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Public Enemies
In Public Enemies, the uneven new gangster film from the Director Michael Mann, substance gives way to form in a never ending barrage of bullets, elaborate costuming, and hand-held high definition video. The greatest casualties of these stylistic choices are, unfortunately, the plot and the central characters: Even though the audience should ostensibly be interested in the game of cat and mouse between FBI agent Melvin Purvis (Christian Bale) and bank robber John Dillinger (Johnny Depp), it is never clear who the audience is meant to root for, or even care about. Even the fantastic Marion Cotillard (in the role of Dillinger’s love interest, Billie Frechette) can’t save the film from feeling like an interminable tommy gun battle. Still, while the film ultimately fails in its attempt to be a genre-redefining epic, it’s easy to go along for the ride: Depp, Bale, Cotillard and Nathan Crowley’s production design make this a very watchable, if not a very good, summer movie.
Set throughout the Midwest and Northeast during the 1930’s, Public Enemies explores the signature Mann motif of law-abiding and law-breaking men in opposition. In many ways, this film could be seen as an attempt to revisit what worked so well in his masterpiece thriller Heat (1995). This time around, however, we have Depp and Bale in 1930’s Chicago instead of De Niro and Pacino in modern-day Los Angeles. Dillinger, a prolific bank robber, is portrayed as the consummate professional by Depp, and watching him be so good at doing wrong provides most of the excitement of the film. When the mob and J. Edgar Hoover (Billy Crudup) start to interfere, it becomes clear that the world Dillinger once thrived in is quickly becoming a thing of the past. Meanwhile, while Purvis is meant to be a worthy foil to Dillinger, he really isn’t given enough screen time or portrayed with enough nuance by Bale to be memorable in the least. Further muddying the waters is Dillinger’s love interest, Billie Frechette. Ultimately, the film does not settle on either relationship as the focal point of the film, and the audience pays the price. Mann focuses on never-ending shoot outs and dully executed set pieces, which is profoundly disappointing, given the caliber of talent he had to work with.
Mann’s films have been shot almost entirely on high-definition video since the moody thriller Collateral (2004), and up until now this choice has made sense, given the subject matter. Here, however, it simply does not work. As a gangster picture, it screams for a more classic treatment; the effect of seeing the actors and 1930’s-era sets on video is both jarring and ridiculous. Instead of drawing the audience in (which, it could be argued, was the effect of video in Mann’s past two films), it lends the entire production a phony feeling. Even though the audience becomes habituated to this visual dissonance about twenty minutes into the film, the damage is done.
While Public Enemies is a flawed film, it still rises above most popular summer cinema, if only because it is trying something new. Mann takes a huge risk by shooting this film in an avant-garde way; with a better story, maybe it could have worked.
Orson Robbins-Pianka
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