Public Enemies
Directed by Michael Mann
For the fifth time since he was shot dead outside Chicago’s Biograph Theatre in 1934, John Dillinger is the subject of a movie. And like its predecessors, Public Enemies doesn’t quite do it.
There are all kinds of wonderful things about Public Enemies, especially the way it transports you into a resolutely unglamorous 1930s America without special effects or stylized settings. It’s long, and at times it’s hard to hear the dialogue (an unfortunate specialty of writer-director Michael Mann), but it always holds your interest, and there’s a spectacular depiction of a famous cocked-up midnight effort to nail Dillinger at a Wisconsin roadhouse. Still, there is a hole at the center of Public Enemies, and that hole is Dillinger himself.
You’d think Dillinger’s story could support any number of movies: After all, this is a man who busted out of prison and went on a yearlong bank-robbery spree that became front-page news. He was even captured before staging a second jailbreak. But aside from a single encounter between Dillinger and the press, when he was supposedly insouciant and charming, he was a cipher. The terrific book by Bryan Burrough upon which the new movie is based makes it clear that Dillinger’s success was primarily attributable to primitive policing and jailhouse protection rather than to any particular brilliance on Dillinger’s part.
Indeed, Dillinger’s legend has survived primarily because of the stunning story of his death–with federal agents blackmailing the notorious “lady in red,” a hooker of Dillinger’s acquaintance, into telling them where Dillinger would be heading on the night they eventually gunned him down on a busy North Side street. And that, of course, had nothing to do with Dillinger himself.
The narrative blunder of Public Enemies is in focusing on Dillinger when it might have given the lion’s share of attention to Melvin Purvis, the G-Man who finally got him after making a million mistakes along the way. The movie does tell both stories, but it dwells on Dillinger’s, oddly underplayed by the usually great Johnny Depp. Scene after scene depicts his romance with a hat-check girl named Billie Frechette, which never comes off as the torrid affair the screenplay suggests it is. Neither Depp nor Marion Cotillard, who won an Oscar last year for playing Edith Piaf in a movie nobody saw, brings a moment’s conviction to the you’re-my-gal-and-I-get-what-I-want/I-don’t-want-to-see-you-die dialogue we’ve heard before in a thousand crook-and-girlfriend movies.
They actually seem rather indifferent toward each other; there’s no chemistry between Depp and Cotillard. (Maybe he couldn’t get over the fact that, in real life, Cotillard believes the destruction of the Twin Towers was an inside job.)
The treatment of Purvis’s bungles and missteps in the pursuit of Dillinger gives Public Enemies its narrative freshness. Purvis worked for the Bureau of Investigation, the federal office that would blossom into the FBI. (Billy Crudup gives a wonderful little performance as the young J. Edgar Hoover, sounding as though his voice comes straight out of an ancient radio.)
A man of great, even overweening rectitude, Purvis believed in the use of “advanced techniques” to catch his man, but ran a squad that couldn’t manage to keep its eye on the back door of Dillinger’s apartment building, and got most of its information the old-fashioned way–through physical and psychological intimidation. Playing Purvis, the commanding if bizarrely simian Christian Bale captures perfectly the stiff-postured pride of a man entirely sure of himself even though he doesn’t seem to have all that much reason to be so.
Perhaps the reason the Bureau of Investigation story is more interesting than the Dillinger story is that Dillinger was basically a solitary actor. The movie provides him with a few friends and associates to interact with, but they barely register. Great crime movies center on gangs. They show us how thieves act in their dens, and their ultimate subject is not the crimes they commit or the government’s efforts to get them, but rather the inevitability of betrayal. They work hard to raise the sentimental prospect of honor among thieves and then dash it on the shoals of character–the bad character of bad guys.
Public Enemies never gets us into the den of thieves, because Dillinger didn’t have one, except in prison, before he ever attempted a bank robbery. That’s why he’s not a good subject for a movie, even one as accomplished and impressive as Public Enemies. t
John Podhoretz, editor of Commentary, is THE WEEKLY STANDARD‘s movie critic.
