Film review: Public Enemies

PUBLIC ENEMIES (15) ***

DIRECTED BY: MICHAEL MANN

STARRING: JOHNNY DEPP, CHRISTIAN BALE, MARION COTILLARD

NOBODY makes movies like Michael Mann. Whereas most directors working at the high end of the studio system tend to deliver easily marketable blockbusters or awards-friendly prestige pictures in return for the chance to work with a large budget, Mann is one of the few who considers it his duty to take Hollywood's money and use it to push the idea of cinema as an art form. Nowhere is this clearer than in his latest project, Public Enemies, a dense, exhaustive account of the 14-month interstate crime spree John Dillinger went on between breaking out of prison in 1933 and being gunned down by cops outside Chicago's Biograph Theater in July 1934.

Stripping the story of much of the adrenaline-juicing grandeur that made Mann's last foray into the world of bank-robbing hoods, Heat, such a thrill to watch, he's made a summer blockbuster that's almost as radical as Steven Soderbergh's Ché. Like that film, it presents a mostly uncritical portrait of a much-mythologised outlaw, while eliminating much of the artifice that such films sort usually deploy to get us on side. The result is a movie that almost seems at war with itself – a gangster flick determined to rob us of the basic pleasures of the genre.

Appropriately enough, Johnny Depp plays Dillinger with an elusiveness that eliminates virtually any trace of the charisma one always assumed he possessed, given his status as a folk hero loved by the public for knocking off the banks that caused the Great Depression. The only time Dillinger really comes to life in the film is when he's putting on a front for the press or the hostages he takes to ensure his safe getaway after a violent heist. This is a guy who understands how to create and maintain a façade, but, as the film shows, such showmanship is purely functional, a way to curry favour with the public to enable him to live among them. Away from the limelight, he's much more of an empty shell, living for the moment with no time for the emotional baggage that roots most of us to a specific place.

Consequently, the film doesn't waste time poring over his back-story. As he tells Billie Frechette (Marion Cotillard), the half-French/half-Native American girl he sets his sights on: "I like baseball, movies, fast cars and you. What else do you need to know?" It's an admirably minimalist, low-key approach to characterisation, but while it may get closer to the truth of who Dillinger actually was, it also makes him a bit of a bore to be around. Depp, as fine an actor as he is, never manages to convey his ruthlessness or, indeed, make him as intriguing a figure as, say, Robert De Niro's similarly closed-off anti-hero from Heat.

It doesn't help that the film denies him a charismatic rough-edged maverick to bounce off. His opposite number here is Christian Bale as Melvin Purvis, the lantern-jawed G-Man recruited by a publicity-conscious J Edgar Hoover (an amusing Billy Crudup) to head his nascent Federal Bureau of Investigation. Driven by a desire to get the job done, and nothing else, we get glimpses of a man struggling to come to terms with new scientific techniques for fighting crime, when the old ones – beating information from suspects, shooting criminals in the back, fudging the line between right and wrong – are often more effective, if not downright necessary during the Golden Age of bank robberies. Like Dillinger, Purvis seems to have almost no interior life, and Bale plays him with such remoteness we never get much sense of what effect this professional struggle is having on him.

It all makes for an oddly unengaging viewing experience, one further hampered by Mann's decision to shoot the film on high-definition video in an effort to give proceedings a more immediate, docudrama feel. Aside from capturing a couple of magnificently staged gun battles, its use in the harsh sunlight of the American Midwest and the barely-lit streets of 1930s Chicago gives the film a weirdly cheap, blown-out look that doesn't so much put us in the moment, as rip us right out of it by constantly reminding us we're watching a very stylised film pretending to be something it's not. It may be full of verité affectations (name characters that are rarely introduced; badly recorded, half-mumbled dialogue; hyperactive, handheld camera work), but Public Enemies is not an exercise in Dogme-style purity.

There's still a sweeping score to ratchet up the film's emotional beats and the frame is still filled with absurdly glamorous and beautiful movie stars who look like absurdly glamorous and beautiful movie stars. It's a little self-defeating.

Of course, this being a Michael Mann film, the frame is also bursting with meticulously researched period details and facts, right down to the wool content of Dillinger's overcoat. And there are plenty of thematic threads to unspool too, from the changing nature of organised crime in the age of telecommunications, to the impact of the Great Depression on the nation and the uneasy relationship between the law, the media and criminal underworld. Yet Mann never quite transforms any of it into something cohesive. It's if he has decided to present us with lots of stunning raw material and expects us to do all the work in making it make sense. It's a bold approach, but it doesn't stop Public Enemies feeling like visual notes for a masterpiece yet to be finished.