"Public Enemies," Universal Pictures, 2009

My friend Sean Burns, the Philadelphia Weekly film critic, recently noted that Mann's latest movie is a rare summer blockbuster without any establishing shots. That's not strictly accurate (Mann does offer a few sweeping shots of Chicago streets packed with gleaming black cars and the like), but it's true to the spirit of the movie, which is at once intimate and opaque. Like so many Mann movies, "Public Enemies" puts us as close to its main characters' bodies as it can while simultaneously and paradoxically maintaining a respectful, even borderline scientific, detachment. It luxuriates in the present tense, refusing to hang labels on anybody (Mann's heroes rush through backstory monologues and often seem faintly bored by having to provide them) and insisting that we project our personalities and concerns onto Dillinger, G-Man Melvin Purvis (Christian Bale) and company.

Contemporary sentiment dismisses such an approach as shallow, flashy, even cold; I prefer to think of it as respectfully rigorous, a means of demanding imaginative involvement from moviegoers that tend to get pissy when movies don't tell them exactly what to think and feel. (It's no accident that one of Mann's signature shots is a close-up taken from just behind a character's ear, the rest of the widescreen frame filled by out-of-focus negative space. It's intimate yet also intentionally off-putting; it denies us a view of the character's face, thereby forcing us to guess what they're thinking and feeling.)

Despite a wealth of period detail and a few thematically apt timeline markers, such as the creation of the modern FBI (characterized here as a power grab by a then-young bureaucrat named J. Edgar Hoover, played by Billy Crudup as a power-hungry suit who uses PR the way Dillinger uses a Tommy gun), this is not the sweeping, “Godfather”-style historical epic promised in trailers and TV ads, nor is it a guns-a-blazin’ action picture. Though the shootout sequences are predictably loud, intense and immersive -- again, shades of “Heat” -- they take a back seat to scene after scene of Dillinger and his opposite, Purvis, just being. I can already hear the majority of viewers who were bored by Mann’s 2006 “Miami Vice” (one of my favorite movies from that year, and probably as close to a hazy-dreamy Wong Kar-wai movie as Hollywood is likely to get) griping that there’s too much talkin’, not enough shootin.’ I wouldn’t presume to claim that “Public Enemies” is as intricately wrought as say, “The Last of the Mohicans” or “Manhunter,” films in which every scene, line, shot and cut is deployed for a singular, clearly defined purpose. The FBI stuff in “Public Enemies,” for instance, is unsatisfying because -- except for Stephen Lang’s rough-hewn right-hand man, who gets the film’s book-closing final scene -- Purvis and the gang of Texas Rangers he brings in as muscle are pretty standard goons-squad cops, humorless brutes with T-square jaws that don’t have a tenth the inner life of Depp’s Dillinger. That might be Mann’s point, but he didn’t need a parallel narrative to make it.

These inclinations may explain Mann’s total commitment to video. He’s virtually unique among A-list auteurs shooting in high-def in that not only does he not try to make it look like film, he goes out of his way to call attention to the fact that it’s video. Why? A theory: besides indicating a true artist's respect for the properties of the medium he’s chosen (painters don’t break their backs trying to make watercolor resemble oil paint), Mann is looking to amp up immediacy and shatter the usual subliminal reassurances that we’re watching a movie and it’s not “really” happening. Film is about things that happen to other people, usually people who are a lot richer and prettier than we are. Video is about what happens to us, at a birthday party or memorial service, in line at the bank, on the sidelines at a news event. The video-ness of the video in “Public Enemies” is discombobulating in a good way; when we look at all these handsome men and women in their period clothes, driving their period cars and speaking their period slang, we’re not seeing something that happened long ago, something safely removed from our own experience. It’s happening right now, live, right in front of us. Not many big summer films help us see familiar situations through fresh eyes. “Public Enemies” is one such movie: perhaps not minor Mann at all, but something major, a work that needs to be seen, absorbed and argued about more than once.

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