Review of Michael Mann's Public Enemies

Public Enemies (2009)

Director: Michael Mann

Cast: Johnny Depp, Christian Bale, Marion Cotillard, Channing Tatum, Billy Crudup

Time: 140 min.

Rating:

Who are the real public enemies? Crooks and gangsters from the 1930s? Or people who attempt to make contemporary hip, cool videos about crooks and gangster from the 1930s? My answer is the confused people who seemed to think Public Enemies deserved to be put on film.

The movie is supposedly about John Dillinger and his gang robbing banks in Illinois as Mr. Johnny (the criminal, not actor Johnny Depp, who plays him) earns the ranking public enemy number 1. But it also focuses on the not-yet-in-control-fascist J. Edgar Hoover (Crudup) as he fights to create a national police force to tame such hooligans and sends agent Melvin Purvis (Bale) to bring down Dillinger.

The chase begins, and Dillinger and his crew run across the country. Dillinger falls for common girl Billie (Cotillard), gets napped by the feds in Arizona, and breaks out of jail in Chicago. One by one, his gang dies in shootouts with the cops, and poor Billie gets imprisoned (but we are never told why). In the bittersweet end, the feds gun down Dillinger like some common thug.

The first major problem with this film is the title. The movie is based on the book Public Enemies, by Bryan Burrough, which is about Hoover’s efforts to establish the FBI to fight the Depression Era crime wave fuelled by Dillinger, Pretty Boy Floyd, Bonnie and Clyde, and several other big-name baddies. But the film only looks at Dillinger. The other half-dozen public enemies covered in the book aren’t even mentioned in the movie, so why use the same name? Why not just call the film Public Enemy or Public Enemy Number One?

The next major problem is the annoying camera work. About 99 percent of the movie was shot with handheld cameras, which is clearly obvious because the camera constantly jiggles and moves even when the characters are sitting perfectly still. Worse, many of the shots are close-ups, which become confusing blurs with obscured details because of the violently bouncing camera.

A third major problem is the lack of character and plot development. We learn nothing about the characters except their names, and their personalities are never shown or even explained. Perhaps Mann, who helped write the script, thought Dillinger is so well known the audience already knows everything about him. So who needs to waste time with details like his personality? And if you don’t give the lead a personality, why do it for any of the other characters?

Another major problem is the script. The dialogues seem to have been written by a contemporary fiction writer who thinks dialogues shouldn’t sound the way real people speak to each other. Modern fiction is plagued with short, choppy, disjointed, illogical dialogues that are kept abnormally brief and bounce from unrelated topic to unrelated topic. That’s how the Public Enemies characters talk—in five-word digressions and random utterances that don’t convey important information like plot details.

The final major problem is the ultimate pointlessness of the film. The one thing everyone knows about Dillinger is that he died in a shootout with the feds. We already know how the movie ends, so the film should be an in-depth exploration of the man before he meets that end or maybe a serious look at how the FBI came into reality and stopped the crime wave without becoming corrupt like the local police forces. But sadly, the only goal in Public Enemies is to nail the bad guy, which we know is a predetermined fate, so why should we sit through this movie?

I mentioned the major problems, but there are some amusing minor problems, like the blatantly visible anachronisms. In two separate scenes, red LEDs appear on electronically controlled doors, and in another scene, a big FDIC sign appears by a teller’s window in a bank.

To Mann’s credit, he chose to show the 1930s from a contemporary perspective with the jump cuts, fast edits, and handheld camerawork. The dialogues written like those from contemporary fiction also give the film a 21st century feel that modern audiences might relate to. But combined, these tactics simply don’t work because they fail to fully develop the characters or plots. The action is too jumpy, so we have troubles figuring out who is who and who is doing what, and the verbal interactions are too random and superficial, so we never understand why the characters speak or act as they do.

Is there anything positive to say about Public Enemies? Only that Johnny Depp proves once again that he is an amazing actor, but only because he plays a serious role with an understated brilliance that betrays nothing of the over-the-top hamming he did for the Pirates of the Caribbean trilogy. Of course, he barely gets to speak in Public Enemies, and the camera work is so jumpy it rarely focuses on his face.

The same goes for the other actors, particularly Bale and Cotillard, whose amazing talents are completely wasted in this movie. They have limited, poorly constructed dialogues and have almost no opportunity to act. The most we get to see from Bale are a half-dozen scene-ending close-ups, where he stares expressionless at the camera.

Strangely, Bale’s Purvis seems to be some sort of bizarre social commentary about George W. Bush’s blind, Constitution-destroying attempt to stop “terror.” I say this because the make-up artists have made Bale look oddly like Bush in 1999-2000 and because Mann had Bale speak and act like Bush with a soft Texas drawl and blank facial expressions. Is Mann trying to say the gangsters were the first terrorists? Or maybe terrorists are like Robin-Hood-esque gangsters who must be killed for bucking the system?

Whatever Mann might have been attempting, he failed pitifully. In the end, Dillinger gets gunned down outside a theater in Chicago after watching a Clark Gable movie about gangsters. This ending seems rather symbolic because in Public Enemies, both Johnnies (Dillinger and Depp) get slaughtered in a disaster of a gangster movie watched in theaters where it never should have been shown.