Public Enemies

Director: Michael Mann (Heat, Collateral, Manhunter)

Screenwriters: Michael Mann (Heat, Miami Vice), Ronan Bennett, Ann Biderman (Primal Fear); Book: Bryan Burrough, Public Enemies: America’s Greatest Crime Wave and the Birth of the FBI, 1933-34

Cast: Johnny Depp (Pirates of the Caribbean trilogy), Christian Bale (The Dark Knight), Billy Crudup (Big Fish, Mission: Impossible 3), Marion Cotillard (La vie en Rose)

Length: 2h 20m

Synopsis: The year is 1933. Long time criminal John Dillinger (Depp), after escaping from prison following years of incarceration, sets out to become one of the most famous bank robbers in American history. Aided by a team of cunning crooks he enjoys success in his illegal endeavors, falls in love with a coat check girl named Billie (Cotillard), and due to his achievements inadvertently helps propel J. Edgar Hoover’s (Crudup) efforts to federalize the Bureau of Investigations. The Bureau’s main task force, headed by ex-policeman Melvin Purvis (Bale), gets hot on Dillinger’s trail but suffers embarrassing failures as the criminal continually slips through their fingers.

Opinion: Ever since 2006’s Miami Vice, which tried and failed to become a spiritual sequel to the 1995 masterpiece Heat, Michael Mann has been looking to vindicate himself with a film that reasserts his status as a premiere director in Hollywood (at least that’s what critics thought). Thankfully Public Enemies does just this, but just not to the full extent that fans and critics were hoping. The film does a lot of things right, which includes top-rate acting all around, phenomenal set design and cinematography, and characteristically solid writing. But where it fails to exemplify itself is with its generic-feeling biopic edifice. In other words the narrative structure shows little to no ingenuity, which gives the sense that what we are seeing is “just another biopic” that just happens to be a gangster movie. This is a shame, because everything else that happens on screen is vintage Michael Mann (minus substituting cold colors for warm). His most notable earlier works (Last of the Mohicans, Heat, The Insider, Collateral) played with narrative structures and/or aesthetics in one facet or another, and so to have that uniqueness missing from Public Enemies is somewhat disappointing. With that one main gripe being said, however, there are plenty of reasons to welcome Mann’s latest effort as a timely abstract warning for us Americans, especially those on Wall Street. Dillinger’s ability to successfully rob banks and avoid incarceration (at least the lengthy kind with exception for his initial prison sentence), largely due to his knowing the right people, is possibly representative of modern white-collar crime. Keep this in mind. Public Enemies is a gangster movie, which like predecessors such as Scarface (1932, 1983), Goodfellas (1992), Bonnie and Clyde (1967), and other such classics warns against living in the fast lane because the destination is almost always a violent death. Case in point: John Dillinger. But to make this warning more applicable to the everyman we need only to think of the burst real estate bubble of the past year and ongoing recession (the “violent death” being figurative of course). Those who chose to act rashly and greedily for immediate self-benefit found themselves in hard times, or caused others to live as such (e.g. Bernie Madoff). Public Enemies just goes to show that the gangster genre is just as relevant as ever, which actually may not be such a good thing. But nevertheless, this movie definitely is a good thing.

Rating: 7.0

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