Another 'Public' Triumph For Mann

by Brett Parker

Michael Mann is like the Terrance Malick of Action Drama; he brings a poetic vividness to realistic landscapes while lingering considerably on the perplexing depths of the characters in the foreground. To commercial audiences, he can be a rather enigmatic cinematic presence. He denies the average moviegoer conventional comforts and the guidance of pop theatrics. Although he plunges into Hollywood action territories, he challenges audiences with ideals of the highest artistic maturity. He could be the first action director who finds the action itself to be the least interesting component in the genre.

Public Enemies is a further blossoming of Mann’s exquisite talents. After his grossly overlooked masterpiece, Miami Vice, Mann has returned with a knockout work that observes the underlying poignancy and emotional ambiguities of a legendary crime figure. In telling the story of mythic bank robber John Dillinger, Mann has crafted another unsettling and mysterious meditation on crime; one that draws us into troubled depths within crime archetypes we never fully sensed was there.

The film opens in 1933, where America is not only facing the Great Depression but a golden age of bank robbing, in which Baby Face Nelson (Stephen Graham), Pretty Boy Floyd (Channing Tatum), and John Dillinger (Johnny Depp) tear through banks like their own personal playgrounds. Dillinger emerges as the most famous bank robber of the bunch, for he appears as the most calculated and precise one. He runs a strict machine with his gang of outlaws and the newspapers eat up his dangerous exploits. To the poor citizens of America, his persona has emerged into a Robin Hood legend, although he practically spends all of his earnings on himself. Dillinger concerns himself with few thoughts other than intense focus on his next heist. “We’re having too much fun today to think about tomorrow,” he boasts with a matter-of-fact seriousness.

Tomorrow, as it turns out, begins brewing into an increasingly deadly prospect for Dillinger. The FBI’s J. Edgar Hoover (Billy Crudup) is seething with anger over Dillinger’s elusiveness and pines relentlessly for a solid reputation of justice. He recruits the Bureau’s young golden boy Melvin Purvis (Christian Bale) to lead a task force with the main focus of dismantling the notorious reign of the country’s biggest bank robbers. Purvis pushes his intelligence and his resources to the max to put the strongest hold on crime the country has ever seen. Dillinger begins to sense the walls closing in around him. The law is making banks increasingly more difficult to rob, leaving Dillinger with fewer options to support his outlaw lifestyle. As he eludes his pursuers and weighs in his criminal options, it becomes clear that the only real things in his life are his fearless ego and his fragile romance with the lovely Billie (Marion Cotillard).

There’s a curious sublimity to be found in the works of Michael Mann: he highlights the complexities and heartache hidden within familiar plots yet he holds the character’s suppressed emotions at a considerable distance from the audience. In his characters, we can sense brewing emotions yearning to spill out, but they never fully find their own release. Mann never fully spells out his characters, he wholly trusts us to make our own conclusions about them, much like we would in real life. Notice the look on Purvis’ face as his G-Men torture one of Dillinger’s associates: we can sense his anguish over the boundaries he’s crossing, yet he never voices his concerns. Notice Dillinger’s casual disregard for the future: when he finally comes face-to-face with Purvis himself, all he wants to talk about is death. These are the only clues to Dillinger’s perspective on his own situation; we never pin down his full motivations.

For his bold strokes of character subtleties, Mann has found the perfect actor in Johnny Depp, a star who knows how to make low-key gestures feel like grand dramatic statements. Depp’s movie star image is perfectly suited to the mystique of Dillinger, for Depp has built his career on the same kind of roguish charms and rebellious spirit that Dillinger used to boast for his public relations. The fact that we celebrate Depp so much allows us to be more intrigued by the steely villain that Dillinger was. Despite the temptation, Depp wisely never indulges in devilish sympathies or glorified charms to sell his character’s myth. He fully commits to Dillinger’s cold and sinister personality, forcing us to see how dark one of history’s most outsized legends truly was. It’s a testament to Depp that he’s able to immerse his smoldering confidence and compelling originality into such an unnerving figure. We’re surprised how much we relish Dillinger’s quiet arrogance, especially in a fun sequence where he makes a startling decision to take a stroll around a police station at the height of his wanted status.

Even though Mann focuses attentively on dramatic flourishes surrounding action plots, he can also stage an action sequence with the same kind of cinematic mastery. Instead of indulging in gratuitous grandeur, Mann always makes a point to drop the audience into an eye-level immediacy within the action. He’ll put us right next to the gunmen in the middle of a shoot-out, so we can feel the explosive excitement and paralyzing terror of bullets flying by your head. This is strongly felt in a sequence where the FBI has Dillinger and his cohorts surrounded by guns at a Wisconsin cottage, in which the outlaw shot his way to a daring escape. Mann also shows effective staging with Dillinger’s death scene, in which he was gunned down in front of the Biograph theatre in Chicago. Mann uses tight close-ups as Dillinger is pursued by G-Men on a crowded sidewalk. As Dillinger is gunned down, Mann allows us to feel like we’re standing next to Dillinger as that violent hail of bullets whiz by. It’s a spell-binding climax.

On that notorious final night of his life, Dillinger went to the Biograph to take in Manhattan Melodrama, a gangster film starring Clark Gable as a dangerous racketeer. The film shows us Dillinger watching the film, off-put and amused by the jazzed-up Hollywood version of gangster life. Dillinger is privately amused at how Hollywood has twisted around and glorified the real life details of criminal hardships. This scene is possibly the most telling about Mann’s filmmaking methods. For Mann himself is probably perplexed by the cinematic tweaking of criminal exploits and has a steely need to present such tales with cold realism and poetic poignancy. He has no use for pop flourishes and demands that we examine the penetrating depths of crime and its players. With Public Enemies, Mann forces us to take a hard look at a famous criminal and the law men who bent moral codes to stop him. While I didn’t find this film as entertaining as Miami Vice, it’s still a masterful and fascinating look into a tense and aching vision of the law.