Public Enemies (2009)

Universal Pictures

d. Michael Mann; pr. Michael Mann, Kevin Misher; scr. Ronan Bennett, Michael Mann, Ann Biderman; bk. Bryan Burrough; ph. Dante Spinotti; ed. Jeffrey Ford, Paul Rubell; m. Elliot Goldenthal; cast. Johnny Depp, Christian Bale, Marion Cotillard, Giovanni Ribisi, James Russo, David Wenham, Channing Tatum, Billy Crudup (140 mins)

Johnny Depp, Public Enemy #1

Johnny Depp is the finest actor to emerge from what is known as Gen-X, the generation that replaced the baby boomers. 

Beginning with his work on the modish but successful 1980s television series 21 Jump Street, the actor went from small roles for such as Oliver Stone in Platoon to delightful, charming work in such as Benny & Joon (opposite emerging Gen-X talents Mary Stuart Masterson and Aidan Quinn) before developing one of the most interesting and successful of contemporary actor-director partnerships with Tim Burton on Edward Scissorhands, Ed Wood, Charlie & the Chocolate Factory, Sweeney Todd and the forthcoming Alice in Wonderland.  However it was his rogue-ish work on the popular Pirates of the Caribbean series that catapulted him to US superstar status.  Depp is one of the few American superstars to simultaneously appeal to both the mainstream and the independent sensibilities, effortlessly switching between big-budget and avant-garde work, his presence alone guaranteeing a return on whatever he chooses to do.  In that, he is an actor of enormous power, somewhat belied by a humbling nonchalant low-profile in comparison to his Hollywood peers.

However, Depp has a quality that few stars historically have had (and certainly almost unique amongst the crop of actors who now comprise Hollywood “royalty”) – the ability to submerge individual persona within the symbolic demands of the characterization.  There is a chameleon quality to Depp.  His personality is almost irrelevant, submerged within the characters he plays.  In much of his fantasy inspired work, when working in costume and make-up, Depp himself can be almost unrecognizable.  Indeed, when contrasting his work in Edward Scissorhands and Pirates of the Caribbean the transformation in characterization and makeup is so striking as to recall the work of silent actor Lon Chaney Jr.  Chaney was known as “the man of a thousand faces” for his ability to transform himself through heavy makeup into often hideously deformed and freakish characters (the full-grown son of dwarf parents, Chaney had a lifelong fascination with “freakism”).

There is perhaps only one other actor to match Depp’s ability to transform himself into a role: Russell Crowe. 

Recently seen as the journalist in State of Play, Crowe shot to fame first in his native Australia playing a neo-Nazi Melbourne skinhead in the controversial Romper Stomper, a role he prepared for by shaving his head, donning a swastika and walking into Melbourne bars to study people’s reaction.  Hollywood seized on Crowe after his Academy-Award winning work as the schizophrenic mathematician in Ron Howards’ A Beautiful Mind, after which he was contacted by Michael Mann to play the tobacco-industry informer Jeffrey Wigand in The Insider.  Crowe put on glasses and gained weight to play Wigand, surrendering himself to the role.  Mann was so impressed that when director Ridley Scott propositioned Crowe to don Roman armour for the lead in Gladiator and Crowe hesitated, Mann convinced him.

And Michael Mann should know.  Undoubtedly one of America’s finest directors since his creative production work on the hit 1980s TV series Miami Vice led to his single-handed definition of the modern serial-killer movie in the very first Hannibal Lecter film Manhunter (starring Englishman Brian Cox as Hannibal the Cannibal Lecter, a role later usurped and made famous by Anthony Hopkins in Silence of the Lambs).  In Manhunter, the very first Hannibal the Cannibal appearance took place in a stark white cell.  The killer behind bars talks to the man who captured him, FBI Manhunter Will Graham (played by William L. Peterson, an actor whom Mann had first cast in a bit role opposite James Cann in Thief and who went onto a lucrative television career as the star of the original CSI, in a role not dissimilar to Will Graham).  Slowly, Mann’s camera cuts between them, eliminating the physical bars that separate them until killer and cop-profiler stand face to face in mutual recognition. 

In the film’s most confronting moment, Hannibal perceives that Graham, brought back from retirement to investigate a serial killer known as “the tooth fairy”, is there to re-acquaint himself with the serial killer mindset, empathy with the dark fantasies of which had earlier brought Graham to psychological collapse and hospitalization.  Risking his sanity to enter the mind of his nemesis, the serial killer, Graham has come to see Lector to “get back the scent”.  Lector soon recognizes this and after indulging Graham about helping him profile the new killer, confronts Graham and asks Graham how he caught him.  Graham stands up and bangs on the door to be let out.  Lector continues: “the reason you caught me Will is that we’re just alike: you want the scent, smell yourself”.  Let out, Graham flees: running as fast as he can down corridors artfully abstracted by Mann’s perfect architectural composition until exhausted, he collapses on the hood of his car in horrifying recognition of his relationship to his nemesis – one and the same. 

For Mann, the moment of recognition of similarity between cop and killer dissolves the boundaries of law and order erected to separate them, barriers which make them adversaries despite their similarities.

 Yet Graham in Manhunter is allowed an “out” that is denied all other protagonists in Mann films: he returns home to his wife and child for a normal life.  That option was denied the protagonist cop and criminal duo in Mann’s next film, Heat, an astonishingly exhilarating crime drama which paired together (for the first time) Al Pacino (as the cop) and Robert DeNiro (as his nemesis, a career bank-robber modelled on the character type Mann had essayed a decade earlier in Thief, about a safe-cracker played by James Cann).  Heat galvanized the critics and Mann became an A-list director, one of the very few to have creative control over multi-million dollar productions.  With such creative freedom Mann stands as America’s finest contemporary auteur, and his obsession with the psychological dualism between cop and criminal (or, symbolically, outsider and authority) finds its most mytho-graphic expression in his most recent film, Public Enemies, another bank robber versus cop drama.  Here, the bank robber was modelled on a real life figure, John Dillinger, and played by the new man of a thousand faces, Johnny Depp.

And in Public Enemies, Mann re-stages the confrontation between imprisoned criminal and the manhunter responsible for his capture.  Cop and criminal once again confront each other, separated by the bars of a prison cell (does Mann dissolve these bars this time?).  The cop is Melvin Purvis, personally appointed to hunt and kill Dillinger by FBI director J. Edgar Hoover, an egotist who puts his personal vendetta against outlaws above his allegiance to the US constitution.  In Public Enemies, like Manhunter and Heat, there is only a brief exchange between the two men.  Dillinger (Depp) knows his kinship to Purvis – both have been face to face with friends who have been shot.  But here, there is a difference and Dillinger spells it out for Purvis: both are killers, but where Purvis may have the authority to kill and does so from a distance, Depp does it face to face, up front.  Where in Manhunter, the cop was vulnerable and emotional and in Heat was strong enough to face down his enemy as an equal, in Public Enemies he is indifferent, a cipher, his individual personality eclipsed by the responsibilities of his job.  And in Manhunter, Hannibal the Cannibal could never leave the cell (though was clever enough to have influence beyond it) whereas in a few scenes Dillinger is out again, the criminal who could not be restrained.

The real John Dillinger was a bank robber in Depression era America.  Confounding state jurisdictional law enforcement by repeatedly crossing state lines to avoid capture, Dillinger’s activities so frustrated law enforcement that his case was taken over by a new national crime-fighting unit that operated beyond state jurisdictions – the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) headed by J. Edgar Hoover. 

Hoover assigned his top agent, manhunter Melvin Purvis to capture or kill a number of bank-robbing outlaws plaguing Depression era banks, including such notorious figures as Pretty Boy Floyd and Baby Face Nelson.  As banks during the Depression faced upheavals so too American cinema struggled to find genres that resonated with audiences, finding its most controversial one in the gangster picture.  Spearheaded by such as Scarface, Little Caesar and Manhattan Melodrama (the film Dillinger watched right before he was gunned down) the gangster film genre confounded authorities who insisted that the lives of criminals never be glamorized.  Authoritarian hatred of the gangster film eventually led to the establishment of the Hays Code, a set of moral guidelines (spearheaded by Catholic morals groups) that all Hollywood films were consequently subjected to until finally challenged in the late 1950s by independent director Otto Preminger in The Moon is Blue.

As American cinema responded to the French New Wave, the gangster film found a new box-office popularity in Bonnie & Clyde, starring Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway as the bank-robbing duo Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow.  Directed by Arthur Penn from a script originally intended for French director Francois Truffaut, Bonnie & Clyde was a mythographic re-envisioning of the outlaw as romantic-tragic folk hero: a rebellious outlaw beholden to no moral code but destined to be gunned down in the inevitable conflict between the myth of American individuality and the realism of American law and order authoritarianism.  Immensely popular, Bonnie & Clyde was controversial for its violence: bullet-ridden bodies die in a hail of gunfire, a slow-motion ballet of death beautified which ushered in a new level of screen realism in the depiction of violence – carried to its ultimate expression in Sam Peckinpah’s seminal Western The Wild Bunch (which, uncut, still remains problematic to current American censors).

A host of imitators followed Bonnie & Clyde, all seizing on real-life figures with colourful nicknames.  One director who seized on the new gangster craze was John Milius. 

Milius was a screenwriter whose uncredited work on Dirty Harry brought Clint Eastwood from his spaghetti western “man with no name” persona to contemporary LA in a fascistic envisioning of the impotence of law enforcement in the face of criminal anarchy: an impotence that extended to all except the crime-fighter who put himself above the law.  In re-establishing the law, Milius restored potency and discipline to American authority.  Milius continued to assess American law and order in his script for the Dirty Harry follow-up Magnum Force before directing his first film, a gangster picture based on John Dillinger, with Sam Peckinpah’s drinking buddy Warren Oates in the lead role: Dillinger.  Although Oates played Dillinger as an anarchic, venal folk-hero Milius’ attention was with the FBI manhunter responsible for his death, agent Melvin Purvis (played by Ben Johnson).  It was Purvis who most interested Milius, one of Hollywood’s few conservatives and a man known for his gun collection.

The battle between Purvis and Dillinger was between authority and anarchy: the stakes were twofold – 1) the future of American law enforcement and 2) the definition of American masculinity as rooted in the adversarial similarity between criminal and cop, outlaw and authority figure.  Just as Oates’s Dillinger disregards the law, Purvis remarks when told that shooting Dillinger may be illegal that “shoot John Dillinger and I’ll find a way to make it legal.”  Though well-received by the critics, Milius’ film of Dillinger remains obscure, remembered mostly for the cult that has grown around Oates and Peckinpah.  However, the dualism that Milius assessed in Dillinger informs Public Enemies, Michael Mann’s re-envisioning of the Dillinger-Purvis battle where Johnny Depp’s Dillinger is paired opposite a Purvis played by Batman Begins’ Christian Bale.  Although it may be the same story, the re-envisioning is completely fresh and from the beginning inverts the symbolic associations that Milius sought to draw from the tale.  Oates’ Dillinger is rough and crude, a rapist more than a lover and so unlike the new Dillinger, Johnny Depp; and where Johnson’s Purvis was a man of stern honour, Bale’s Purvis begins the film by shooting a fleeing Pretty Boy Floyd in the back, from a distance.

In Public Enemies, Mann extends the similarity between cop and criminal that has been his over-riding expression and extends into a revisionist legend of American individuality.  Much more so than the ironic humour of Milius’ concern for myth, Mann is concerned with the historical ramifications of the conflict – specifically the growth of American law and order in reaction to the anarchic individualism of the American outlaw – the development of national protocols to deal with crime, the individual outlaw being slowly replaced by the organized crime syndicates of such as Frank Nitti. 

Copyright (C) Robert Cettl All Rights Reserved Last modified: October 1, 2009