Film is Pwn

I just caught director Michael Mann’s latest film, Public Enemies, starring Johnny Depp and Christian Bale.  Bottom line: good, not great.

Depp plays notorious, Depression era bank robber John Dillinger at the height of his infamy, stealing from the rich and keeping for himself.  Depp’s Dillinger is a criminal with a certain code of honor, content to steal from banks but not from bank customers.  Dillinger is the fledgling (not yet Federal) Bureau of Investigations’ public enemy # 1, though wildly popular as an outlaw celebrity among the population, who he hides out among without concern that he’ll be turned in.  Dillinger has time to aggressively sweep naive coat-check girl Billie (Marion Cotillard) off her feet, and make her “his girl.”

On the opposite side of the law is square peg Melvin Purvis (Bale), a no-nonsense, no-frills G-man who gained notoriety after gunning down another notorious criminal, Pretty Boyd Floyd.  Purvis is tapped by J. Edgar Hoover (Billy Crudup) to head up the hunt for Dillinger.  J. Edgar Hoover was one of the more interesting supporting characters, a self-professed “administrator” with a politician’s flair for publicity trying to launch the F.B.I. and wage war on crime, but his role sort of peters out in the second half.

As I watched Public Enemies I was never bored or disinterested, but afterward I was never pulled in to the story.  It felt like the focus was too much on Johnny Depp’s charismatic portrayal of John Dillinger and too little time was given to the man trying to bring him down, Christian Bale’s unremarkable Melvin Purvis.  Bale is not so much a co-star as he is one of many supporting players, barely standing out from the rest of the talented cast.  It felt like Public Enemies should have been the story of Dillinger and Purvis, rather than just the dangerous criminal Dillinger. (I have a hard time rooting for notorious outlaws motivated by greed.)

The two best Michael Mann movies to date, Heat and Collateral, have involved two equally important and developed characters on opposite sides of the law.  In the epic crime drama Heat, Robert DeNiro is a master criminal and Al Pacino is the detective trying to track them down; Pacino and DeNiro are famously kept apart for all but one scene, where they have a surprisingly civil conversation before resuming the cat and mouse game.  Collateral featured Tom Cruise as a ruthless hitman who takes an average joe cab-driver Jamie Foxx for a ride.  These two great films brilliantly juxtapose flawed “good guys” and compelling “bad guys” into an enthralling movie.

What holds Public Enemies back from greatness is lack of a meaningful protagonist to contrast with Johnny Depp’s magnetic John Dillinger.  For whatever reason, Michael Mann wanted this to be a movie about John Dillinger, and Christian Bale failed to elevate Melvin Purvis above an anemic boyscout.

–Daniel J. Roos