Public Enemies (2009)

Michael Mann is the working man’s crime-movie maker. That’s not an insult. Or a compliment, really. It’s just how he comes across. Mann is a highly accomplished filmmaker, and has had his hands in things like Heat, The Insider, Collateral, and both the small- and big-screen versions of “Miami Vice.” He knows how to do crime and punishment, and how to do it well. And yet beneath the polished veneers of his films is the idea that for those whose line is either crime or punishment, those are just jobs. Cops and robbers ain’t a game; it’s work. That sensibility is on full display in Public Enemies, a gorgeously-shot, well-acted, and masterfully put together movie that, for all its glories, really feels like nothing so much as the story of some guys having very good and very bad days on the job.

The two main guys are bank robber John Dillinger (Johnny Depp) and FBI agent Melvin Purvis (Christian Bale). It’s the 1930s, and men like Dillinger and his gang are giving lawmen a black eye with their robberies and dashing prison breaks. To fight this, J. Edgar Hoover (Billy Crudup, with more neck than usual) is angling for additional funding for his national crime investigation agency. When politicians turn him down, he ramps up the effort by putting Purvis (a noted gangster-killer) on the job with some publicity fanfare (making Dillinger and Purvis publicly enemies, in one of many possible meanings the film tweaks from its title). Purvis’s job is to get Dillinger by any means necessary. Dillinger’s job? Well, as he casually tells his new girlfriend Billie Frechette (Marion Cotillard, all big eyes and 1930s moxie), he robs banks.

That Dillinger says that in the way another man might say “I sell shoes” is a key to how Mann treats his material. The director is known for his crime set-pieces (Christopher Nolan claims the elaborate heist that opens The Dark Knight is Mann-inspired), but Dillinger’s robberies are shown quickly, with some nice flourishes but that’s about all. When Dillinger claims he can go through a bank in under two minutes, "flat," he may as well be talking about total screen time. The robberies aren’t the point for Dillinger; the life he can live because of them is. Why does he rob banks? Same reason any man get a particular job--because he’s good at it. It pays for the freewheeling lifestyle he wants to lead, preferably with Billie (or so the film would have us believe). The celebrity of being “Public Enemy Number One” is only a by-product—sometimes a helpful one, sometimes a problematic one.

Purvis is also good at what he does, but early on, is surrounded by underexperienced Hoover men who don’t know which end is up. When the newbies blow an entrapment job in a tragic manner, Purvis complains to Hoover until he can get some hard-hitting (and shooting) Western lawmen in on the case. Dillinger’s men know how to follow orders and use their guns. So, Purvis reasons, should the guys on the side of law. And so it goes: two guys on the job, with Dillinger’s job getting harder as the lawmen on one side and organized crime on the other crack down on a brand of outlaw both see as a serious threat to their nationwide enterprises. You just know that this won’t end well.

Of course you know it. John Dillinger is a legend in our country (Melvin Purvis probably a little less so). He was a legend in his own time. The movie has a great scene where Dillinger dons a hat and dark glasses and wanders into a police station. He goes into the special designated “Dillinger Unit,” looks at the pictures of his gang and himself on the wall, and then pauses to ask the gathered cops the score in the Cubs game. They’re all clustered around the radio. They tell him the score. Did the real Dillinger do this? I don’t know. The point is that the real Dillinger could have done it. Of course he could have, because the Cub-fan cops were all hunting the legendary Dillinger, and he wasn’t going to just show up on their doorstep. Legends don’t do that. This movie doesn’t give us the legend.

What it gives us is Johnny Depp, immersed (as usual) in a man who’s very good at what he does until conditions just won’t let him do it anymore. Depp once again proves that he can inhabit pretty much anyone at any level. A known celebrity like Dillinger could have been pitched as a swashbuckler (we know Depp can do that) or a Robin Hood, but Depp instead plays him as a restless man with a wolf smile and haunted eyes. The dialogue suggests that Dillinger doesn’t plan for the future because he’s so cavalier. The look in Depp’s eyes says differently. Dillinger knows what his future is, and he’s just holding it at bay. Opposite Depp is another acting heavyweight, Christian Bale. Bale is known for flying off the handle onscreen and, alas, off. But here he plays Purvis with a slow drawl and such tight lips that he may as well have “contents under pressure” stamped on his face. Purvis is a bulldog, not a showboat. As stars of a film go, such casting is a win-win, and it allows Mann to put some character set pieces alongside the robbery and jailbreak set pieces. Notice the scene where Purvis reacts to how thoroughly his green G-men have botched an apartment sting: the camera lingers on Bale’s face longer than it might in some films, but it lets us see what’s going on behind the lawman’s expression. Likewise, the scene where Dillinger learns his girl has been apprehended while he waited in the car. Depp is given the time to let Dillinger’s entire persona crumble onscreen. Both of these takes, by the way, are wordless. Here again, two crack guys on the job. Strangely and sadly, the two men are given only one scene where they are actually physically together.

The film is beautifully made. The cinematography (by Dante Spinotti) is amazing, and handles prison yards, nightclubs, big city banks, cramped hotels and rambling forests with equal aplomb. Details are allowed to stand out: the fabric of a coat, the flash of a gun, the shine on tile floors, the blue sky above a colorless prison, the final plume of a dying man’s breath on a cold night. Equal care has gone into set design and costuming, so that the period is evoked without obvious artifice. It feels real. In fact, a lot of realism went into this movie: real locations, a non-fiction book as a source—Depp reportedly even researched Dillinger’s accent, and the “lady in red” of legend is reduced to the much less catchy but more true-to-life lady in orange and white.

For all this, the end result is strangely unaffecting. The movie is superb on a technical level, but I wasn’t grabbed emotionally. There’s emotional potential in the Dillinger-Frechette love story, and there are hints of social themes aplenty, but the film isn’t interested in pushing any of those things very far. When Purvis calls his goons off beating up Frechette for questioning, it feels like chivalry, not commentary. The same goes for when Dillinger tells a robbery witness “We’re here for the bank’s money, not yours” (though it’s funny how that distinction depends only on the guy’s place in the line for the tellers). Still, it’s nice, when so many movies rely on vulgarity and overdone flash-bang, to be able to celebrate onscreen some gentlemen who know how to do their jobs thoroughly and right. By which I mean Mann and his fellow filmmakers. Did you think I meant Purvis and Dillinger and their men? I could mean both, and that’s what makes the movie work as well as it does.