'Public Enemies': Johnny Depp is magnetic as legendary bank robber
ACTOR'S CHARISMA CARRIES MOVIE ABOUT LEGENDARY BANK ROBBER JOHN DILLINGER
‘‘Public Enemies” is a good movie about one of the truly great American subjects. So split the difference and slap a “very good” label on what’s opening today in your friendly neighborhood megaplex, for those micro-attentioned span folks who like movie reviews in two words or less.
There’s a half ton more to say but that’s where the fun is.
Movie Review
“Public Enemies”
Three and a half stars
(Out of four)
Rated:R
Johnny Depp, Christian Bale, Marion Cotillard, left, Billy Crudup and Stephen Lang in Michael Mann’s tale of the blood-soaked cat and mouse game that John Dillinger played with law enforcement in the ’30s. Opens today.
The truly great story is about John Dillinger and his cohorts competing bloodily with Bureau of Investigation chief J. Edgar Hoover and HIS cohorts for premier status as folk heroes of the ’30s.
And don’t tell me John Dillinger, as a subject, has been done to death in movies either. When John Milius tackled it in 1970 for his wiseacre version, his idea of the genuinely legendary counter-leaping bank robber was Warren Oates — a rich casting joke if ever there was one.
When Lewis Teague and slumming writer John Sayles made “Lady in Red” in 1979 about what happened after the bureau gunned down Dillinger outside the Biograph Theater, their Dillinger was Robert Conrad, a “tough guy” of such buffoonish cast that it might as well have been a Mel Brooks movie.
What the Dillinger tale never quite had before is a star of the magnitude and charisma of Johnny Depp — with Christian Bale as his designated pursuer, the “G-Man” in excelsis Melvin Purvis.
It’s great casting and, as Dillinger, Depp gives the most magnetic James Dean performance that Dean never lived long enough to give.
Depp has turned into one of the more remarkable of all living film presences, not because of his dark, piercing heartthrob looks but the gloriously odd and gutsy uses he’s happy to put them to — most notably in Tim Burton’s “Edward Scissorhands,” “Sweeney Todd,” but also, immortally, as that effete, rum-soaked proto-rocker pirate Capt. Jack Sparrow in the “Pirates of the Caribbean” movies.
I suspect that Dillinger’s personality more closely resembled the self-adoration of a cable-TV talk bloviator than Depp’s wry insolence and secret sensitivity. But Depp is rather wonderful here, in a role whose close-ups director Michael Mann very cleverly withholds from us until he’s ready to make them count.
Carefully note how long it takes Mann to give us a full-scale close-up of that famous Depp face. And even more carefully note what’s going on in the film the few times he gives you that close-up in full camera languor. That face is a weapon in Mann’s arsenal and he’s very clever not to waste it.
Mann knows what he’s doing. He’s telling a story about America’s hopeless passion for mythology — for making up wonderful stories about both its famous and infamous. And he’s doing it with one of the few movie stars we’ve still got who can suggest all the ambivalences of movie mythology.
Mann’s Dillinger is a free spirit and romantic, a rebellious gun-toting Bohemian who, yes, robs banks, kills cops and continually escapes repeatedly from fortress police custody. But he’s also a guy capable of obsessive love at first sight with a French/Native American “hat check girl,” Billie Frechette, in Chicago.
That she’s played by superb French actress Marion Cotillard (an Oscar winner as Edith Piaf) is more evidence that Mann knows what he’s doing. If she’d been an actress who looked like, say, Megan Fox or Jessica Biel, his whole tale would have been soulless. As it is, I almost bought the story here of Dillinger and Billie.
Mann’s Dillinger is the ultimate existential “live-for-the-moment” guy.
But the real fun of the movie is Mann telling us how much America loved him and preferred his spirit over the banks he was robbing and the cops and “G-men” chasing him. He raises “Bonnie and Clyde’s” perception of ’30s bank robbers as folk heroes to another level. His Dillinger takes secret pleasure out of hiding in plain sight as often as possible — in movie theater audiences, for instance, while his “wanted” face fills the screen and, in a wonderful scene, just before his death, playfully wandering into the Chicago Police Department’s “Dillinger Squad” room while the cops are busy listening to a ball game.
Mann does so much right here. His eye for faces fills the screen with actors whose visages cut right into you, whether it’s Billy Crudup as a crazily slick-haired J. Edgar Hoover or Mann’s old favorite actor Stephen Lang as the Fed whose bullets finally took Dillinger down.
Obviously, there’s a lot of bullet-spewing gunfighting here — some of it breathtaking (the scene of Babyface Nelson’s death is almost classic).
And the music score is terrific. Not only is Diana Krall — in a nightclub — singing “Bye Bye Blackbird” and overshadowing everything but you repeatedly hear vintage Billie Holiday when the love story needs a soundtrack. And Elliot Goldenthal’s score for the film gets maximum effect by grandiloquently slowing down one of the greatest modern-era jazz themes, Mongo Santamaria’s “Afro-Blue.”
There is bad news here. It’s a film of cumulative power and wit, to be sure. But it’s a severe and muted one, too. And Mann’s insistence on filming in so many of the real locations of the story whenever possible was a big mistake. This is, after all, seven decades after the fact, when those locations can simply look more shabby and unmemorable than “authentic.”
At the same time, has any other Dillinger film ever gotten more out of actual footage of “Manhattan Melodrama,” the Clark Gable movie he watched just minutes before he was killed?
At this movie’s heart, though, is an inimitable “natural” of an asset — Johnny Depp playing the archetype gangster “hero” of the 1930s.
It’s Depp’s charisma that more than carries the movie.
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