Gangbanging

Director Michael Mann’s new movie, Public Enemies, brings outlaw John Dillinger back into popular culture, more or less on schedule. His first appearance, of course, was in person as public enemy No. 1, with America following his titillating career of bank robberies, jailbreaks and gun battles, climaxing when he was cut down by gunfire as he left Chicago’s Biograph Theater in July 1934 (in an exquisite historical irony that no pulp writer would dare invent, the movie Dillinger had just seen was Manhattan Melodrama with Clark Gable and Myrna Loy).

Hollywood first told Dillinger’s story—or something like it—in 1945 with Lawrence Tierney. Later, in the wake of the success of Bonnie and Clyde, nearly every 1930s desperado got his or her own movie. Dillinger was no exception; his turn came in 1973, courtesy of writer-director John Milius and actor Warren Oates. There was a 1991 TV movie with Mark Harmon, and now comes Mann’s shiny new movie, starring Johnny Depp as Dillinger and Christian Bale as his FBI nemesis Melvin Purvis.

Mann and co-writers Ronan Bennett and Ann Biderman based their script on a book by Bryan Burrough, but only loosely. Burrough’s book was about the interstate crime sprees of Dillinger, Baby Face Nelson, George “Machine Gun” Kelly, Alvin Karpis, Charles “Pretty Boy” Floyd and others, and how the gaps in response from local law enforcement gave rise to the modern FBI. But Mann and Co. know where the meat of the story is, and they concentrate on Dillinger, with only cameo appearances by Nelson (who actually worked with Dillinger), Karpis (who didn’t) and Floyd (who is shown dying at the hands of Purvis early in the movie, although in real life he outlived Dillinger by three months).

Mann was careful about authenticity, according to a recent Op-Ed by the admiring Burrough; he filmed at the actual locations of Dillinger’s jailbreak in Crown Point, Ind., and the big gunfight with the Feds at the Little Bohemia Lodge in Wisconsin, and he remodeled several blocks of Chicago’s North Lincoln Avenue to duplicate how it looked the night Dillinger went down. However, Mann didn’t let authenticity keep him from including scenes between his two high-power stars (in fact Dillinger and Purvis never met), and he plays up the affair between Dillinger and Billie Frechette (Marion Cotillard) to inject a measure of romantic outlaw glamour.

With all that, then, it’s hard to understand why Public Enemies is so uninvolving and feels so inauthentic.

Part of it can be put down to sheer monotony. Dillinger is credited with about a dozen bank robberies, and Mann seems to take us through every one from beginning to end. We don’t see the times he reportedly posed as an alarm salesman to case banks, or as a filmmaker shooting a bank-robbery scene while actually pulling off a real one. Something like that might have helped to distinguish one bank knock-over from the next.

Another problem is the lack of interesting characters on display. There are Dillinger and Purvis, of course, but aside from being played by Depp and Bale, they seldom rise above the gangster-movie stereotypes of the Dashing Outlaw and the Implacable Long Arm of the Law. Marion Cotillard’s Billie is simply “the girl”; Mann makes little use of Cotillard’s considerable talent (although ironically, France’s Cotillard, sporting a flawless American accent, is the only member of the cast who never once mumbles a line into inaudibility). Other characters, even J. Edgar Hoover (Billy Crudup, miscast) pass in a confusing welter of hats, overcoats and machine guns.

Still, for all that, Public Enemies isn’t exactly a misfire—pun intended, for like most gangster movies it comes most to life when the bullets begin to fly. If we suspect that the actual number of bullets has been inflated for effect, it’s probably within the reasonable limits of dramatic license—and after all, the high body count of those shootouts is a matter of public record.

Still, from Michael Mann, we might have expected something more than merely a pretty good gangster flick. With The Last of the Mohicans in 1992, Mann made us absolutely believe we were seeing 18th-century America up there on the screen. Public Enemies looks more like Johnny Depp and Christian Bale playing cops and robbers in fedoras and pinstripe suits.