He Robbed Banks...and We cheered

Michael Mann’s Public Enemies is a sharp and fresh look at a romanticized traditional American genre: The gangster flick. Taking its cues from Bogart and Clark Gable alike, the film’s main character is hopelessly fond of these actors’ on-screen personas. He is a bank robber, an idealistic, maybe even romantic one at that, but he is nothing more nothing less.

Public Enemies focuses sharply on the brief crime-spree of legendary bank-robber John Dillinger, played by Johnny Depp. It is not a traditional bio-pic, or a summer action flick for that matter. What director Michael Mann does instead, he does with great discipline. He portrays Dillinger, during the two weeks or so that the film covers, as a bank robber, and nothing more. “I rob banks” Milliner says to his lover Billie (Marion Cotillard) with enough confidence to bet the house on it. We aren’t sure of his motivation, except that we suspect he might have something against the institution itself seeing as how he never steals from the customers’ pockets. We aren’t sure of his background either, but according to Mann it doesn’t really matter that has one. What matters is that the audience shrugs off its rememberance of the Robin Hood legend that he has become, to view him as he really was. Unabashedly cool, yes. But oh so tragic as well.
The film opens with a jail-breakout sequence that is unfortunately not as engrossing as it needs to be to get the story rolling. From here we are thrust into the crime saga of ambitions for his future. All he seems to take pride in is doing something and doing it extremely well.

Christian Bale co-stars as Melvin Purvis, working for the newly formed FBI. Purvis is obsessed with fighting criminals like Dilinger and his work becomes centered around apprehending him. He has admiration for his boss J. Edgar Hoover, who dreams of an FBI with black-tie officials, and clean-cut accountants. Purvis however, wants men who have actually been in gunfights, and when the feds’ screw-up leads to a Dilinger prison break and dead civilians, Purvis starts to feel the heavy toll of hunting a man like Dilinger

This plot does meander, and doesn’t always earn many of its emotional arcs it tries to implement, but it is a film of mostly crisp story-telling. The film is gorgeous to look at, with the utilization of digital hand-held shots to tell a story set in the 1930’s creating a breath-taking juxtaposition. I suppose that even though I wasn’t always excited at what was around the next corner, or even hugely invested in its characters, the film did what it was supposed to do anyway. It showed me Dilinger, at least Mann’s interpretation. Take it or leave it.

3/5

This one goes right for the tear ducts...

My Sister’s Keeper takes a sharp left turn from the typical summer fun at the box-office and delivers a story laden with emotional baggage and a plot that is unavoidably audience-grabbing. From the film’s opening monologue, we learn that 11-year old Anna was designed at birth with a very specific purpose. She was born through in-vitro fertilization and used as a source for spare parts for her leukemic 16-yr. old sister Kate. So far, Anna and her parents have succeeded in keeping Kate alive who was supposed to be dead at age 5. Anna however, is starting to become fed up with the whole thing. Bright, and endearing Anna (Abigail Breslin) finds a local attorney boasting a 90% success rate (Alec Baldwin) in order to sue her parents for “medical emancipation”. In short Anna wants to be able to make her own decisions with her own body. She wants a shot at having a somewhat normal childhood and a future that won’t be riddled with medical problems brought on by her parents’ decision to use her.

Anna’s mother Sarah (Cameron Diaz) also happens to be an attorney who is not currently practicing. Her desire to move every mountain and win every battle inevitably gets in the way of her dying daughter’s wishes and Anna’s as well. The family seems to be picture-perfect if only somewhat enigmatic being that some of them are rather under-developed characters in the film.

I am afraid that many people will write off this film because they believe it to be contrived, emotionally manipulative, and too close to genre norms. They would perhaps be partially right, but to completely dismiss this film would be equally unfortunate. The script does a great job of giving us scenes that are emotionally jarring without constantly inserting dialogue that tells us what to think as an audience. Each scene is paced in such a way that just as we begin to feel we have pegged a family member down, the screen fades to black and we are given a different dose of the complexities of this family’s struggle through a different person’s perspective. The film’s “pro-life/pro-choice” themes are clear but we are not hit over the head by director Nick Cassavetes and told what to think. The younger actors in this film are the most consistently strong performances throughout. They virtually never step wrong, and carry the weight of the entire story. An incredibly strong supporting performance is offered by Joan Cusack as the judge hearing Anna’s case. Cusack plays the part of a mother who has recently lost her 12 year old daughter, with intense yet restrained emotional gusto.

I won’t deny that many of these scenes do seem to have been manufactured in a lab long before they ever got on-screen for the sole purpose of hitting us right in the tear ducts. Yes, I’m warning you, the room will get very dusty during this one, so make sure you have your Kleenex box handy. In the end, this film is meditative enough that audiences will not feel as if they are being completely spoon-fed source material to crank up their emotions. The filmmakers manage to take highly thematic material and show remarkable restraint in displaying it.

3.5/5