Film Review: Depp's Dillinger stands out in telling of criminal's love, death : GoMemphis.com

More a reverie of romantic banditry and paean to movie love than rat-a-tat-tat gangster yarn, director Michael Mann's dreamlike "Public Enemies" imagines the Depression-era "Golden Age of Bank Robbers" as the final, sputtering flame of American lone-wolf integrity and contrariness, extinguished by a lethal squall of FBI bullets and the windstorm profit margins of modern organized crime.

Grounded by Johnny Depp's relatively restrained and sometimes humorous star turn as the eloquently plain-spoken and charismatic gangster, John Dillinger, "Public Enemies" is both mesmerizing and disappointing. The more bloodthirsty fans of criminous cinema may be surprised that the expected violence is intermittent and -- to Mann's credit -- far from cathartic. During the opening jailbreak, when Dillinger lets a bullet-riddled comrade slip from his grasp, we sense he's still attached to the dead man by some psychic cord that will continue to unravel until the life force of this killer, media darling and folk hero is spent at the end of the movie, beneath the ironic and appropriate glow of a cinema marquee (Chicago's Biograph Theater, where Dillinger kept his bloody date with destiny on July 22, 1934).

The movie's already controversial high-definition video photography (overseen by Dante Spinotti, longtime Mann collaborator on "Heat," "The Insider" and other projects) adds to the impression that we are watching something brilliant flare out; patches of bright sunshine sometimes seem to burn the image. But the problem with the hi-def picture isn't that it's not as attractive as traditional film (although it's not); it's that the lightweight, portable cameras, which work well with available light, encourage Mann to shoot much of the story in a handheld, faux documentary manner. As a result, images seem captured rather than composed. On a breaking-news movie such as "Cloverfield," this approach makes sense, but it's weirdly incongruous when applied to something as clearly artificial as an artsy, major studio-sponsored period piece with a cast of superstars, including the glamorous Depp as "Public Enemy No. 1" and the Dark Knight himself, Christian Bale, as J. Edgar Hoover's top "G-Man," FBI agent Melvin Purvis.

Originally pitched by journalist Bryan Burrough as an HBO miniseries before he turned the material into a nonfiction best-seller, the book "Public Enemies" -- subtitled "America's Greatest Crime Wave and the Birth of the FBI, 1933-34" -- was published in 2004 and immediately became the definitive history of the era's most famous lawbreakers and lawmen, including Dillinger, Purvis, Hoover (played in the movie by Billy Crudup), "Baby Face" Nelson (Stephen Graham), the neglected Alvin Karpis (Giovanni Ribisi), "Pretty Boy" Floyd (Channing Tatum), the "Lady in Red" (Branka Katic), the Barker gang, Memphis-born "Machine Gun" Kelly and Bonnie and Clyde (who visited Memphis during their crime spree, according to Burrough). The latter three hoodlums didn't make the film; in fact, screenwriters Mann, Ronan Bennett and Ann Biderman inevitably have compressed, shuffled, romanticized, elided and ignored many of the facts in these hard, wild and (in many cases) short lives.

Even so, the movie -- already 140 minutes long -- gives the impression of something whittled down from a more monumental size during the editing process.

What isn't short-changed, and in fact takes center stage for much of the film, is the somewhat exaggerated love story between Dillinger and hat-check girl Billie Frechette, played by beautiful French actress Marion Cotillard, the Oscar-winning star of "La Vie en Rose" (the real-life Frechette favored "Max Factor pancake powder to cover acne scars," Burrough writes). Dillinger appears blissful when he's with Billie, but the couple seem to exist on the edge of the void (or at least Lake Michigan, at night); on the radio, another Billie, the tragic Billie Holiday, supplies their doomy theme songs (as does Diana Krall, who sings "Bye Bye Blackbird," which eventually is used to boldly cornball effect). Violence comes for both lovers; when the captive Frechette is brutalized by a police interrogator, the film makes the obligatory connection between Hoover's "war on crime" and the current "war on terror."

Of course, the central courtship in a Mann crime film (see also "Manhunter" and "Heat") is not that between a man and a woman but between the pursuer (the lawman) and the pursued (the criminal). Typically, these twinned men of violence demonstrate that opposites attract. Dillinger, the villain, is likable and spontaneous; during one heist, he offers his hat and coat to a chilly female hostage. Purvis, the so-called good guy, is dour and cold. He is at the vanguard of Hoover's "modern professional" approach to crimebusting, and thus in unintentional sympathy with the "scientific" approach to crime itself, as represented by mobster Frank Nitti (Bill Camp), who has no more use than the FBI for a headline-grabbing wild card like Dillinger.

The idea of the lone gangster as an anachronism to be washed away by the tide of progress has been a movie theme since at least the Raoul Walsh/James Cagney masterpiece "White Heat" in 1949. ("We're having a good time today, we ain't thinking about tomorrow," says Dillinger.) But Mann, who bookends his movie with murder, also has more profound notions in mind; the great theme of "Public Enemies" is the inevitability, finality and tragedy of death.

This becomes especially apparent after the movie is goosed in its second half by the FBI's famously bungled assault on the Little Bohemia gangster hideout in the Wisconsin woods. The nighttime chase and shootout that follows -- involving Dillinger, Purvis and the gleefully psychotic "Baby Face" Nelson -- is the most exciting action sequence in the movie, setting events in motion that lead to the finale in Chicago, where the betrayed Dillinger spends the last night of his life watching his final movie, "Manhattan Melodrama," with Clark Gable as a dapper gangster named "Blackie." Mann asks us to spend several minutes in our movie seat watching Dillinger in his movie seat watching Blackie, until the connection becomes almost mystical, as these myriad identities -- Depp, Dillinger, Gable, Blackie, us, them -- melt and merge, resulting in an emotional payoff that likely will resonate most powerfully with those afflicted with an incurable case of movie love. At the same time, the clips from "Manhattan Melodrama" demonstrate that in the golden age of Hollywood, even a relative journeyman like director W.S. Van Dyke could craft films of such silvery, shivery beauty as to make the habitué of the 21st century multiplex weep at the thought of what has been lost.

-- John Beifuss: 529-2394