(500) DAYS OF SUMMER – marc webb – 5.5 / 10

Though it deserves some credit for being one of the funnier romantic comedies out there (although that really isn’t saying all that much) and for telling its story in an appealingly unconventional way, (500) Days of Summer ultimately fails because the relationship at the center of the film just isn’t worth rooting for. Perhaps this owes to the fact that well over half the film is spent either with the central couple already broken up or in the initial throes of their infatuation. And while it might be true that those are the moments a person is most likely to focus on after the relationship has ended, in the film it means that there’s an awful lot of cute banter and agonized heartbreak but precious little evidence that these two people worked well as a couple and deserve the audience’s rooting interest.

Much of the blame for that can be attributed to the fact that Summer (Zooey Deschanel) is a bit of a cipher. After ninety plus minutes of watching Tom (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) obsess over her, the audience still has no idea who she really is. She likes The Smiths, wears quirky clothes, doesn’t particularly believe in love and is prone to all sorts of random behavior (sprinting through Ikea or shouting ‘penis’ at the top of her lungs in a crowded park, for instance). But she has no family, no friends, no ambition to speak of and seemingly no life outside of the moments she spends with Tom. She’s the type of character who only exists in movies (and maybe in the mind of a certain type of twenty-something writer) precisely because there’s nothing to her. She’s a fantasy, all surface and no substance.

If the film had bothered to delve into Summer’s character a little bit more, it might have been an interesting investigation into why this sort of relationship always ends in disaster; namely that the person we think we want to be with almost always turns out to be quite different from the type of person that can really make us happy. Unfortunately, the filmmakers seem to be as smitten with Summer as Tom is. They have no interest in fleshing her out into a real person, confident in the belief that the audience will be as in love with her as they are.

Maybe it’s because Zooey Deschanel has played this role countless times before (in everything from All the Real Girls to Elf to Yes Man) or maybe it’s because I’m a little too old to find that sort of flighty superficiality appealing, but I often found myself wondering what’s so great about this girl that Tom thinks his life is going to end if he can’t be with her. She’s cute and fun and all but she’s really not worth the complete meltdown that Tom suffers after they break up.

But for a certain type of guy at a certain time in his life, a girl like this is pretty much catnip. She likes the music he likes, is (seemingly) completely unself-conscious and spontaneous, sports a cute retro haircut, is just the slightest bit damaged, etc. In short, she fits almost exactly the blueprint this type of guy would draw up if he was designing his perfect girl. ‘She’s better than the girl of my dreams,’ Tom says at one point. But since even children know that a fantasy is, by definition, unattainable, there’s no reason to care about the fact that Summer and Tom’s relationship implodes. She even tells him flat out when they first get together that she isn’t looking for anything serious. So the guy has no one to blame but himself for his heartbreak. And I just don’t see how anyone can muster up even the slightest bit of empathy for a character who gets exactly what he should have known was coming and then spends days and weeks on end completely falling to pieces because of it.

Which is the film’s other major flaw: that Tom spends countless days wallowing in self-pity. We get it, man, having your heart broken sucks. But of the 500 days chronicled in the film, it seems that more than half of them involve Tom either drinking himself into a stupor, failing to show up for work or to do his job because he’s sad or talking some poor bystander’s ear off about how great Summer was. I just wanted someone to tell him to stop being such a little bitch and grow up already. Or just to slap him really really hard.

Eventually, of course, Tom does pull himself back together. He quits his shitty job writing greeting cards (with a big speech about how the whole industry is bullshit, which, for some reason, the film seems to believe is tremendously insightful), gets a job as an architect (what he really wanted to do before getting sidetracked into the greeting card gig) and meets cute a new girl that promises to fulfill all his (now more realistic) fantasies. So, you see, it was all worth it in the end. He may not have ended up with the girl he thought was The One but his life is that much better for it. Hooray.

Bullshit. Worse, it’s just as much bullshit as any big budget Hollywood romantic comedy you’d care to name. (500) Days of Summer (and no, the film doesn’t offer an explanation as to what the parentheses are doing in the title) is a smug, self-satisfied film made by filmmakers who seem to think they deserve some sort of special consideration because they’ve noticed how hollow and ridiculous the Hollywood romantic comedy is. Big fucking deal. Even the people who watch those movies know they’re absurd. (500) Days of Summer might declare itself to be the antidote to that sort of film but it ends up in more or less the exact same place. It just takes a different route to get there. And while that route is occasionally amusing, it certainly doesn’t elevate the film out of the rom-com ghetto.

PUBLIC ENEMIES – michael mann – 5.9 / 10

As great as some of his earlier films undoubtedly are, Michael Mann has of late become about as reliable for delivering solidly middlebrow entertainment as Tony Scott or Ron Howard. A lot of that owes to the devolution of his visual style. His images, once so immaculately composed and carefully choreographed (in films like Heat or The Last of the Mohicans), have become increasingly lackadaisical and haphazard. A straight line can be drawn from The Insider (Mann’s first film to heavily feature the handheld camerawork that has lately become his trademark) through Ali (his first foray into terrible looking digital photography) to Public Enemies (the unholy combination of those twin aesthetic disasters).

I should admit, right up front, that I have a strong distaste for both digital filmmaking and handheld camerawork in general. When applied to the right story and for the right reason, both of those techniques can work brilliantly (digital photography worked wonders for The Curious Case of Benjamin Button and the handheld aesthetic perfectly suited Quarantine) but I’m hard pressed to find a compelling reason as to why Public Enemies should look this bad. It looks like it was shot on a consumer level video camera from a couple years back by someone who had only recently figured out which end of the camera to point at the actors. There are all kinds of weird smearing effects whenever something moves quickly across the frame (pretty much every shot since the whole film features a shaky handheld style), white areas of the frame are routinely overexposed resulting in that weird (and distinctly digital) ‘popping,’ blues and greens just look wrong both for the time period and real life. And the overall effect is an off putting one that distances the audience from the events on screen simply by constantly making them aware of how terrible the film looks.

For some reason, period gangster films tend to be some of the best looking movies out there (Road to Perdition, Miller’s Crossing, The Godfather, etc.). And given Michael Mann’s reputation as a ruthless taskmaster director who carefully pores over every detail of his films, it’s tempting to think that the terrifically ugly look of Public Enemies was a deliberate artistic choice, a way to differentiate this film from others of its genre, as if Mann was attempting to force the audience to get some distance on the film in order to make them think more critically about it. But when you take into account that Mann has been moving in this aesthetic direction for a decade now, that scenario seems less likely. And anyway, even if the putrid color scheme and blown out lighting was on purpose, that can’t compensate for the fact that it’s still a very ugly film. The trade-off-- assuming there even is one-- just isn’t worth it.

At the heart of pretty much every Michael Mann film is a pair of male antagonists who dance around one another like champion prizefighters before finally destroying one another (either literally or figuratively). In Heat it was Robert De Niro’s Neil MacCauley against Al Pacino’s Vincent Hanna. In The Insider it was Russell Crowe’s Jeffrey Wigand against Pacino’s Lowell Bergman. In Collateral it was Tom Cruise’s Vincent against Jamie Foxx’s Max. And in Public Enemies it’s Johnny Depp’s John Dillinger against Christian Bale’s Melvin Purvis. But this time, unlike in those earlier films, Dillinger and Purvis just aren’t all that compelling. Some of that, I suppose, might owe to the fact that anyone who knows anything about Dillinger knows how this story ends. But even if Public Enemies wasn’t based on a true story, there’s really only one way the film could have ended. By the mid-1930s Dillinger had become an anachronism, a product of an age that no longer existed (as is made very clear in the many scenes featuring Frank Nitti and his Chicago syndicate who make more money in a day than Dillinger does in two months). Besides, this is a big Hollywood blockbuster; the bad guy isn’t going to win.

No, the problem isn’t that the ending is a foregone conclusion but rather that when it finally does come, no one in the audience cares what happens to either Dillinger or Purvis. Nothing that either one of these men has done over the course of the film’s bloated two and a half hour running time (and, in truth, it feels a lot longer than that) is all that interesting. Thinking back on it now, I’m hard pressed to remember anything that Purvis does other than to suck up to J. Edgar Hoover at a press conference. Of course, that might be at least partly due to the fact that Purvis is played by Christian Bale, one of the dullest actors around. But Johnny Depp’s Dillinger doesn’t fare much better. As likeable as Depp is in the role (though isn’t he always likeable?), at the end of the film Dillinger remains a frustrating enigma. His reasons for doing anything are completely inscrutable, which might have worked if the rest of the film (plot, action, etc.) had been compelling; but it isn’t. And so we’re left with a long, meditative film about a man we never really get to know despite having spent a lot of time with him.

Chief among the things about Dillinger that are never adequately explained is his relationship with Billie Frechette (Marion Cotillard). He meets her while out in Chicago one night in 1933 and decides that he wants to spend as much of his (probably limited) remaining time as he can with her. But because he’s an outlaw and constantly on the run, the amount of time the two get to spend together ends up being pretty limited. And when Dillinger executes an elaborate plan to reunite them, it seems like he does so less because he wants to be with her and more because he wants to piss off the FBI. In the end, all their relationship does is provide a (likely fictional) coda to the film that attempts to shoehorn in some unearned pathos right at the very end. If I had to guess, I’d say that Mann, displeased with the relatively low key way in which Dillinger meets his end but unable to change it because it’s so well known, added the coda in an attempt to bring some emotional weight to the end of the film, which, if this were fiction, he would’ve put into some sort of massive shootout or back alley confrontation between the two antagonists.

The coda that ends the film is immediately followed by a title card that reveals that Melvin Purvis left the FBI a year later and eventually took his own life in 1960. The fact that he left the FBI shortly after taking down Dillinger fits neatly into the dominant theme of Mann’s work, that of two antagonists pitted against each who ultimately destroy one other. Dillinger, of course, dies at Purvis’s hand. And the implication of that title card is that without a man like Dillinger to hunt, Purvis found the work hollow and quit. But what to make of the last second (literally) reveal that he killed himself? It seems like a parting shot at the guy for no good reason. He doesn’t kill himself for almost thirty years. By 1960, the man’s circumstances might have changed dramatically. His wife and kids might have been killed in a car accident and he could have felt himself unable to deal with the grief. Or he might have had terminal cancer and killed himself so that he didn’t have to spend the last few months of his life in agonizing pain. There are any number of reasons Purvis might have killed himself and there’s a good chance it had nothing at all to do with what happens in this film. It’s borderline ridiculous that Mann would boil the rest of the man’s life down to those two simple facts; and it colors the audience’s impression of Purvis at the very last second. It’s as if Mann is saying, ‘Look, this guy killed himself. He wasn’t worthy of taking down Dillinger.’ And maybe worst of all, committing suicide doesn’t seem like something the Melvin Purvis we’ve seen over the last two and half hours would do. So either Mann hasn’t been faithful to the character of the real man or something changed in the intervening decades. Either way, it’s a clumsy and ungraceful way to end the film. It feels like a bit of a ‘fuck you’ to the character and to the audience. And it makes absolutely no sense as a post script to a film that is ostensibly about John Dillinger.

Make that a very boring film that is ostensibly about John Dillinger. Aside from the dreadful color palette, the downright confusing camerawork and the muddled character motivations, the fatal flaw of Public Enemies is that it’s boring. There are really only one or two moments in the whole two and half hours (the best of which is when Dillinger’s escape from an Indiana jail is momentarily stalled by a red light) that are in any way compelling. Even the massive action set-pieces-- the sort of thing Mann usually excels at-- have no life to them. They’re just a confused mess of loud gunfire and people yelling. There’s no sense of where anyone is at any one time or what’s actually happening from one minute to the next. And while the argument could be made that this is what it would it be like to actually live through something like that, it doesn’t change the fact that these scenes are just too confusing and headache-inducing to be engrossing in any way. And when you have a film centered around two characters who are never clearly defined, doing things that are never quite made clear, all filmed in a (deliberately?) off putting way, what you get is a muddled mess of a film.