Johnny Depp becomes 'Public Enemy' no 1
By Joyce Glasser - 02/07/2009
The great depression era bank robber, John Dillinger, became an icon for the unemployed, down trodden public who blamed the rich bankers and government for their plight. You can see where the producers are heading in our own credit crunch by casting the charismatic, popular actor Johnny Depp as the charismatic, folk hero, Dillinger.
Michael Mann’s film Public Enemies is, however, slightly at odds with the publicity drive that equates Dillinger with Robin Hood. Although, in the movie we hear Dillinger reject kidnapping because the public don’t like it and he depends on the public to hide him, Dillinger spends the heist money on clothes, cars, women and whiskey, not on charity. The movie also shows that his debt to the public doesn’t prevent him from using innocent bank customers as human shields or leaving passers-by to be gunned down while he escapes in the crossfire.
You can’t make a movie about John Dillinger without including his nemesis, the agent Melvin Purvis appointed by J Edgar Hoover (an excellent Billy Crudup) to capture Public Enemy No 1. Against fierce opposition from anti-Federalist polititians, Hoover and Purvis organise the squad that was to become the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) I to facilitate Dillinger’s capture across state borders. Purvis’s challenge was to find the few men in the country with sufficient training to outwit Dillinger, using ‘modern’ techniques, including blackmail, phone tapping and physical violence.
It was fitting that Dillinger’s betrayal (by illegal immigrant Anna Sage) and death occur as he leaves the Biograph Cinema where he had watched Clark Gable in the gangster movie Manhattan Melodrama. The America of the 1930s was all about the depression, femmes fatales, gangsters, cinema and architecture and so is Michael Mann’s new film, Public Enemies.
In the film, Dillinger (Depp) allows himself a rare smile when Gable says “Die the way you live, all of a sudden; don’t drag it out” perhaps imagining himself, as a movie star, uttering the same prescient lines. If he couldn’t become a film star Dillinger nonetheless became a cinema legend right up there with Clark Gable. Films about or that included John Dillinger were released in 1945, 1957, 1959, 1969, 1973, 1979 and a television movie with Mark Harmon in 1991.
Now Michael Mann, who, with Thief, Manhunter, Heat, the Insider, Collateral and Miami Vice, has never strayed far from cops and robbers, has entered the field. Filming (with digital cameras) in actual Dillinger haunts in Indiana, where he was born and jailed, Wisconsin, where the actual Little Bohemia Lodge shoot out is reconstructed, and Chicago, Illinois home of the Biograph cinema, Mann is aiming for authenticity from the way the actors hold their period guns to the way they dressed, to the art deco banks they robbed.
While the action sequences capture the violence of the period the film sheds little light on Dillinger and even less on his colleagues who we never get to know. Even Johnny Depp is wasted in a role that doesn’t play to his strengths. Moreover, while at 45 Johnny Depp has the looks to play a man of 35, Dillinger died at 31, his youth being part of the legend. Christian Bale captures the frustration of Purvis leading a squad of amateurs in his battle against a pro, but his subdued portrayal of this troubled man on a mission (Purvis committed suicide years later) doesn’t offer any further insights or angles on his character. The movie impresses, but doesn’t emotionally engage us, despite a embellished love story between Dillinger and his moll, Billie Frechette (Marion Cotillard, of La Vie en Rose). We know the ending, and the journey is not as enjoyable as it ought to be.
In one scene where Dillinger is being driven to prison (from which he would again escape) the streets are lined with people cheering and clamouring to get a glimpse of this mythical figure. Dillinger/Depp raises his hand-cuffed hands to wave to his fans. This image stayed with me as I exited the cinema at noon to see a crowd of fans already lined up in the blistering heat to get a glimpse of Johnny Depp at the Premiere that evening. There was something pleasingly nostalgic and reassuring about crowds that still, in our age of home movies, videogames, Blackberries, Twitter and Face Book, gather to honour their hero, whether they be the daring rebel himself or the handsome actor playing him.