The role of the infamous bank robber John Dillinger fits Johnny Depp as elegantly as one of the many finely tailored suits that he sports throughout Public Enemies, Michael Mann’s epic gangster picture. That’s because the film—scripted by Ronan Bennett, Mann and Ann Biderman—has obviously been tailored to trade on Depp’s screen persona: the confident man of few words with the dashing good looks, the always present innate coolness and, above all, the masculine sensitivity that is irresistible to the ladies (and the gay men). The result is an antihero glamorized in much the way that Clark Gable’s bad-boy character was romanticized in Manhattan Melodrama, the 1934 gangster picture that Dillinger watched just before being shot down by FBI agents outside Chicago’s legendary Biograph theatre.
Dillinger’s romance with Billie Frechette (played by La vie en Rose Oscar winner Marion Cotillard) has also been heightened to the point where it becomes the central motivating force for Depp’s character and for the movie. Mann’s film, in bringing the doomed romance of the bank-robbing but innately decent Robin Hood figure to the forefront of the story, opts for the time-tested old-fashioned approach of dozens of classic movies from the Hollywood canon. Fresh it isn’t, but audiences hungry for an emotionally gratifying, familiar moviegoing experience after a spate of spiritless, characterless special-effects blockbusters will be particularly satisfied by Public Enemies. Mann has eschewed his signature battery of editing tics and curbed his propensity for in-your-face graphic violence. (The stylized violence here is more in keeping with any number of cops and robbers movies.) He brings his considerable gifts to bear on what is essentially a traditional crime drama with a romantic flair—a mixture of The Untouchables and Bugsy. The film offers audiences a great time, letting them luxuriate in a plethora of melodramatic flourishes, the whole awash in vintage Billie Holiday tunes and intricate period detail—and it could just as easily been titled Chicago Melodrama.
Depp’s Dillinger is portrayed as a gentleman bandit—an honorable thief with standards and a loner’s sure sense of confidence, and an effortless womanizer. We see him during a bank robbery tell a poor farmer to put his money away and give up his expensively tailored coat to a shivering female bank hostage. When he meets Billie, working as a coat-check girl, nothing will keep him from his girl. The two dance to a sumptuous version of “Bye Bye Blackbird” by Diana Krall (glimpsed on the bandstand), which immediately becomes “their song.” The romance is on and, throughout the rest of the picture, it’s back and forth between Cotillard crying for her “Chonny” in her thick French accent and Depp pulling off one daring feat after another.
Prissy, tight-mouthed FBI director J. Edgar Hoover (Billy Crudup, in a nice, cryptic performance) —forever followed by smirking number two Clyde Tolson (Chandler Williams) and a phalanx of good-looking G-men—knows he needs to bring down Public Enemy number one in order to solidify his power and that of his newly formed organization. After a series of setbacks, Melvin Purvis (Christian Bale, still intense but more subdued than one of his blockbuster characters) seems about to do that when he comes briefly face-to-face with his archenemy during Dillinger’s brief incarceration—only to see himself and the feds embarrassed time and time again until the infamous Lady in Red comes forward to tip him off to Dillinger’s whereabouts.
The overfamiliarity of the story (the material has been the basis for at least five movies) is offset by Mann’s elegant technique—Dillinger’s arrival in a rainstorm by night at Indiana for transport to a prison is thrillingly shot and edited, as is the shoot-out at Wisconsin’s Little Bohemia Lodge (yet another beautiful night sequence). Ostensibly, Dillinger’s downfall is caused by the syndicate turning its back on him when his notoriety interferes with their profits, but we are guided to believe that his overconfidence and his inability to let go of his Big Love are the things that really sealed his fate.
The movie would have us believe that on the afternoon of his death Dillinger walked unnoticed into the office of the task force designed to bring him down, gazing at photographs of himself and his mostly dead compatriots, even engaging distracted policemen in conversation before strolling out again. Later, Mann even gives Dillinger dying words that a compassionate G-man secretly imparts to a tearful Billie. Naturally, this being a supreme example of revisionist history, they have to do with Their Song. It hardly matters that there’s not been much heat between Depp and Cotillard in evidence or that there’s not much fealty at this point to the facts.
Like Robert Mitchum, James Dean, Greta Garbo and a few others in their heyday, Depp makes for a smashing antihero who audiences won’t just mind seeing die onscreen, but will actually revel in. Depp is a singular, mesmerizing screen presence who has yet to have a single on-screen love interest who can compete with the audiences’ moony affection for him. Mann knows this, and though he stuffs this vastly entertaining epic with a raft of familiar character actors (everyone from Lili Taylor to Stephen Dorff), it all comes down to those smoldering eyes. When Depp wailed “I’m burning for you baby” at one point in Cry Baby, he was speaking for his worshipful audience. Lurching around in the Pirate movies; supremely evil in Sweeney Todd; weirdly childlike in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory; and geeky and phobic in Sleepy Hollow, Public Enemies once again gives us the dreamy Depp of Finding Neverland and Chocolat.
I’m burning for you, baby.
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