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the consequences of that civilization several generations later, as wide open prairies and equal opportunity have been replaced by cities teeming with poverty, corruption, and a class structure that denies the promise of the American Dream to many.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.