Breaking the banks

Michael Mann’s Public Enemies is an
audacious, exciting Depression-era crime film

DASHING DILLINGER: Depp

by MARK SLUTSKY

What sweet relief it was to see a smart, exciting and entirely adult-feeling genre film a couple days after sitting through the bloated, juvenile idiocy of Transformers, a movie that made me want to set fire to the movie screen, or possibly myself, in protest. Public Enemies is an engrossing work from director Michael Mann (Heat, The Insider, Miami Vice), a true artist whose cinematic sensibility can be felt in every scene. There are some things you might not like about this film, but it’s undeniably the work of one of Hollywood’s most visionary and original talents.

Public Enemies is set in the 1930s, during the period where celebrity bank robbers terrorized and thrilled the country with their exploits. Johnny Depp plays the dashing John Dillinger, who was perhaps the most famous of them all. A combination of smarts, chutzpah and charisma led to a truly unbelievable criminal career, with dozens of bank robberies and multiple prison escapes under his belt.

As Dillinger sprees his way across the Midwest, stealing cash money and the heart of Billie Frechette (Marion Cotillard of La Vie en rose), celebrated Bureau of Investigations officer Melvin Purvish (Christian Bale) is charged by his superior, J. Edgar Hoover (Billy Crudup), with hunting down America’s most popular criminal. It’s a set-up not unlike Mann’s Heat, with two coolly determined rivals slowly winding their way to a final confrontation.

The one thing that is bound to divide audiences about this film is Mann’s audacious use of high-definition video. Mann also employed this look in Miami Vice and Collateral, but for a period piece, it’s jarring, and that’s probably his point—to shake audiences out of their preconceptions of what the 1930s were supposed to look like. It can be distracting, but Mann composes some beautiful images, as well as some truly masterful set pieces. The agents’ raid on an inn late at night is truly breathtaking, and the sequence of Dillinger’s final night is brilliantly conceived and pieced together.

Public Enemies is unusually even-keeled for the kind of film it is; both of the main characters have their emotions under tight discipline and the filmmaking is equally controlled. For some, this might feel unsatisfactory, but taken on its own terms, this is one of the year’s great films.

PUBLIC ENEMIES IS NOW IN THEATRES