Johnny Depp's gangster is rapped in Public Enemies

10 April 2012

Michael Mann made his name directing Miami Vice in the Eighties and before that he worked on Starsky & Hutch. He has shown himself to be very effective as a manager of excitement; he is bold and imaginative in choreographing scenes that pitch good against evil, but the hazards of Mann’s style are sometimes greatly emphasised in the cinema.

The main hazard goes like this: why work your way around a problem when you can rush at it headlong? He has been responsible for mega-successful rush-a-thons such as Heat and The Insider. (He has also proved his admiration for running shoes by twice directing advertisements for Nike.) His movies are never boring but they are always breathless, which makes you wonder if he is the right person to investigate the cold enigma of 1930s gangster John Dillinger.

He has a good script, written with the novelist Ronan Bennett, and Mann is in possession of a native visual talent: he can make a story interesting by the manner of its telling, which places him among a select group of directors nowadays who understand how to make a Hollywood movie. He also has an asset in Johnny Depp, playing Dillinger with customary coolness, and, now and then, with a sense of the steep likeability of bad people in a bad society. Depp has become, in his young middle age, like a star of the movies’ golden period, Errol Flynn or Ronald Colman. He takes his persona from movie to movie, giving himself to the part rather than playing it, which can prove pretty effective when you’re trying to tackle a showman like Dillinger.

The film opens with the demise of Pretty Boy Floyd, gunned down by a sharp young blade from the FBI, the notorious Melvin Purvis (Christian Bale). This sets the tone but also the premise of the film: gunning down the Dillinger gang will prove to be the hallmark of the new war against gun crime sponsored by J Edgar Hoover, if never its stated aim. (Hoover is played with puffed-up excellence by Billy Crudup.)

At times it seems like a cops and robbers saga as it might have been imagined by Theodore Dreiser: acres of idealism gone wrong, tons of detail in the cars, the banks, the drinking dens, the cop shops. Dillinger meets a nice coat-check girl, Billie Frechette (Marion Cotillard), who is drawn into the dark and kept there: she never entirely knows what it is he does but she has a moll’s trajectory, and before long we find she is being slapped about by some publicly funded brute driven crazy by another of Dillinger’s brazen escapes.

Public Enemies is a shimmering car made of only good parts but it somehow fails to move. It glides, then stalls, it makes elegant turns, then grinds to a halt. There is a great deal to enjoy about the movie — many of the performances, the dialogue — but the central figure of Dillinger makes no sense. We never know what he wants so we don’t care whether he gets it or not. He tells us he wants everything, right now, but then he blows between bravado and ennui in a way that causes you not to trust his motivations. He seems disconnected from his pursuers as much as from his collaborators, which fairly kills the tension of the cat-and-mouse game. It’s one of those movies where there’s a lot of storytelling talent on screen, but none of it is working together or surviving the process or escaping the director’s rushing, so in the end there’s no real story at all. Dillinger is lost in all the gestures that might seek to explain him — he is not an enigma by the end, he is a void.

I would remind you that some artists’ failures are more interesting than other artists’ successes. Michael Mann may not succeed with Public Enemies but the attempt is compelling enough. The American Depression-era gangster film has lived long in the cultural memory, not only through the Warner Brothers classics starring Cagney and his cohorts, not only via the small film noir masterpieces made in the Forties, but because of the way the genre was re-worked in the late Sixties and early Seventies by directors under the influence of the New Wave.

Bonnie and Clyde seemed like an existential dream set in the Thirties, filled with sexual insecurity and thoughts of Vietnam. Chinatown still seems not only like a vintage homage to classic Americana but also a ripe engagement with the finer points of capitalist corruption.

There is no empty space in Mann’s movie, no solid ground for folklore to take root. Every scene is a crush of action. But maybe there is something in the Dillinger myth that is simply less conducive to subtlety. There have been several attempts on his life before now: the 1973 version starring Warren Oates turned it into a kind of callous Western, and there have been others, for TV and film, with Mark Harmon and Martin Sheen as Public Enemy Number One. If some kinds of bravery are a sickness, and if the life of John Dillinger proved it, then none of these productions so far have managed to tell his story. But there is joy in the attempt.

Public Enemies knows where to look for Dillinger but it doesn’t know how to locate him. What did he stand for and what were the struggles of his life about? What allowed him to become the kind of man who would cheerfully kill people to get money? In the end, despite all their vivid attractions, neither Michael Mann nor Johnny Depp can incite our understanding. As everybody knows, attractiveness is only half the task. What do you do once you get them up close?

Public Enemies
Cert: 15

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