Public Enemies

Bryan Burrough's nifty book Public Enemies: America's Greatest Crime Wave and the Birth of the FBI 1933-1934 is filed with fascinating characters and daring capers. John Dillinger, J. Edgar Hoover, Bonnie and Clyde, Pretty Boy Floyd, Baby Face Nelson, Melvin Purvis, and the underrated criminal mastermind Alvin "Creepy" Karpis. The Kansas City Massacre, Little Bohemia, the Crown Point jail break. A director could make a dozen different movies utilizing different narrative and thematic angles from this material. Judging by the two and half hour running time and the numerous failed digressions, it seems that Michael Mann tried to make all of those movies at the same time. Parts of Public Enemies seem to be about J. Edgar Hoover's clever exploitation of the 30s-era bank robber epidemic to expand the power of the nascent F.B.I. Other parts frame the antics of Dillinger and company as the last gasp of a free-wheeling criminal underworld, soon to be crushed by increasingly organized crime and professionalized law enforcement. Sometimes, the movie's about John Dillinger's relationship to his celebrity, which grew into legend before his very eyes. Most of the time, it seems to be about the love between Dillinger and his devoted girlfriend, Billie Frechette. Mann would have been well-served to pick one these strands with an eye towards creating a cohesive hole. As it stands, the tangential style crowds all of these notions and more to the margins, leaving nothing to fill the center of the frame.

No director has taken to digital cameras with the enthusiasm and skill of Michael Mann, and Public Enemies unsurprisingly benefits from Mann's embrace of the technology. Digital film and handheld cameras give the film an immediacy that is often difficult to achieve in a period piece. The performances are generally solid. Depp's Dillinger is a typical cauldron of brooding charisma, but the movie is so busy that his terse opaquacy never becomes accessible. Marion Cotillard is surprisingly affecting in the usually thankless role of devoted lady friend. Christian Bale's G-Man Melvin Purvis throws around a lot of disapproving glares and affects a Carolina drawl adequately The only guys having any real fun are Stephen Graham in a sadly underdeveloped role as Baby Face Nelson, and Billy Crudup, whose J. Edgar Hoover speaks with that great, extinct accent that olde timey radio announcers used. The story of how Hoover rode the 30s crime wave to power unprecedented for a bureaucrat is a fascinating one, and with Crudup's delightfully idiosyncratic take on the character, its easy to imagine one of the several great movies that Public Enemies could have been.

Instead of any of those movies, Michael Mann's inability to find a consistent point of view leaves us with a competently exectued police procedural. Even with scenes that gesture towards Dillinger's singular place in American criminal history, including one sequence of Dillinger looking at a wall full of newspaper clippings about himself that strongly echoes a similar scene in Mann's similarly unfocused Ali, there isn't much here in the way of insight into the Dillinger phenomenon or the experiences of those Depression-era criminals. Change the character names, turn the Tommy guns into AK-47s and the De Soto's into Honda Accords, and Public Enemies would be an unremarkable tale of cops and robbers.