The most surprising thing about “Public Enemies,” directed by Michael Mann, written by Mann, Ronan Bennett, and Ann Biderman, is its balance.
Perhaps that’s because it comes out when action movies are over-special-effected (Transformers), when superhero good-guys (The Dark Knight, X-Men, et cetera) have dark sides and thus we identify them on the same side as the criminals they pursue.
What characterizes this movie is its restraint. Yes, there are chase scenes, but only at 40 or 50 miles per hour. Baby Face Nelson (Stephen Graham) doesn’t take out rooms of people with his machine gun. Fistfights are more bar room tussles than Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon martial arts ballet performances.
And the characters are played tight, to the purpose, without exaggeration. Sure, Dillinger (Johnny Depp) is supposedly a Robin Hood, stealing bank money but letting a teller keep his own loot (of course forgetting that the bank’s money is the people’s money). But Mann downplays that: Dillinger is a crook, period.
He’s got a girl, Billie Frechette (Marion Cotillard), but the movie isn’t about a flamboyant, careless playuh about town. He asks her if she wants to take a wild trip, she agrees, and that is that.
Neither are the characters of Melvin Purvis (Christian Bale) and J. Edgar Hoover (Billy Crudup) given imaginative reign. They are clearly on the same side, though they don’t necessarily see eye-to-eye.
And, especially, Graham does not trump up the character of Baby Face Nelson’s hotheadedness; it would be interesting to see another director turn him into a Heath Ledger Joker. Or Bale’s Purvis into another Dark Knight. Perhaps another movie, another time.
Then it hits you. This is a respectful film. It’s as if Mann wanted to make it look like newsreel footage; as if, though it’s not particularly drummed home in the film, he was drawing a parallel between that Depression and our current one.
It’s not an anachronistic film. Mann certainly had the resources to make this a blockbuster, a character-driven film, with all the bells and whistles that by default accompany such films. But he didn’t. It’s as if he’s more interested in telling a story, stripping away anything extraneous that would dilute the narrative, and letting us decide how we feel about it.
It just comes as a shock. I mean, Johnny Depp playing John Dillinger? What’s so amazing about the film is how unremarkable it is. The casting was spot-on, the sequencing carried us along, even though we knew the ending. But you’re not going to walk out of there saying “God, wasn’t Johnny Depp sexy? Did you see that car chase, those explosions, the body count?”
No, you’re going to walk out thinking that’s what happened in that Depression, which is a stark contrast to what’s happening in our Depression: escapism via violence, comic book remakes, movie franchises, and toys that become cars that threaten the Earth. The movie has the same sense of period as “The Changeling” with Angelina Jolie.
It’s a great movie by a process of subtraction, not accretion.
Imagine that.
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