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Michael Mann's Public Enemies, starring Johnny Depp
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For years now, Johnny Depp has done everything in his power to deny the fact that he’s a legitimate movie star. A glance at his curriculum vitae – Edward Scissorhands, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, Sweeney Todd – reveals an actor with an almost clinical obsession with de-beautifying his handsome features, as if there was an unwritten rule that a great actor cannot, by definition, be a sex symbol.
In 2003, Depp was named the “Sexiest Man Alive” by People magazine; the same year he hit box office pay dirt with the first installment in the Pirates of the Caribbean franchise, a movie in which he hid behind more mascara than Bret Michaels wore during the height of Poison’s “Open Up and Say…Ahh!” tour..jpg)
It thus comes as a bit of a shock to see Johnny’s actual face appear again on the screen as legendary bank robber John Dillinger, absent any prosthetics or other tricks of the makeup artists. From the first frames of Public Enemies, it’s clear we’re in the presence of a movie star, and a good one at that.
Dillinger’s real-life mug could hardly have won him any Sexiest Man awards. His wide forehead sloped up severely to a receding hairline, his hair cropped high above pointed ears with a pencil thin mustache framing a crooked mouth and cleft chin. Warren Oates bore the closest physical resemblance to Dillinger in John Milius’ 1973 biopic, and no one can match Lawrence Tierney’s 1945 portrayal in pound-for-pound menace. But Dillinger was also a charismatic man, with the kind of folk hero status normally reserved for movie stars or ballplayers, and Depp plays his charm to the hilt, at times to the point of over-romanticization. “We’re here for the bank’s money, not yours,” he remarks to a petrified customer, clearly channeling his inner Warren Beatty from Bonnie and Clyde.
Crime may not pay, but it’s certainly exhilarating, at least in a Michael Mann movie that is. Public Enemies offers further proof that nobody is better than Mann among modern directors at staging action sequences, and specifically at gunfights. As in his masterpiece Heat, the gunshots just sound more real than your average movie. The FBI’s raid on the Little Bohemia Lodge, where Dillinger and his gang holed up in April 1934, is a virtuoso scene, shot by Mann from a myriad of camera angles, with Depp waking from a sound sleep to bullets ripping through the cabin windows. Despite a wounded shoulder, he grabs a tommy gun and begins blasting, the orange glow from the gunfire illuminating Dante Spinotti’s noirish cinematography like a bonfire on a moonless night.
The meat of the film’s story revolves around the love affair between Dillinger and Billie Frechette, played by the French actress Marion Cotillard, who won the 2007 Best Actress Oscar for her portrayal of singer Edith Piaf in La Vie en Rose. She is perfectly cast as the part French/part Menominee Indian hat check girl, her waif-like features and tremulous voice recalling such Depression-era starlets as Myrna Loy and Sylvia Sidney.
Like Heat, there is also a cop/criminal storyline, with Christian Bale portraying FBI agent Melvin Purvis, whom J. Edgar Hoover put in charge of the Chicago district office in 1932. Bale gives a wooden performance, albeit in a wooden role, his Southern drawl having all the inflection of a bored telephone operator. More interesting is Stephen Lang as Charles Winstead, the laconic Texan who put three of the five fatal bullets in Dillinger, but he isn’t given enough screen time to be an appropriate foil to Depp’s dominating presence.
The brilliance of Heat was that equal care was given to developing Pacino’s cop and De Niro’s criminal, and even if we couldn’t help but root for the “bad guy” to get away at the end, there was a wholly satisfying symmetry to its fatalistic conclusion. Lacking a strong protagonist/antagonist interplay, Public Enemies leaves us no choice but to revel in its criminal violence, even as the corpses become too high to count.
Dillinger was ultimately gunned down while leaving Chicago’s Biograph Theater, and Mann wisely takes his time with the climatic sequence. The picture that evening was Manhattan Melodrama, starring Clark Gable as crooked gambler Blackie Gallagher, and the lingering close-ups of Depp’s wistful face suggest that Dillinger conceived of himself in terms of popular superstardom and may have been influenced by the very gangster movies he helped to inspire.
One can only hope that life won’t once again imitate art and that the country’s next John Dillinger or Whitey Bulger won’t be similarly inspired by Public Enemies.
Public Enemies is currently playing at the Majestic 10 in Williston, the Roxy in Burlington, the Palace 9 in South Burlington, the Sunset Drive-In in Colchester, and Essex Cinemas in Essex Jct.
The trailer for Public Enemies:
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