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Wednesday, Jul. 01, 2009
We’ve been robbed by director Michael Mann with muddled 'Public Enemies’
Review: Michael Mann has no story worth telling in 'Public Enemies,' a muddled crime flick.
By Christopher Kelly
Michael Mann continues an ongoing descent into his navel in Public Enemies, an uninvolving, often incoherent gangster epic about federal authorities’ attempts to capture the notorious bank robber John Dillinger in the 1930s. Much like this gifted but often self-sabotaging director’s last film, Miami Vice, this new effort is bound up entirely in its own artifice; Mann doesn’t tell stories anymore, he creates stylistic poses.
Shooting in high-def digital video, the director succeeds in creating a lush, hyper-real vision of a bygone era. If only he had a story worth telling and characters we might actually care about.
Johnny Depp, giving a squirrelly, surprisingly charm-free performance, plays the notorious criminal who, when we first meet him, has been sent back to prison just months after being released from a nine-year sentence. Dillinger coordinates a violent escape from the prison, though — like most of the action set pieces in the film — this sequence proves as visually impressive as it is difficult to follow.
In Chicago, Dillinger begins a heated romance with a hat-check girl named Billie Frechette (Marion Cotillard). Meanwhile, FBI chief J. Edgar Hoover (Billy Crudup, doing a nice bit of mimicry) has appointed a special agent named Melvin Purvis (Christian Bale) to exploit state-of-the-art technology such as phone tapping to pinpoint Dillinger and bring him down. As Dillinger and his closest associate, Baby Face Nelson (Stephen Graham), continue a string of bank robberies, a larger crime syndicate, led by Frank Nitti (Bill Camp), is developing a national bookmaking operation that earns far more than Dillinger could ever earn from one of his robberies.
It’s around this point that something resembling a theme begins to emerge: Public Enemies appears to be an elegy for an old-fashioned, personality-driven brand of gangsterism that died at the hands of technology, only to be replaced by organized crime syndicates that exploited technology to even greater riches. The fact that Mann shoots all of this in state-of-the-art fashion — the detail is so precise in some scenes you can see the actors’ pancake makeup — would seem to make for an interesting contradiction; the movie is a kind of tech-obsessed embrace of Luddite-ism.
But for these ideas to flower, they have to be connected to some sort of compelling drama, and the tale that Mann has conjured up here is a bore. Written by Mann, Ronan Bennett and Ann Biderman, based on a book by Bryan Burrough, Public Enemies follows a pattern of catch-and-release: Purvis hunts Dillinger down; Dillinger eludes him; Purvis throws Dillinger in the pen; Dillinger manages to escape; and so forth. One of the early raids, in which Purvis enters an apartment where Baby Face Nelson is eating dinner, is enjoyably tense and volatile. But the action scenes that follow become indistinguishable. How many times do we have to watch Dillinger get away before the audience grasps that he’s slippery?
Cotillard does a competent enough job capturing her character’s journey from an uncertain young woman to the fiercest of all defenders of her beloved gangster. But the other actors, particularly Bale, seem to have checked their personalities in the coat room where Cotillard’s character works. (Speaking of actors: Blink and you’ll miss Channing Tatum as Pretty Boy Floyd, Lili Taylor as a small-town sheriff and Leelee Sobieski as an unwitting femme fatale.)
The movie listlessly lumbers to an endless, cheese-ball showdown outside of a Chicago movie theater, and the final black-and-white scene is so mawkish and idiotic you wonder if Danielle Steele invaded the projection booth.
The result is the year’s sorest disappointment. Michael Mann may have ambition to burn, but — at least on the basis of his last two pictures — he’s lacking something much more valuable: good sense.
Public Enemies **
Rated R (violence, sexual content, strong language), 140 min.
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