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