Prince of Thieves

[July 1st, 2009]

Michael Mann’s vigorous John Dillinger picture Public Enemies contains an ecstatic visual flourish for nearly each of its 140 minutes—prison walls as stark as a Kafka castle, black Fords galloping through the night with deadly riders clinging to the sideboards, and everything speckled with a dusting of Tommy gun fire—but its best image is of a room whose occupants are politely seated. It’s a Chicago movie palace, where an FBI Most Wanted reel has instructed the audience to check the theater for recognizable bank robbers by looking to the left, then to the right. Every head swivels obediently—except for Johnny Depp’s Dillinger, who stares straight ahead, smirking in unconcealed delight. The shot is pinched from the tennis match in Hitchcock’s Strangers on a Train, and it delivers the same jolt: Only one man here bears watching.

That’s the movie’s story, and it’s sticking to it. Public Enemies is billed as a grudge match between Depp’s Dillinger and Christian Bale as Melvin Purvis, the ascendant G-man who was tasked with snuffing out the Great Depression crime wave, and eventually gunned down the gangster outside another Chicago theater, the Biograph. The biopic benefits from serendipitous timing: With a nationwide release two days after Bernie Madoff’s sentencing, it is poised to respond to the current infamy of bankers with the story of people who became famous by sticking up reviled financial institutions. But Mann conceived the project well before the latest stock-market crash, and he isn’t invested in sounding populist themes, or in arranging a balanced standoff between cops and robbers. Instead, he is resurrecting the legend of a singular personality. “We rob banks,” Bonnie and Clyde crowed during their 1967 escapades. In Public Enemies, there is no “we.” John Dillinger stands—and sits and runs and escapes and dies—alone. He robs banks. Everyone else is just trying to catch up.

“What do you want?” Dillinger’s best moll, Billie Frechette (Marion Cotillard), asks him in bed. “Everything,” he says. “Right now.” (He is not, presumably, speaking in the immediate context, where he is portrayed as a considerate paramour.) Depp, however, doesn’t emit greed so much as a pensive anticipatory regret that he will never have everything, and devilish pride that he’s gotten away with so much. Depp is an actor whose best talent—a twitch around the mouth that says he’s two steps ahead of everyone else—has often been wasted on roles that ask him to be merely bizarre, but here he is allowed his quickness. In the film’s peak sequences, including a breathtakingly choreographed jailbreak, Mann builds suspense simply by cutting to his star’s face, so we can wonder (along with everyone else) what he’s plotting next.

Other characters come drifting in and out of Dillinger’s orbit: Peter Gerety steals his scenes as a lawyer who has played tonsil hockey with the Blarney Stone, while Stephen Graham (previously known as the sidekick worried about “zee Germans” in Snatch) reinvents Baby Face Nelson as a fizzing psychotic trapped in a permanent James Cagney impression. The strongest supporting work is accomplished by Cotillard as a flinty dame who longs to fully trust a man, and is never sure whether Dillinger is that man until the final, ruinous shot. Billy Crudup adds a clever J. Edgar Hoover routine—as a young pup, he’s already begun to look and sound like a sick bulldog. As for Bale, he’s humorless as always, but his dead fish eyes do underline the gulf of wits between him and his quarry.

Public Enemies moves at an electric-wire tempo, and its gleaming Midwest winterscapes single-handedly justify Mann’s belief in high-definition video. It’s all nearly enough to make you forget that the movie isn’t about anything, except perhaps the pleasure of losing yourself in the pictures. John Dillinger was a legend once, but he may now be best known as the poor schmuck John Cusack memorializes in a High Fidelity speech outside the Biograph: “All he wanted to do was go to the movies.” After seeing him grinning at the screen, you can hardly blame him.