Public Enemies
Michael Mann (2009)
I’ve a blind spot about Johnny Depp. I don’t think he’s a bad actor – he doesn’t infuriate me the way Leonardo DiCaprio does – and his face is practically a definition of film star good looks but I find him lacking in inner force and tension. Today, I finished reading Stefan Kanfer’s (mediocre) biography of Marlon Brando and was astonished at how highly the aging Brando seemed to rate Depp. Apart from the Pirates of the Caribbean pictures (which I’ve not seen), Depp’s most recent highly-rated performances (both Oscar-nominated) were in Finding Neverland and Sweeney Todd. In Finding Neverland, his J M Barrie was charming and sensitive, although more like an ideal big brother to the Llewellyn Davies boys than a man who felt he was both a kindred spirit and absolutely banished from their world of childhood. In Sweeney Todd, Depp seemed a piece of design rather than a character (and compared poorly with Helena Bonham Carter’s Mrs Lovett, who was both). As John Dillinger in Public Enemies, I could see that Depp was trying to do more but I found him as blandly uncommunicative as usual. When we got home, I looked up some reviews online; when I read the piece in Salon by Stephanie Zacharek (who isn’t easy to please), I thought I must have been asleep for even more of Public Enemies than I’d realised:
‘Depp is as close to being a ’30s-style movie star as we’ve got these days, and his Dillinger offers a peculiar mix of star quality laced with pathos: Even as he flashes that instant charmer of a smile, there’s also something gaunt and haunted about him, as if he were living his life in reverse, as if he already knows how it’s all going to end. … Depp doesn’t shade his performance with obvious shadows of foreboding. What he does is more complex and more difficult: He acknowledges that the grab-it-and-run approach to pleasure, and to life, has its limitations.’
I thought I should see Public Enemies but I might not have done if I’d not been to films in this month’s BFI’s gangster season (which was presumably scheduled to coincide with the release of Michael Mann’s film). We left with more than half of the 139 minutes remaining; I was so relieved to see Sally looking at her watch. The last sentence in the Wikipedia article on the film is currently ‘Michael Mann, the director, decided to shoot the movie in HD format instead of using the traditional 35 mm film’ and technology seems to be what Public Enemies is about. There’s hardly a shot that doesn’t draw attention to itself before anything else gets going in it (the cinematographer is Dante Spinotti). The violence is no more than part of the logistics. Mann’s idea of evoking the period is to put Billie Holiday songs on the soundtrack (in combination with a generic pompous-emotive score by Elliot Goldenthal.) The whole thing is bombastically uninteresting. Stephanie Zacharek also praises the chemistry between Depp and Marion Cotillard, as Dillinger’s girlfriend (another Billie). They don’t convey anything to me other than their awareness of their glamour. Christian Bale is predictably tedious as the FBI agent who’s repeatedly thwarted by Dillinger (and also, I gather, his eventual nemesis). Billy Crudup is more amusing as J Edgar Hoover. I’m pleased to see Stephen Graham, who’s been striking as hooligans in two recent British films (Combo in This is England, Billy Bremner in The Damned United) getting a sizeable part in a big Hollywood picture although, since it’s another psycho (Baby Face Nelson), you fear that Graham’s already getting typecast. I ended up going to see Public Enemies because I thought it might at least be interesting to compare with The Public Enemy and Bonnie and Clyde. It would be insulting to both those films even to bother doing so.
19 July 2009