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.