Public Enemies

"What's the score?"

Michael Mann’s Public Enemies — one of the most interesting and challenging wide releases of the year — uses the gangster movie form to say something profound and unexpected about the way we respond to evil. It is stubbornly unsatisfying and daring in its moral conclusions. Many of the early reviews have chided the film for lacking insight into the life and mind of John Dillinger, but that misses the point. Public Enemies thinks Dillinger is less interesting than the paranoia, petty egoism, and institutional arms race that he inspired. The key to the film is the plural in the title.

I hasten to add that Dillinger is nonetheless interesting as depicted here — played by Johnny Depp, he’d be hard-pressed not to be. We first glimpse the legendary bank robber as he is escorted into an Indiana prison, from which he then proceeds to escape in a meticulously planned maneuver that nonetheless leads to the death of one of Dillinger’s most trusted associates. Dillinger is crushed by the loss, which will later prove important — the movie sees the capacity to be affected by death as indispensable to one’s humanity.

Dillinger’s elusiveness is a public relations disaster for the FBI and for J. Edgar Hoover (Billy Crudup), who has been desperately trying to convince Congress to give him the funds to create a viable federal police force. Hoover dispatches the ambitious, determined Agent Melvin Purvis (Christian Bale) to head the FBI’s Chicago division, which will be dedicated solely to capturing Dillinger. Dillinger, meanwhile, appears to be more popular with Chicagoans than the G-men, no matter how many hysterical newsreels the latter release; a populist bank robber of sorts — he stops shy of giving his spoils to the poor, but he refuses to take money from the customers of the banks he robs — he hides out among the hoi polloi and carefully shepherds his public image.

Public Enemies gives Dillinger a love interest, a vulnerable coat check girl named Billie (Marion Cotillard), whom Dillinger swears to protect and never abandon. But if you work up an emotional investment in this romance, you’re fooling yourself. Their courtship is beautiful, in a way, but anything beautiful here is fated for destruction.

In a strange way, this is a political film. Its thesis is that a government will respond to an affront to its authority with thoughtless and arbitrary applications of power — passing laws, inventing bureaucracies, and legitimizing violence. It’s a short road from shooting a fleeing felon to storming a hideout without sufficient manpower because waiting for back-up risks embarrassment, or attempting to beat information out of a 100-pound woman, or — presumably — torturing prisoners on the shores of Cuba. Public Enemies‘ message is bleak: people cannot be trusted with a monopoly on force.

The movie dutifully recreates the famous moment when Dillinger allegedly strolled into the FBI’s “Dillinger Ward,” inquired as to the score of the baseball game, and strolled back out. But Mann makes the moment ugly rather than cool: the agents are fools, and Dillinger’s jaunt opens his eyes to the death and havoc that the manhunt for him has wreaked. That paves the way for the final scene, which you’re likely familiar with from history; the movie suggests that Dillinger knew exactly what he was walking into.

Because there’s no real entry point to the film, and because it takes such a distressing view of, oh, everything, Public Enemies is a bit of a cold experience — I admire it more than I love it. But I admire it a lot. Shot on gorgeous, fluid hi-def digital video, with expert performances from a dream cast, it’s Mann’s most thoughtful, most complete movie in years.

-- Eugene Novikov

Released:	2009
Starring:	Marion Cotillard, Christian Bale, Johnny Depp, Giovanni Ribisi, Steven Dorff, Billy Crudup
Directed by:	Michael Mann
Rated:	R