Ironically, it’s our tightly wound G-man who threatens to become unglued. And part of the pleasure-at least traditionally-is watching the bad guy start to lose his cool as his fate is sealed. We know FBI hotshot Melvin Purvis (Christian Bale) will stop at nothing to bring his man in. Thanks to the way Mann sets things up, you don’t have to know anything about one of the most notorious manhunts in gangland history to predict that there’s a bullet with Dillinger’s name on it. Much of what defines the sketchy story skitters across a dapper surface: from squealing tires to the flash of Tommy guns sputtering in the dark. What else do you need to know?”ĭirector Michael Mann doesn’t give us a lot more to go on in terms of character development. When Billie protests that she doesn’t know enough about him, he quips: “I like baseball, movies, good clothes, fast cars, and you. Sure, Depp’s floppy-haired Dillinger is number one on the FBI’s most-wanted list, but that doesn’t stop him from pursuing hatcheck girl Billie Frechette (Marion Cotillard) like a bad-boy celebrity on probation. Miles away from the greasy menace oozed by Warren Oates in 1973’s Dillinger, this is a gangster flick made for the age of Twitter. It's a message of which we stand today in all too little need.In Public Enemies, Johnny Depp plays Depression-era bank robber John Dillinger with a killer dose of rock-star cool. Public Enemies celebrates something yet more untoward, namely the call to get away with whatever you can in pursuit of whatever you want. People used to worry that gangster movies exalted crime. America's gangbusters reasserted the rule of righteousness as our rapacious bankers go unpunished, our own leaders have been busily indulging in their own brand of embezzlement. Unlike Dillinger, Fred the Shred can't even claim it was a troubled life that drove him to plunder bank vaults. In some ways it's even worse than the version that Mann portrays. We may be seeing less bloodshed now, but we're not short of our own kind of depravity. It's this air of pervasive amorality that most clearly links Mann's tale with its present-day analogue. Christian Bale's gloomy G-man is as intent as his quarry on a ruthless personal quest, and he's prepared to connive at torture when he thinks this might advance it. Johnny Depp's Dillinger may be a romantic charmer, but he shows no compunction for his misdeeds or the deaths they cause. Nonetheless, our own public enemies have at least one thing in common with both the black hats and the white hats of Mann's movie.Īs he did in Heat, Mann toys with the much-favoured Hollywood theme of moral equivalence between wrongdoers and their state-ordained antagonists. Today, however, politicians seem to be ducking the challenge of reining in bankers' malfeasance through transnational regulation. To beat Dillinger and his peers, the American government created a federal law enforcement agency empowered to cross state lines. Far from bringing them to book, our own authorities seem to be permitting a new round of heists to get under way. Instead, they've waddled off unscathed in full possession of their ill-gotten gains. They're the banks' own fat-cat bosses, and they aren't getting the comeuppance they deserve in a hail of bullets, however widely desired such a fate for them might be. We have our own bank-robbers, but they're not attractive quasi-Robin Hoods from the wrong side of the tracks. Unfortunately, his saga can afford us little of the comfort that its real-life version was able to offer our predecessors in economic calamity. Director Michael Mann is proud of both his film's historical accuracy and the immediacy which its digital photography imparts. Now, however, Public Enemies hits us just as we're engulfed by the first slump comparable with the one that spawned its subject matter. Hollywood has told us Dillinger's story several times, most memorably in John Milius's Dillinger in 1973. Since then, a continuous stream of big-screen gangster derring-do has helped us cope with the frustrations instilled by our own grudging submission to the rules that constrain our lives. In 1934, Dillinger heard himself being name-checked in a gangster movie while lawmen waited to gun him down outside Chicago's Biograph theatre. Since this unstaged entertainment had proved so captivating, it's hardly surprising that cinema leapt on it. It was an outcome offering the enthralled audience not only painless mortification but the simultaneous reassurance that the order on which they depended was ultimately being upheld. In the end, the beguiling bad guys lost and the dreary good guys won. Americans were presented with the spectacle of a stirring contest played out to the death. When, goaded by the threat of such implied subversion, the authorities fought back, the drama took a different turn.
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