Weasel faces at war
with society
Sympathy is spread too thinly for Public Enemies
to be truly engaging, says Andrew M Brown
3 July 2009

Johnny Depp plays 'gentleman criminal' John Dillinger in Michael Mann's accomplished gangster movie Public Enemies.

The Dillinger gang - or "yeggs", as bank robbers were known - have the right weasel faces in Michael Mann's technically polished new movie Public Enemies. Nowadays they'd all be diagnosed with personality disorders. Mann gathers a collection of fine supporting players, including Harry "Pete" Pierpoint (David Wenham, who does a good line in villains), Charles Makley (Christian Stolte) and Homer Van Meter (Stephen Dorff). They don't fit: they're at war with society. And they're on the lam, tearing up the dusty roads of the Midwest in curvy Fords with V8 Flathead engines that enable them to outpace coppers.

Johnnie Dillinger himself (Johnny Depp) has a thin pink scar traced down his left cheek. Was this to add character to his face? I don't remember the scar in the source, which is Bryan Burrough's masterly account of the crime wave that swept the Midwest, reaching a peak in 1933. It involves Bonnie and Clyde (who both had disgusting hygiene), "Baby Face" Nelson (a thorough psychopath played by Stephen Graham), Alvin Karpis (brainiest of the lot), "Ma" Parker (the FBI lied that she was an evil mastermind; in fact, she was a hillbilly who "couldn't plan breakfast") and "gentleman criminal" John Dillinger.

The film concentrates on Dillinger's brief story, a romance involving the hat-check girl "Billy" Frechette (wide-eyed Marion Cotillard), and the growth of J Edgar Hoover's FBI as a result of Dillinger's activities. Hoover was a bureaucrat who had never arrested a man in his life and lived with his mother until he was 43. Most people, Burrough included, think he was a repressed homosexual. Certainly he remained weirdly obsessed with Dillinger for his entire career.

The film compresses events to demonstrate how Hoover needed Dillinger to bolster his position in the eyes of politicians and justify extending the powers of his federal police to pursue felons across state lines. Billy Crudup plays nattily dressed Hoover with an orange tint to his face. He does an understated rendering of Hoover's power-hungry personality, captures his uptight vocal inflections and gives hints of the rivalry and affection he directed towards his top field agent, Melvin Purvis (Christian Bale).

Bale is excellent as the man charged with bringing Dillinger to justice. It's the same sort of role as Kevin Costner in The Untouchables except Bale suggests darkness and moral ambiguity. He's square-jawed and authoritarian and ruthless in hunting and shooting yeggs, not infrequently in the back. He knows the FBI is ill-equipped. Desk-men are no match for sociopaths who learnt murderous crime in childhood.

Purvis says his agents fight crime "scientifically". They do, up to point - they eavesdrop on phone calls and painstakingly gather intelligence. At the same time they're not averse to using casual violence. After Purvis persuades Hoover to enlist policemen with street experience, he betrays flickers of discomfort at their torturing of suspects. The G-men stoop to the level of criminals. They conquer yeggs not by science but by gunning them down in the street.

Dillinger was defined by friendships in prison, where he was sent, aged 16, for mugging a grocer. He helps Pierpoint and the others to break out of Indiana prison at the start of the movie, not long after he is paroled, in 1933. Constantly Mann pushes the violence, the head-smashing, the blood-gushing bullet wounds. Mann and Depp want us to believe in a Dillinger who is not only charming - easy to swallow - but also, and this is harder, uncomfortable with violence. Dillinger was a murderer. It bothered him because he knew murdering a police officer tainted his Robin Hood image.

The bank robberies themselves are epic, filmed in bright early morning sunshine - to judge by the long shadows - by Dante Spinotti using Sony HD cameras which give a visual tone of stark immediacy. Many of the locations are authentic - glorious banks clad in as much marble as the London Oratory, with proud safes of gleaming brass. You see Lake County Jail in Indiana, which Dillinger breaks out of by holding up a guard with a wooden gun, the notorious shoot-out at the Little Bohemia travel lodge in Wisconsin, and the Biograph theatre in Chicago dressed to look as it did the night Dillinger took two women to see Clark Gable in a gangster film, where the feds killed him as he emerged.

It's a long film but the pace holds up. As usual for Mann, the acting is first-rate - honourable mention to Peter Gerety (recently seen as the judge in The Wire) for his nice cameo as a flamboyant lawyer. Since The Sopranos people are used to jokes in their gangster pictures but Public Enemies is done straight. Depp cannot be anything but cool. Is he a touch bland? Apart from casting him, Mann doesn't sympathise too much with his anti-hero or glamorise him as a romantic rebel. This leads to a weakness: because the director spreads his sympathy across the large cast, we fail to become thoroughly engaged. To take one example: when officers arrest Frechette as Dillinger watches from a distance, a string section surges on the soundtrack. It should move us; it doesn't.