark Gable portrays a figure loosely based on Dillinger himself. He was betrayed, of course, by the “woman in red,” Anna Sage, a brothel madam facing deportation if she didn’t give him up to the feds.

Some of this stuff is factual, much of it isn’t—gleaned from legend, past movie fictions, or the current screenwriters’ imaginations—but all of it is highly romanticized and bathed in the glow of nostalgia. This tone is very much at odds with the film’s photographic style, which relies heavily on imagery drained of color, giving it a muted, near black-and-white look at times--a touch of Depression bleakness. In addition, Mann shoots many scenes with hand-held cameras that weave around and between the actors, catching them at odd, sometimes uncomfortable angles, and framing the action at very close range, so that the viewer is plunged into the midst of what’s going on rather than allowed to stand back and study it from a safe distance. This approach gives the film an immediacy and an off-guard quality that would work well with gritty, raw story matter--but Enemies is anything but gritty or raw, despite the violence of its subject. From the romantic plotline to the meticulous costuming—the clothes are chic, tailored to perfection, and seemingly unperspired-on—to the gleaming cars and spotless set interiors, Public Enemies is a showcase for a world that exists only in an art director’s imagination, a world every bit as make-believe as those in the Hollywood melodramas Dillinger liked a bit too much.

This clash of styles produces artistic confusion: the film has a strangely detached feeling, despite the camera’s closeness to the people onscreen. The star-crossed love affair between Dillinger and his moll, Billie, is so hopelessly retro, so out of touch with modern sensibility about criminals and their lives, that it renders the naturalistic effects of the documentary-style shooting irrelevant, actually distancing us further from the characters instead of forging the intimate connection desired. It doesn’t help that most of the dialogue is banal, often unintelligible, and so lacking in personality that supporting characters never clearly define themselves. Most of Dillinger’s gang members are interchangeable; when one gets shot we feel little or no loss--they’ve never emerged from the surroundings to become distinct individuals we care about. The film puts us in the odd position of eavesdropping on conversations but never learning anything worth knowing because nothing worth knowing is ever said. The camera gets inside the action but not inside the story; a more traditional, aloof method of filming would have penetrated deeper and uncovered more of its emotional life. I find this rather ironic.

But the main problem with the film is Johnny Depp’s Dillinger. Depp is one of the cleverest, most watchable actors on the screen today, equally adept at carefully nuanced and over-the-top performances, but he is less than arresting as America’s Most Wanted. Dillinger, by most accounts, was a humorous, cocky, charming extrovert—notoriously oversexed as well. Depp’s version is moody, closemouthed, introspective, and seemingly monogamous--a romantic who longs more for time spent with the woman he loves than the excitement of his daring robberies and whorehouse lifestyle. Much of Public Enemies’ chilliness radiates from him, and this miscalculated and inaccurate performance is as much a surprise as it is a disappointment.

Which is not to say he doesn’t have some good moments. A jailhouse confrontation with Purvis late in the film—Depp’s and Bale’s only scene together—crackles with tension and humor, Depp finally showing some of Dillinger’s spark as he baits the strait-laced lawman from behind bars. And he captures the bank robber’s on-camera insolence pretty well, too, smirking cagily for photographers like a rock star who digs the press swooning over him but pretends take it all in stride. Dillinger seemed to attract that kind of attention in his day, which might explain the most interesting side of Depp’s impersonation: there are moments when the soft, slurring drawl he affects sounds a bit like Elvis. It’s been Depp’s modus operandi of late to channel a pop idol for some of his more grandiose characters: Keith Richards for Captain Jack Sparrow in the Pirates of the Caribbean series, and the late Michael Jackson for Willie Wonka in 2005’s Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. Now comes Dillinger as Elvis, which makes sense in a weird kind of way: both were charismatic bad boys, media darlings in life, folk heroes in death—which came early to each--whose statures continue to grow as the years go by. But fascinating as this is to think about afterward, Depp just doesn’t give “Dillvis” enough swagger to make him fun to watch while the film is rolling.

The other principals don’t fare very well, either. Bale, sadly, shoots blanks as Purvis. Who this G-man is or why he’s so driven are mysteries the film makes no effort to solve. The script gives the actor virtually nothing to work with, and he responds by giving nothing back. His terse, monotonic portrayal of Dillinger‘s nemesis is a flat-out bore. Marion Cotillard, fresh off her Oscar-winning role in La Vie en Rose, glows as the ill-fortuned Billie, but is adrift in a script that can’t keep her busy, which proves a sorry waste of her talent. Only Crudup as a feisty, politicking Hoover and Stephen Lang as Charles Winstead, a weathered western lawman recruited by Purvis to help corral Dillinger, give off any heat, but neither commands much screen time.

Lang’s character does provide the point where Public Enemies intersects with the western, however. Purvis and the Bureau represent the future of law enforcement: bureaucratic in organization, scientific in method, urban in setting. But Dillinger’s wildness poses a challenge to their new order because he is a throwback to the days of the rural outlaw, the train robbers and bank robbers of the vanished West. Dillinger is Jesse James in a fedora hat, wielding a tommy gun instead of a revolver. Recognizing that he can’t catch him because he doesn’t understand him, Purvis calls in Winstead and two of his cowboy companions; their arrival is captured in an iconic moment as they step off the train in Chicago, ten gallon hats on their heads, bedrolls and rifles in their hands. The genre that symbolizes the triumph of law over disorder has entered the gangster film‘s sphere of social chaos, announcing an epic clash. What follows soon after is just that, the shootout at Little Bohemia, the movie’s big action set-piece, and the sequence where gangster picture and western most completely overlap. It's the Gunfight at the O.K. Corral, but in reverse: the bad guy gets away, the sheriff is defeated.

Dillinger’s death makes it obvious that by the end of the film Mann has become more interested in the western’s mythmaking potential than the gangster film’s implied social criticism. It’s an elaborate sequence, prolonged and poeticized by slow motion and intricate cutting between Dillinger strolling down the sidewalk and lawmen stalking him from behind, drawing their guns, taking careful aim… It’s not the violent, ugly depiction of death that awaits the protagonist in most gangster films, but a lyrical restaging of it: an elegy for a romantic figure from America‘s past, and for the era that he's come to represent. A late western such as The Wild Bunch (1969)--a long, slow meditation on the closing of the west and the death of its heroic individualism--is closer to what Mann has in mind here than the stern warning issued to society by James Cagney’s brutal end in The Public Enemy (1931). Though the name of the current film is obviously an homage to that genre-defining classic, their underlying philosophies couldn’t be farther apart.

America’s fascination with violence, and with films that glorify its violent past, seems to be endless. Part of their appeal might be to help us process, even escape, the violence of the present. But because the gangster and western genres are historical in nature, they also provide ways for us to reinvent the past, or to understand it differently over time. The gangster film was once a contemporary social problem film, angry and direct in nature. A film like Public Enemies has left criticism behind and crossed into the mythologizing realm of the western. It’s not the first to do so, of course--Bonnie and Clyde and The Godfather saga broke this ground years ago. But it reminds us how far the gangster film has traveled, and why a bank robber who died 75 years ago is still at large and will never lack pursuers.
　

Up

This is a delightful film, another triumph for Pixar, but probably its darkest one yet. I can't say enough about the stunning visuals, or the vocal acting, especially by Christopher Plummer as the villain, Charles Muntz, a charming but truly malevolent character. Several people have pointed out to me that the figure of Carl, the hero, looks like a puppet version of Spencer Tracy in his final movie role, Guess Who's Coming to Dinner? And it's true--the flat head, short white hair, the oversized black glasses, it's all there. What an obscure and brilliant allusion! Those people at Pixar know their stuff.



UP

Much of Up, the new animated film from Pixar and Disney, is a real downer. Consider these subjects for a “children’s” movie: aging, death, care of the elderly, the loss of parental love, the death of youthful ideals. Ouch. But Up is ultimately what its title claims it to be: an uplifting film that carries one away from all those cares and woes. How it does that just might make the movie more rewarding for viewers in middle life and beyond than for the kids who would seem at first glance to be its audience. But that’s why you can never completely trust the way films are marketed, and why surprise is still such an important part of the movie-going experience.

The opening scenes of the film chronicle the life of Carl Fredricksen (voiced as an adult by the wonderful Ed Asner), from his Depression-era childhood to the present day. A shy, lonely boy who spends his afternoons at the movies, Carl’s world is turned upside down when he meets Ellie, a hyperactive young girl who shares his hero worship of world-renowned explorer and adventurer Charles Muntz (Christopher Plummer at his suavest) and has started a club in his honor in an old, abandoned house. Carl becomes the club’s second--and only other--member, and a touching montage traces his relationship with Ellie as it moves from friendship into courtship, marriage, and their life growing old together in the clubhouse that's become their home. The couple, unable to have children, are devoted to each other, as well as to the memory of Muntz, who disappeared years earlier while piloting his dirigible over a remote region in South America called Paradise Falls. They put money aside to one day make the trip to Paradise Falls themselves, but one emergency after another drains their savings and the trip never materializes. On her deathbed, Ellie makes Carl promise that he will still try, but her death leaves him lonely and heartbroken, and there seems little chance of his keeping that promise.

So what is this movie up to? So far it does not seem calculated to entertain anyone who can’t already vote. And for awhile things only get worse. In addition to grief and loneliness, Carl must contend with urban renewal, which surrounds his tiny home with modern building developments. He stubbornly refuses to sell his property and leave, but one day he clashes with a construction worker and hits him with his cane. Ordered by the court to be placed in a retirement home, Carl’s life seems at its lowest point—until he comes up with a brilliant solution. During the night, he inflates thousands of balloons with helium and attaches them to his house. The next morning, just as the medical attendants are coming to collect him, he releases the balloons and they pull his house from its foundations and carry it up, up and away, his destination the long-desired Paradise Falls.

The film undergoes an extreme makeover at this point. The fantastic was hinted at earlier in old newsreel footage of a young, reckless Charles Muntz, but now Up literally becomes a flight of fancy. The picturization of the house soaring above and through clouds is simply amazing, real enough to send acrophobes under their seats. In a nod to Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Paradise Falls turns out to be a kind of Lost World inhabited by strange creatures, most notably a prehistoric bird that resembles a cross between a giant dodo and a toucan. And then there are those talking dogs….

But despite the outlandish elements, Up never completely loses touch with solid ground. Carl’s emotional connection to Ellie only deepens the closer he gets to their life’s goal, and his journey is complicated by an interesting stowaway: an 8-year-old Wilderness Explorer (i.e. Boy Scout) named Russell (Jordan Nagai), who was on Carl’s porch about to ring the doorbell when he got the surprise of his life. Russell understands nothing of the more serious implications of this flight from reality--he’s simply thrilled by the Boy’s Adventure aspect of it, and is eager to become a crew member of the unusual flight craft. But Russell has a story of his own, which comes out slowly as the film unfolds: only child, divorced parents, a father whose business travels keep him away from home so much he has little time for his son. Russell’s loneliness clearly echoes Carl’s, and though the curmudgeonly senior is initially resistant to Russell’s presence, he softens over time as the two share the hardships of the journey, eventually bonding with the boy over their mutual need for friendship.

As its name suggests, Paradise Falls, once found, is a source of disillusionment. There, Carl and Russell find the aged, but surprisingly spry, Charles Muntz living in splendid exile, like Robinson Crusoe on Charles Foster Kane’s income. The most charismatic and complex character in the film, Muntz dominates the movie’s third act. In person he's something very different from the romantic hero of Carl’s memory. Isolation, and the totalitarian authority he exercises over his corps of trained watchdogs (hilariously fitted with devices that translate their barks into human speech) has turned the idealistic explorer into a shadowy, menacing figure, something along the lines of the renegade Kurtz in Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (their names are even similar). Muntz’s purpose for living in seclusion, allowing the world to think he’s dead, is a dark one: he wants to hunt down a prehistoric bird so that he can prove its existence to a scientific community that doubted and humiliated him years before. Crazed to the point of megalomania, he dispatches anyone who stands in his way—which now includes Carl and Russell, who have found the bird in the jungle and grown attached to it.

Conrad, Paradise lost, megalomania—this is a children’s film, right? The colorful giant bird (which Russell names “Kevin,” before he discovers it’s a mother) and the talking dogs do provide many lighter, kid-friendly moments. Dug, a misfit among Muntz's stormpoochers--he eventually switches sides to help Carl and Russell--is especially funny, the kind of comic relief the film needs to give it ballast (he's voiced by co-writer/director Bob Peterson). But Paradise Falls is a gloomy place overall, befitting the film’s melancholy understanding of aging and the abandonment of dreams. Tots won’t get it, of course, but their parents and grandparents will—which makes the exciting climax much more meaningful than the usual Hollywood action finale. Muntz finally succeeds in capturing Kevin, so Russell dashes off to save him, and Carl—after some initial reluctance and a moving farewell to the life he spent with Ellie—chases after him to fulfill his hero’s destiny. And to begin his life anew.

He pilots the house to intercept Muntz’s dirigible, where both Kevin and Russell are imprisoned; when Muntz catches him on board, the two antiquated warriors face off with “swords” for a classic swashbuckling denouement. If Errol Flynn and Basil Rathbone had reunited onscreen in their 80s, their final duel might have looked like this. The sequence is one of the film’s real treats, heightened by the superb vocal work of Asner and Plummer. But after the movie heroics are over--and Russell and Kevin rescued--this Paradise False must be left behind. The story returns home, to its beginnings, where real heroism is displayed in ordinary daily life--accepting reality, shouldering responsibility, engaging with the world. Carl and Russell--friends and fellow adventurers--are now each other’s family as well.

Is the middle section of the movie in actuality a dream? It could be--it functions like one, helping Carl work through his problems (making peace with his disappointments, accepting his losses) and move on with his life. This should sound familiar. When it comes to fantasy adventure films purportedly made for younger audiences, is The Wizard of Oz ever very far away? With regard to Up, it’s no farther than its own front yard. Let’s see, a troubled protagonist running away from his problems escapes to a fantastic world--in a flying house, no less--where he’s helped by unlikely companions to defeat a mysterious oppressor, who is something of a wizard (inventor, flyer) but with the murderous impulses of a wicked witch. Renewed by his victory, he returns home, having gained both a greater appreciation of his life there and a better understanding of how to live it well.

The sudden, sharp changes in the film’s direction and visual style also suggest that something extraordinary is happening in these middle scenes. Carl and Ellie’s sweet, real-life story is displayed in mostly muted tones and two-dimensional compositions within the enclosed spaces of their house. Up’s switch to the fantasy-adventure genre introduces eye-popping visuals and the three-dimensional depth of the world at large, especially the vertigo-inducing shots from the air. The film concludes with a series of photographs of Carl and Russell hanging out back home, enjoying their new friendship--happy images but completely flat ones, emphasizing the return to the two-dimensional space of the beginning.

Carl’s journey to Paradise Falls could therefore be another version of Dorothy’s dream. The lines between reality and fantasy having been blurred by the narrative’s liberties, there is no confirming what actually takes place or doesn’t. Up doesn’t directly make this claim, but it plays with the kind of ambiguity and surreal logic that admits of the possibility. And isn’t that the possibility underlying all fairy tales, in a way? Once Up-on a time, there was a little old man living by himself in a funny-looking house…