Public Enemies

It’s tough to walk into Public Enemies without expecting serious greatness. After all, here’s this big, juicy, expensive, long-awaited period gangland epic directed and co-written by Michael Mann from Brian Burrough’s fascinating 2004 book about the war America waged on criminals John Dillinger, Baby Face Nelson, Pretty Boy Floyd, Bonnie and Clyde and others between 1933 and 1934. Mann’s film stars Johnny Depp as the legendary bank robber Dillinger and Christian Bale as Melvin Purvis, the Fed agent charged with tracking him down in a crime-busting spree engineered by fledging Bureau of Investigations chief J. Edgar Hoover, played by Billy Crudup. Add in Marion Cottilard as Dillinger’s nightclub coat check girl who becomes his lover and a supporting cast populated by Giovanni Ribisi, Channing Tatum, Lili Taylor and Leelee Sobieski, not to mention cinematography by Dante Spinotti and music by Elliot Goldenthal, and you begin thinking of A-games and Oscar worthiness.

Anyone can see that Public Enemies is impeccably made, well-acted and shot through with blasts of brilliance. Yet, for all its virtues, this is a detached, glossy, hollow-feeling piece of work. Take Depp, for instance, who plays Dillinger with strut, charisma and movie-star wattage. Too bad his performance is all about his character’s preening self-satisfaction and iconic status—so much so that, by the time we get to the machine gun-rattling finale, we don’t know that much more about him than we did going in. The same goes for Bale, whose real-life character was twisty and complex enough to warrant a movie all his own; as written and directed here, Purvis just seems tightly wound, macho and dogged. Other very good actors turn up, vanish or meet their makers without our knowing exactly whom they’re supposed to be, Still, Marion Cotillard injects such rich inner life into her underwritten “girlfriend” part that she makes us believe she’s been handed a plum role. The movie lavishes plenty of attention on period details, clothing, haircuts and music (some of it anachronistic)—but why, in a film set during the grinding, terrifying poverty of the 1930s, is everyone so beautifully dressed and groomed? It’s the Depression as brought to us by Rejuvenation Hardware and Disneyland. Mann doesn’t do the period or subject any favors by shooting it in HD, which often looks cheap and flashy.

Public Enemies is worth seeing, but it’s nowhere near as powerful as, say, Bonnie and Clyde, let alone gangster classics made in the 1930s and 1940s. Compared to the hard bitten, tough as nails Warren Oates in John Milius’s low budget 1973 movie Dillinger, Depp’s rock star gangster doesn’t fill a fedora anywhere near as convincingly.