film, eyeballs, brain

There’s one flat-out great sequence in Michael Mann’s new film, Public Enemies, the kind that makes you wish you were watching another movie. It’s a spectacular (and poorly thought-out) shoot-out in a lodge in the Wisconsin woods where John Dillinger and Babyface Nelson, the two most notorious gangsters of their time, are holed up. It’s the opposite of those scenes in Thief (1981) and Manhunter (1986), or even on “Miami Vice”, which Mann produced — not those trademark tense scenes shot with paradoxical languor, with still bodies cut by shards of light, but with jittery handheld cameras.

Mann has been proven to be an efficient director of action (see the otherwise bloated Heat from 1995), and his sharp eye is actually aided here by using nothing but digital cameras all throughout. The cameras, practically up people’s nostrils, plunge you into the frenzy of the shootout: heat and light everywhere, the din of gunshot and breaking glass, Tommy guns literally ablaze, the sparks from their muzzles momentarily overexposed and blown out on camera. The gangsters run into the dark forest, and the DV camera makes the woods look alive, swarming with digital motes and jellyfish tendrils of fog. When the sequence ends in a forest clearing — death twitches galore and blood squibs exploding everywhere — you finally exhale. It’s unfortunate that it’s surrounded by over two hours of dullness.

It’s a shame, because the rest of Public Enemies is an undercooked mess, an ambitious cinematic casserole of different ingredients that don’t quite taste well together. (Sorry, I’m going overboard with the bad cooking metaphors here; leftovers are simmering on the stove as I write this.) Even the score, usually Mann’s forte (hey, I really liked the two soundtracks to “Miami Vice”, and even the Tangerine Dream score to Thief), is both puzzling and predictable: ahistorical countrified electric guitar for the action sequences, Billie Holiday playing whenever the radio is turned on, and grandiloquent orchestral strings courtesy of Elliot Goldenthal every time there’s a pause that can be filled.

At two and a half hours long, it’s overstuffed to a fault, like the supporting cast. There’s Giovanni Ribisi, Lili Taylor, an unrecognizable Billy Crudup as J. Edgar Hoover, some of the mainstays from “Crime Story”, a couple of folks from “The Wire” (that fool cop who drove the Mayor, and the always great Peter Gerety, who steals just about every brief scene he’s in), Leelee Sobieski, and maybe a dozen more others. The sum of their lines are limited to about a minute each. It’s a lot to slog through just to get to Gerety’s courtroom appearance.

It’s because Mann wants Public Enemies to be all things at once: epic period piece, gangster action flick, psychological two-hander, and it fails at all three. I’ll take the first: There’s certainly some interesting historical context that Mann weaves throughout the film. Dillinger’s far riskier and increasingly outmoded business practices are challenged by organized illegal betting via the nascent telephone system; it’s far more financially lucrative and efficient. There’s also talk about the birth of the modern FBI and more “scientific” crime-fighting techniques, but they’re simply thrown into the picture.

There’s a tantalizing scene halfway through the movie when I thought things would turn around: Dillinger is transported in a car after his arrest through a gauntlet of cheering onlookers; with a knowing grin on his face, Dillinger lifts his manacled wrists to wave to his unseeing adoring public. This is followed by a brief press conference where Dillinger upstages the police by charming the reporters. And then the scene ends. A deeper exploration of the cult of celebrity — or crime during the Great Depression, or the government’s attempts to fight the War on Crime on a federal level — are one of many far more interesting paths Mann could have taken, but doesn’t. It’s all just about the skimming of surfaces: the way cars glide like sleek sharks across the screen, the way the camera zooms in on pinstripe suits and cuff links. It’s hard to make a period piece out of only this.

You can tell that Mann wants the Depp / Bale dyad to function like Pacino / De Niro in Heat, Petersen / Cox in Manhunter, or Cruise / Foxx in the far-superior Collateral (2004). But again, the psychological introspection Public Enemies explores is limited to the surface. (Think Don Johnson brooding by his Ferrari, i.e., the one blown up by Ted Nugent in the second season, or Al Pacino in The Insider, brooding by the seaside as he takes breaks from yelling at people over the phone.) But Depp isn’t the introspective one; instead, it’s his nemesis, Agent Melvin Purvis, played by the increasingly insufferable Christian Bale. Bale, still clearly besotted by his gruff Batman voice (he used it again for John Connor in Terminator: Salvation), gets to be the brooder here: he broods at a window, Dark Knight-style, and stares out into the blue Chicago night, presumably pondering his chances for a Best Supporting Actor nomination. Hopefully he won’t get one.

Why Purvis is in fact so obsessed with Dillinger is never very clear. (Babyface Nelson seemed like the far more dangerous trigger-happy psychopath on the public enemies list.) Indeed, it’s one of the odd things about Public Enemies. You can sense that Mann is trying to figure out what makes the characters tick, with little hints dropped here and there about their psychological backgrounds — the man behind the legend, so to speak. But in Public Enemies, there’s neither man nor legend. Dillinger’s compulsion to rob banks, or his relationship with his fellow gangsters, go unexplored. (If Dillinger’s the boss, he sure doesn’t look like he does much bossing.)

It’s like Mann wants to play it cool, but it’s perhaps too cool; there’s no emotional engagement with or between the characters. For instance, there’s simply no chemistry between Marion Cotillard and Johnny Depp; what they see in each other — and how this fatal attraction leads them to do stupid, stupid things — is similarly murky. There’s no zing in their dialogue, none of the snap and crackle associated with this kind of cops-and-robbers genre. Indeed, I had wished that Mann would have made a “real” Thirties period piece, complete with gum-snapping delivery and cigar-chomping gangsters.

After a one-night stand and two nights’ worth of clunky expository dialogue, the hardened gangster and the seemingly sensible coat-check girl are suddenly an uncharismatic pair. (I was hoping that Depp’s stale lines to Cotillard were proof of an inevitable insincerity towards the end of the picture, but no; here, he really was in love.) Depp, ordinarily the most riveting of actors (seriously: try to take your eyes off of him, even in Pirates of the Caribbean) is left here with little else to do than peer above the tortoiseshell glasses perched on his nose.

The pleasure of a cat-and-mouse game comes not only from showing the audience how one has outwitted the other (yet again) and sharing the outwitter’s satisfaction with the audience. Mann seems determined not to let Dillinger derive any pleasure from robbing banks or from outwitting the G-men; consequently, neither do we. Eating steaks in a posh nightclub at the height of the Great Depression — why, that could be anyone in this economy. There’s no thrill for Dillinger, no joy in the chase for Purvis. Despite the round dance of convict-and-prison-guard (one of the film’s better scenes), the series of interchangeable bank heists and prison breakouts seem perfunctory. The Feds aren’t outwitted, really; they’re simply outgunned and undone by their own incompetence and sheer bad luck. There’s little excitement in that.

I’d like to think that maybe the source material was to blame. Maybe Billie Frechette really was as bland as Marion Cotillard plays her. Maybe John Dillinger really was as dull as Johnny Depp in this picture. Maybe “Bye, Bye Blackbird” really was the John & Billie Love Theme in real life (though it’s sung here in a cameo appearance by Diana Krall, whose vocal phrasing by no means sounds like it comes from the ’30s). Or maybe not.

Popularity: 4%