Michael Mann’s hotly anticipated Dillinger flick turns out to be maddeningly, frustratingly, exhilaratingly brilliant, the sort of film one fights with and hisses at, but leaves the cinema willing to fight tooth and nail for.
Aargh! What is Michael Mann up to? Doggedly adhering to digital, the director’s medium is consistently at odds with his retro material. Forget the slick Can’t Believe It’s Not 35mm of Miami Vice; Public Enemies lies somewhere on the visual spectrum between the murkier moments of Collateral and a cheap wedding video; an $80 million cheap wedding video.
Occasionally, it’s as if Mr. Mann has composed a beautiful sweeping symphony only to perform it with a comb and a piece of paper. Witness a later scene in the woods when our antihero, John Dillinger (Johnny Depp, wonderful) is shooting it out with some G-men on his tail. Wisps of Tommy gun smoke appear to roll uphill as Dillinger surveys the aftermath, yet this poetry is rendered with a nasty camcorder sheen. Look too at the scene by the racetrack where Dillinger kisses his Woman in Red (Marion Cotillard), a golden age of Hollywood money shot sullied by inappropriate shadows and glare.
Such strategies are deliberate. If the camera wobbles here and there, you can be sure that’s what Mr. Mann wanted. Public Enemies, for all its tiny imperfections, is meticulous even by the standards of its very precise director. This is every badass Warner G-man flick he has ever watched and then some. The characterisation is, accordingly, pretty shallow. Dillinger is consistently played as Chicago’s Robin Hood, a fly in the ointment for a headline obsessed J. Edgar Hoover (Billy Crudup, back on form after his deathly boring Dr. Manhattan) and driven, vengeful G-man, Melvin Purgess (Christian Bale playing, erm, driven and vengeful again).
The screenplay, co-written by Newtownabbey man Ronan Bennett, is an exchange of hardboiled signifiers. These quips can be sublime – “I don’t see John Dillinger watching no Shirley Temple picture”. They can, equally, be rubbery old clichés in keeping with the Depression Era setting.
Ultimately, the film forms an extended shoot-out, from the opening prison break sequence to those famous final moments outside the Biograph cinema. These events are, for the most part, drawn from Bryan Burrough’s non-fiction book, Public Enemies: America’s Greatest Crime Wave And The Birth Of The FBI, 1933–34. But historical accuracy is hardly top of Mr. Mann’s priorities. This is not a documentary, though it can look like one. Nor is it The Untouchables. This is a wildly kinetic, full blown art film, replete with references to The Conformist and long forgotten Edward G. Robinson standards. Michael Mann is out to print the legend. Questioning whether he ought to have printed the legend in such grainy pixels is just part of the trip.
I have a feeling we’ll work out our differences, Public Enemies and I. Anything this aggravating must be love, right?