|
 A new interpretation of the gangster, after all these years, is something that had been conceded as well-nigh impossible. Yet along comes a pleasant and handsome youth, Alan Baxter, who presents a sick-souled, small-voiced, love-mad Dillinger so convincingly that, after three weeks, his small tight voice is still drilling into my ears. The picture is deliberately underplayed, and derives an excruciating suspense though contrast with the usual machine-gun gang and G-man epic.
Meyer Levin on Mary Burns, Fugitive
Esquire magazine, 1935
(reprinted in Garbo and the Night Watchmen, 1937)
Gangster drama from Michael Mann makes an awful lot of noise, but mainly fires blanks.
The perfunctory plot sees feds led by straight-arrow Melvin Purvis (Christian Bale) going after the USA's public enemy number one, charismatic bad-boy bank-robber John Dillinger (Johnny Depp) in a Depression-ravaged 1933 America. As with Collateral and Miami Vice, Mann - always boyishly eager to get his hands on the latest technology - has shot the whole thing on digital, and the hand-held visuals give proceedings an unusually fresh, realistic edge. It's a step beyond even The Assassination of Jesse James and the grand-daddy of the sub-genre, Robert Altman's 1974 Thieves Live Us, films seemingly inspired by William Faulkner's famous line from Requiem for a Nun - "The past is never dead. It's not even past."
But Mann's innovative stylistic approach has a downside: it makes the "classical" elements of the film-making - such as the ostentatiously hard-boiled, very "movie-ish" dialogue and, most notably, the over-emphatic, largely-orchestral score - seem all the more incongruous, old-fashioned and unhelpful.
Performances are serviceable, with Billy Crudup's (K.Hepburn-ish) clipped diction as a very young J Edgar Hoover stealing the show in his all-too-brief appearances. He nevertheless fares much better than the eminently capable likes of Lili Taylor, Peter Gerety and Stephen Graham, whose roles amount to little more than extended cameos. Does Mann simply not realise what resources he has in these actors, and what they can do if only given suitable room to perform? (PS - Mike D'Angelo plausibly defends these casting-choices as deliberate here.)
And whereas the gangster movies of the 1930s - such as the James Cagney vehicle The Public Enemy (1931), nodded to both by this entry's title and poster art - were notable for their economy and brevity (The Public Enemy runs 83 minutes, while the 1941 spoof Public Enemies clocks in at a mere 68), Public Enemies sprawls to a profligate 140 minutes without ever feeling particularly epic or expansive.
 This is despite (or perhaps because of) the conspicuously large number of cutting hands - two main editors, plus numerous assistants - employed on the project. Further, much more audacious trimming would have been required if the picture was to live up to the potential promised by its subject-matter and director.
There's only one sequence which really shows very much in the way of imagination or flair - and it comes right at the very end, when Dillinger is enjoying his final, fateful visit to the Biograph Cinema to see gangster drama Manhattan Melodrama (released in France as L'ennemi public no.1). Mann cuts together key scenes from the latter, concentrating especially on expressive closeups of star Myrna Loy (who, we intuit, reminds Dillinger of his girlfriend Billie [a very good Marion Cotillard]). And Dillinger's subsequent death is handled reasonably well, with much use of moody slow-motion, extreme close-up and histrionic soundtrack music. But it's all just a classic case of too little, too late.
Then again, it seems a very long time ago since Mann was on properly top form - Miami Vice was wildly underrated, and Collateral certainly has its moments, but the prediction made on this website back at the very dawn of the decade now seems rash in the extreme:
There can be very few directors in history who have had the sheer technical mastery of the medium Mann now exercises as a matter of course, and on the basis of Heat and The Insider I'll go as far to state that Mann will now go on to make masterpiece after masterpiece until he has pushed the medium as far as it will go. He really is that good.
Or maybe we just jinxed him...
Neil Young
30th June, 2009
----------------------------------------------------
 director : Michael Mann
country : USA
year : 2009
run-time : 140m (BBFC*)
seen : 30th June, 2009
cinema : Empire, Newcastle (press show)
format : 35mm (projection of a film made on digital.)
MVP : Myrna Loy. OK - Billy Crudup.
respected second opinion : Nick Schager, Slant
recommended further reading : Ignatiy Vishnevetsky's set reports at The Auteurs
*
PUBLIC ENEMIES is a US period gangster drama about bank-robber John Dillinger and his gang, their criminal exploits and attempts to evade capture by the FBI. It was passed '15' for strong violence.
'12A' violence guidelines state that 'Violence must not dwell on detail. There should be no emphasis on injuries or blood' and this film featured some strong violence that exceed this rubric, for example when a fleeing gangster was shot in the back by a federal agent and blood spurted from an exit wound followed by brief sight of blood bubbling up from the wound, sight of a federal agent repeatedly shot which included brief sight of a bloody exit wound from the man's shoulder and occasional scenes where gangsters were repeatedly shot including brief sights of blood spurting from the bullet wounds. None of these scenes 'dwell on the infliction of pain or injury' or contained 'The strongest gory images' that are unacceptable at '15' as the scenes were brief and generally lacked prolonged close-up sight of wounds or depictions of pain, so they were permissible at '15' and do not exceed the guidelines at this category.
PUBLIC ENEMIES also contains one use of strong language, as well as some moderate and mild language, a moderate sex scene which lacks stronger details and is generally implied rather than shown and some moderate sex references.
This work was passed with no cuts made. | | |
|
