"Public Enemies"

By David Hudson on 06/27/2009

[Updated through 6/30]

"Public Enemies" opens on Wednesday not only in the US but also in the UK. As mentioned earlier, the trades' reviews are in (Hollywood Reporter, Screen and Variety), and now, the Guardian's run a special issue of its "Film & Music" weekly: John Patterson profiles Michael Mann, while David Thomson looks back on the director's career - and lists his top 10 gangster movies.

Jeff Guinn looks back to the 30s and notes that "the idea of swashbuckling crooks sticking it to the rich and powerful epitomised the daydreams of working-class America. It was what people wanted to believe, and the media provided the stories to reinforce the myth."

"This month," notes Joe Queenan, "the British Film Institute hosts a series of high-quality gangster films made between the Great Depression and the end of the millennium. It is entirely possible that the scheduling of the series is a deliberate commentary on the times, as the public has long preferred ruthless criminals who rob with a Tommy gun to weasel-like MPs who rob with a fountain pen."

Meanwhile, in Time, Richard Corliss: "Mann, from his debut feature film, 'Thief,' through those exemplary TV series 'Miami Vice' and 'Crime Story' to his cop-and-crook, cat-and-mouse 'Heat' with Pacino and De Niro, has fashioned a body of work that puts him up there with Martin Scorsese as American entertainment's definitive chronicler of the underworld. This project promised to be the crowning achievement of a Chicago kid steeped in the lore and chivalric code of the bad guy. And moment by moment, it delivers details that seem true to the time... But all this docudrama grit allows for precious little dramatic juice."

"With its portrayal of two men clenched by obsession and its meticulous visual sheen, 'Public Enemies' plays as if it were intended to be a Michael Mann movie all along. But it got there the hard way." Mark Harris tells the story in the New York Times.

Ignatiy Vishnevetsky visited the set in Chicago last summer, took notes, and opens a series in The Auteurs' Notebook.

"'Dillinger's Wild Ride' is, inevitably, a rehash of familiar stories about Dillinger's crime spree," writes Jonathan Yardley in the Washington Post. "But [author Elliot] Gorn - a professor of history at Brown University who has a particular interest in popular history and sports - tries hard to separate fact from myth, and he makes plausible arguments for why Dillinger captured the popular imagination."

Online browsing tip. Sean Axmaker captions a photo gallery for MSN: "Kiss Me Deadly: Hollywood's Baddest Screen Gangsters."

Update, 6/28: Rachel Abramowitz profiles Johnny Depp for the Los Angeles Times.

Updates, 6/29: "'Public Enemies' is a ravishing dream of violent gangster life in the 30s - not a tough, funny, and, finally, tragic dream like 'Bonnie and Clyde' but a flowing, velvety fantasia of the crime wave that mesmerized the nation early in the decade," writes David Denby in the New Yorker. "Yet, for all its skill, 'Public Enemies' is not quite a great movie. There's something missing - a sense of urgency and discovery, a more complicated narrative path, a shrewder, tougher sense of who John Dillinger is."

"As Andrew Dominik did with Jesse James," writes Nick Schager in Slant...

Mann envisions Dillinger less as a flesh-and-blood human being than as a near-supernatural archetype, and as in 'Assassination of Jesse James,' his initial means of achieving those ends involves pensive, haunting close-ups of the man set against expansive gray countryside backdrops. Mann idealizes Dillinger while recognizing that, in doing so, he's partaking in a long cinematic tradition. Yet until a finale in which Dillinger, while leaving a movie theater, is felled by cops working for Christian Bale's agent Melvin Purvis (who is handpicked by J Edgar Hoover to make headlines by capturing Dillinger and, in doing so, drum up public support for his stymied plans to create a federal police force), 'Public Enemies' only cursorily addresses its two opposite-sides-of-the-law protagonists' kindred relationship to the spotlight. The image of a captured Dillinger driving past cheering admirers lining the streets, or of Purvis and Hoover putting on a show for media cameras, certainly makes plain this subtext. Mann's interest in fully exploring such issues, however, is ultimately fleeting, the fame-related dynamic that's glimpsed now and again too faint to register as more than a tantalizing but underdeveloped suggestion.

"Michael Mann Week" is off and running at Radiator Heaven. Through July 4.

Capone talks with Mann for AICN.

Part 2 of Ignatiy Vishnevetsky's "Public Enemies" diary is up at The Auteurs' Notebook.

Online listening tip. It's Matt Singer and Alison Willmore Monday! "Michael Mann, Kathryn Bigelow... Tony Scott? It takes a certain type of action movie director to earn the love of the Film Comment crowd. This week on the IFC News podcast, we look at which action filmmakers are taken seriously as artists and why."

Updates, 6/30: "Johnny Depp and Michael Mann show us that we didn't know all about Dillinger," writes Roger Ebert in the Chicago Sun-Times. "We only thought we did. Here is an efficient, disciplined, bold, violent man, driven by compulsions the film wisely declines to explain. His gang members loved the money they were making. Dillinger loved planning the next job. He had no exit strategy or retirement plans.... This is very disciplined film."

"'Public Enemies' is a drab looking film," writes Karina Longworth at the SpoutBlog, "its shaky-cam aesthetic coming off as less considered - and far less explicable - than that of any number of indie dramas employing similar run-and-gun techniques on a millionth of this film's budget. Add in a wildly uneven performance style, an unnecessarily attenuated running time and a sound mix that's problematically muddy even after evidently excessive after-the-fact dubbing, and the result is a severely miscalculated marriage of style to subject."

"For an artist as history-obsessed as Michael Mann, it's a wonder he's made only three period films in 30 years," writes ST VanAirsdale at Movieline. :It's even more surprising how wildly their quality swings, from the dynamic, violent romance of 'The Last of the Mohicans' to the paper-thin biopic 'Ali' to this week's middling 'Public Enemies.' Mann's style may remain consistent throughout, offering his same moody riff on a classic American folk tale. But what happens when the filmmaker's even more preoccupying theme - crime, and the men who practice it - has its own stake in 'Enemies' John Dillinger myth? A schizoid mess, that's what."

"[F]or all its lush costumes (by Colleen Atwood) and game cast members, the movie has nothing new to tell us about John Dillinger, the birth of the FBI or the Depression that we haven't seen in countless better films," writes Alonso Duralde at MSNBC. "Even as a valentine to gangster movies, 'Public Enemies' leaves you wishing that you, like Dillinger on the last night of his life, were watching 'Manhattan Melodrama' instead."

[Photo: "Public Enemies," Universal Pictures, 2009]

Tags: Johnny Depp, Michael Mann, Public Enemies