Public Enemies (2009)

I'm not sure what I think about Michael Mann anymore. He was responsible for two of the most stylish and influential television series of the 1980s, Miami Vice and Crime Story. He started his big-screen career with a bang with the hypnotic Thief and carried through on its promise with Manhunter and Heat. He was still in good form on The Insider. (I have not seen The Last of the Mohicans, Ali, or the feature version of Miami Vice.) He has a tremendous visual gift, both pictorial and energetic, and is especially good with the expressive uses of color cinematography. He began as a writer and can be a good one, as he demonstrated with the screenplay for Heat.

And yet, Collateral was just a genre doodle with a few good performances and scenes, and the most recent Mann film, Public Enemies, is far worse than that.

Bryan Burrough's book Public Enemies is a complex, thrilling, contrapuntal account of the simultaneous and overlapping careers of six of the great American criminal gangs in 1933 and 1934, and the sometimes laughably inept attempts of the nascent FBI to bring them down. I can't recommend the book highly enough; it's got everything. Including, apparently, too much plot for Michael Mann, who stripped the story down from six plot-lines to one -- John Dillinger's. The Pretty Boy Floyd and Baby Face Nelson stories only come in as throwaways, with their facts completely altered; Alvin Karpis of the Barker-Karpis gang makes a brief appearance; Machine Gun Kelly and Bonnie and Clyde are not mentioned at all.

Mann shows a contempt for his factual sources that is not justified by what he puts up on the screen. I have some problems that way with Bonnie and Clyde, too, particularly the over-glamorization of the ratty-in-real-life protagonists, yet there is no doubt that what Arthur Penn created is a great movie. Public Enemies takes the wrong lessons from Bonnie and Clyde, putting slick photography, studied performances, and meticulous period re-creations in the service of a meretricious re-writing of history, and without gaining any entertainment value thereby. Mann pumps up the violence, pumps up the body counts, glosses up everything, and yet the result is still deeply dull.

If a film-making team wanted to stick to Dillinger, OK, but the result would be far more interesting if they followed the facts where they lead, and made the movie in a grungier, messier, less perfectionist style. Think The Honeymoon Killers, or Altman's Thieves Like Us; but Mann could never direct a film like that. Mann puts Dillinger in a glass case, and for all his camera dynamism, the movie is dead on the screen. He wastes his most game performer, Marion Cotillard, by re-conceptualizing Dillinger's moll Billie Frechette as a comparative innocent, when in fact she was a gold-digger who was already married to a convicted robber! That is a lot more of a compelling character proposition; and I have no doubt that Cotillard could have played it, and that it might have sparked Depp to better work. He's fine physically as Dillinger -- unlike Clyde Barrow, John D. was a wickedly handsome, well-dressed guy -- but both he and Christian Bale as G-man Melvin Purvis are stiff as period actors, not loose and alive the way you need to be to make the past into a present.

Given that this is a big-budget film, it represents a criminal waste of resources. A film like Michael Cimino's Heaven's Gate is often criticized for wasting resources; and indeed, it went ridiculously over its already astronomical budget, and on a scene-by-scene basis, it doesn't "work" any better than this movie of Michael Mann's. And yet -- it is personal, it has compulsion written all over it, it is what Pauline Kael used to admiringly call a "folly." That is one point on which I utterly agree with Kael; she memorably said that "The tragedy of movie history is not the follies that get made, it's the follies that don't get made." (Come back, Pola X, all is forgiven!)

Public Enemies is something of a disaster. But it is not that kind of a folly, alas.