Public Enemies

Editorial

Rich and complicated lives, an elusive moral foundation, and man-sized subject matter, all located in a down-to-the-plug-sockets recreation of 1933? Surely this is a rupture in the time-space continuum, coming as it does in blockbuster season? After barely a caption, Michael Mann tosses us headlong into a prison break.

Although contrary to standard operating procedure, our antihero appears to be breaking into prison. It's immediately clear than Mann is having no truck with the weary tropes of gangster movies, biopics, period pieces or, for that matter, the basic principles of what we know as films. Whatever James Cameron's Avatar may resemble in cinema's "big shake-up" later this year, this marks a new cinematic language.

The genre may seem familiar — the rat-a-tat-tat patter of Tommy guns, molls, and dapper criminals — but never with this level of immersion. If Mann's mission was simply to portray the early '30s with pin-sharp realism, he has triumphed. This is not a film about the '30s, it is a film in the '30s.

Those familiar with Mann's men — embattled souls with good skills — will spot the guile and moral slipperiness in John Dillinger. Labelled Public Enemy No. 1 by FBI supremo J. Edgar Hoover, we catch up with him cutting loose after nine years in the stir. He exits prison fully educated in criminality and is thus confident enough to walk straight back into Indiana State Pen and pluck out a hatful of assistant crooks.

His gang, with its shifting head-count of hoodlums, took down scores across Chicago and the Midwest with impunity. It was a slick operation, in and out in minutes. Mann too has the sense not to dwell on the old-hat of bank heists, getting on with the business of Dillinger's rise to fame. This is not a film about bank robbing, but a bank robber. And given most of the population were on the verge of starvation, they saw a dashing hero sticking it to the man, not a villain.

A fan of the movies, Dillinger was greatly amused at how Hollywood would riff on his moves. Onscreen he became Clark Gable, and there is a sly resonance to Johnny Depp becoming Dillinger — a star part Gable and part Dillinger.

Depp embraces his director's mission to strip away the wise-guy melodrama and Cagney-sneer of movie mythology to see what lies beneath. His Dillinger is equal parts flamboyant devil and Zen-like professionalism. He treated the press like playthings, nonchalantly posing for snappers, but would take on an icy control as he invaded banks.

At his centre, and the nut that Depp and Mann are out to crack, lies an enigma — what motivated the rogue? Money, yes; fame, certainly; but he was manically living for the moment, there seemed no getaway plan. To some degree, he thought himself untouchable.

In one of many fantastical moments based on real events, Dillinger saunters into a Chicago police department, the cops too busy listening to the ball game to pay him any heed, to become rapt in the maps of his crimes, details of his partners, and his own mug-shot pinned to the wall. On his way out, he stops to ask the score. There is, as with many Depp performances, a magical undercurrent, this intoxicating compound of angel and demon.

Naturally, Hoover charged his best man with the task of "getting Dillinger", and Bale, with a seamlessly genteel purr, paints Melvin Purvis as another consumed by the rigours of his task. A master cop hot on the elusive trail of a master thief… Ring any sirens?

Mann may squirm, but the Heat-in-the-Depression tag is inevitable and the comparisons numerous, from languid cityscapes and the rigorous unpicking of male psychology to a 14-minute shoot-out that, like Mann's classic LA street battle, is another extraordinary mix of cinematic verve and physical veracity.

Yet, more than just their eras, the two films feel like different worlds. Such is the docu-clarity of this digital skin you have to readjust your thinking.

This isn’t the glamour of the movies, warmly draped in celluloid, but an instantaneous, “stunning” reality: every facial pore and every silvery wisp from a smoking gun is crystal-clear. Strangely, it makes the film feel both period and contemporary: history through a sci-fi lens.

And more than just the fiery tale of Dillinger’s final weeks, Mann takes up the canvass of America itself. Here are the forces that shaped a nation: phones; telegrams; the automobile revolution; the Mafia ditching brute extortion to make piles of dough from gambling scams; and the newspapers and moviehouses spreading the latest headlines across the country in hours.
Dillinger, if anything, was a product of a different era. He was the last of the great outlaws, and Mann’s movie lies at a cusp between great American genres: the dusty borderland between the Western and the Gangster movie.

And it also finds time to be a love story. Billie Frechette is swept up by Dillinger’s electric charm, and a wonderful Cotillard is the heartbeat of the movie.

True, Mann is asking a lot of you: myriad characters come and go in the hurly-burly of the plot and we are required to keep up; so hard-and-fast-and-vivid comes the digital detail it can be overwhelming — some may even find it too far from the comfort zone of celluloid, too distracting. Alternatively, here is a film alive in a way we’ve not perceived before: a breathtakingly new visual experience, a precision choreographed action thriller, and a classically minded piece of American art. You up to it?

Ian Nathan