I ended up seeing Michael Mann’s Public Enemies two days ago by accident, rather than design. Exceptionally long queues and a sold out screening of The Hangover meant my cinema party and I had to make a quick decision on a replacement – and lured by the talent (and the pretty faces) of Johnny Depp and Christian Bale, it wasn’t exactly a difficult choice. And since there was no build up, I wasn’t exactly sure what I was expecting but it certainly wasn’t what I saw: a curiously vacuous, introverted and oddly unsatisfying film.
In the film, Depp plays John Dillinger, a 1930s Robin Hood-style bank robber who was enormously popular with the public – unsurprisingly, given that the USA was in the depths of the Great Depression at the time. Bale plays Melvin Purvis, the FBI agent assigned by J. Edgar Hoover (played fantastically here by Billy Cudrup) to catch him. It’s very fast-paced and Mann packs in a lot of exquisitely choreographed machine gun battles, but there’s something about Public Enemies that never really comes together. Its many strands exist in parallel and when they intersect, there’s no cohesion; the tension between Depp and his pursuer should be palpable throughout the film (even though they only share one scene together) but they’re curiously detached, both failing to invest much in the relationship. Compare this, say, to No Country for Old Men, in which Javier Bardem’s psychotic killer and Tommy Lee Jones’ Sheriff never actually meet, but yet somehow the relationship between the chased and the chaser is both moving and disturbing.
In the wake of such disappointment, I was more than a little surprised to see that it had been given two five star reviews, from Empire magazine and Film 4. According to Empire, it is “intelligent and absorbing”, but I wouldn’t call it either of those things. For me, the most absorbing element was the stylish cinematography, and even that was at times impressive, at others just a little irritating and empty. I didn’t think it was especially intelligent either; there’s a half-hearted attempt at the start to make Dillinger’s love interest, Billie Frechette (played by Marion Cotillard), seem like a strong woman but all signs of her independent streak are vanquished when he gives her a fur coat and, to the sound of dramatic music, she is won over and is transformed into a background figure. She is, we’re supposed to believe, Dillinger’s reason for living but the shallow-ness of their love story makes this difficult to digest.
Broadsheet reviews have been more temperate, with the Guardian’s Peter Bradshaw giving it three stars and both The Times and the Telegraph awarding it just two. But my favourite review of Public Enemies comes from the always brilliant Little White Lies – the best film magazine in the UK, in my opinion. I agree with LWL’s Anton Bitel that there’s much to admire in the contemporary parallels that the indirectly film draws between the 1930s and the late 2000s, but that this relevance is undermined by the implausability of its romance and the often over-stylised camera work. At its heart, this is a work with great potential – Dillinger’s dramatic real life story and Mann’s pedigree as a filmmaker assure that. But this potential is ultimately unrealised, resulting in a flawed plot and a film that takes itself too seriously to be fully engaging.
