REVERED and expert US film-maker Michael Mann (The Last Of The Mohicans, Heat, Miami Vice) paints images on a large scale and delivers major set-pieces without losing sight of the very human dramas at the centre of his stories.
He repeats the trick with Public Enemies, an electrifying, epic re-telling of the later life of Depression-era bank robber John Dillinger (Johnny Depp). It is intense, intelligent and brilliantly orchestrated.
Mann takes simple genre tales and pumps them so full of testosterone and technical excellence he can make the air crackle with the kind of cinematic thrills few of his peers manage to achieve, never mind maintain.
And, over the years, he has developed a storytelling shorthand, in cahoots with a team of recurring, almost repertory-type actors, where a few scenes, or a few lines, seem to mean so much more in the context than they have any right to.
For “shorthand” read “the maximum meaning in the minimum unit of information”, which you might also like to call “poetry”.
In Public Enemies, actors appear on screen and more or less instantly seem to be fully-formed characters – David Wenham, James Russo, Stephen Dorff, Giovanni Ribisi and star-on-the-rise Jason Clarke are just some of the guys who selflessly and effectively help fill the period tapestry behind and around Depp. And, despite each having limited screen time, it’s as if you’ve spent months on the road with Dillinger’s gang and their associates, holed up and on the run.
Mann is a master at assembling and herding superb casts, with the smallest roles making an indelible impact – here Stephen Lang (TV series Crime Story, Manhunter) pops up as a hard-bitten, steely-eyed FBI guy who steals every scene he’s in and, in the end, just about walks away with the whole picture.
Depp successfully portrays both sides of Dillinger, the violent, ruthless, professional killer and the charming “Robin Hood” who steals from the rich banks to give the poor a “hero” to root for through the hard times.
Dillinger is keenly aware of his public image, reminding his cohorts that since they have to live among the people between bank jobs, it’s best to keep them on your side. Ironically, it’s only when the organised Mob realise Dillinger’s often high-profile tactics attract too much police attention that his fate is sealed.
Depp doesn’t dominate as Mann works his splendid supporting cast. We are actually told very little about the background of the real Dillinger, and Depp only has a handful of scenes with Marion Cotillard, as love interest Billie Frechette, the half-French, half-native American girl he picks up on a night out. But, by the end of the picture, all the little moments, all the little details, add up to two very believable, sympathetic, tragically romantic characters.
Cotillard walks into the film as an Oscar winner (Edith Piaf in La Vie En Rose) and a fine character actress and walks out a new Hollywood star.
The movie is adapted by Mann and Ronan Bennett from the book by Bryan Burrough – Public Enemies: America’s Greatest Crime Wave And The Birth Of The FBI. Mann spends time spelling out the impact made by the “new policing” championed by the Bureau and its controversial chief, J Edgar Hoover (Billy Crudup), as well as detailing the crimefighting advances of the era in a way that sends ripples ahead into our own compromised times.
Christopher Nolan’s scintillating Batman movie, The Dark Knight, managed to weave into its action-packed, beautifully-constructed whole the deep, dark, recurring question – how far will the good guys go to stop the bad guys? The echoes of rendition flights and Guantanamo were there for all to hear, and Mann similarly uses Hoover’s “war on crime” to cast an eye forward to the War on Terror, with interrogations becoming torture sessions.
It is fitting, then, that Nolan’s Batman, Christian Bale, plays the FBI’s Melvin Purvis, who we first see hunting and gunning down Pretty Boy Floyd (Channing Tatum), then pledging to bring Dillinger to justice.
Bale’s Purvis is a civilised, well-educated man, a very different, more three-dimensional character than the bloodthirsty Purvis played by Ben Johnson in John Milius’ pacy and excellent Dillinger (1973, with Warren Oates as the title character and Richard Dreyfuss as Baby Face Nelson – Britain’s Stephen Graham in the Mann version).
Public Enemies is a real treat on the big screen, dark, brooding, muscular and magnificent as Mann’s regular cinematographer Dante Spinotti employs high-definition digital photography to great effect.
All technical departments offer top-notch contributions and Elliot Goldenthal’s classy musical score is the hatband on the fedora.