Public Enemies and Male Myths.

When the trailer for Public Enemies premiered in early 09, one could be excused for thinking that this was going to be a slam bang action movie. But considering this is Michael Mann, who perhaps pulled off one of the biggest artistic coups of the decade when he turned Miami Vice into a hard boiled noir film by way of Wong Kar Wai, we shouldn’t be too surprised that this isn’t what we have here.

Mann drops us into the middle of the action, as he loves to do, and we join John Dillinger as he busts his cohorts out of prison. Shooting once again in High Def, Mann makes the 30’s feel very much in the present. That appears to be one of the aesthetic properties of High Def as opposed to film, film gives us the feeling of watching something that has happened, and HD gives us the feeling of watching something that is happening. And like Miami Vice, we do feel as if we are watching events that are happening.

We follow Dillinger during the last year of his life as he goes on a bank robbing spree throughout the midwest. But mainly we are following Dillinger as he tries to experience as much life in as short a period of time as possible. Through his use of HD, and by putting us into what feels like the present, we experience all of these experiences as Dillinger experiences them. The film unfolds over a period of one year, but with the exception of the beginning of the film,when we are told it is 1933, we really have no concept of time ellapsing. It is as if we are stuck in an eternal present, a place where there is no future and there is no past.

This feeling of no future and no past is one of the fascinating things about the film, because it does take place in the past. It is almost as if Mann is telling us that we have an idealized notion of the past, and he appears to be doing everything in his power to strip all of those notions from the film. And yet, Dillinger does seem to be a mythic hero, a man out of time who is being crushed by the modernity that is closing in all around him. It is this schizm between realism and myth that makes the film fascinating and difficult to pin down.

Although Mann is dealing with real life characters, he is once again creating characters who seem to exist solely in the present, these are characters who seem to be living in an eternal moment. Mann has stripped his storytelling to its bare essentials, so he is relying on his actors to fill in a lot of background with their characters through their actions, and top to bottom the cast succeeds. Johnny Depp has the right amount of charm and devil may care charisma as Dillinger. He is exceptional at capturing the curiosity behind Dillinger’s eyes, as the world to Dillinger, who has just spent 10 years in prison, would seem to be a very exciting place, and a very different place.

Christian Bale is also quite good as Melvin Purvis, the FBI agent who is assigned the task of bringing Dillinger to justice. Bale is not afforded nearly as much screen time as Depp, but he does a good job at capturing the schism that develops within Purvis as he betrays his own ethics out of blind loyalty to the FBI and Hoover. Marion Cotillard also delivers a terrific performance as Billie Frechette, Dillinger’s love interest during the film. Her role is under developped, but she brings a real poignancy to her performance, and her and Depp do have great chemistry.

The film does take on a very tragic tone towards the end, at moments reminding me of The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, as the weight of the world seems to be on Dillinger. It is here that we realize how much Mann empathizes with this man out of time, and the character of Dillinger almost seems to go to the core of who Mann is as an artist. Mann is once again dealing with a male character who plays by his own rules and will not go against his code. It is a male myth that has been played out in numerous westerns and cop films, and Mann seems to understand the lie of this myth, and yet he yearns for it to be true, creating a sense of loneliness and isolation that seems to be at the heart of all of Mann’s films.

So ultimately Public Enemies is still dealing with the myth of Dillinger, and Mann has not given us the truth about Dillinger, but he has created a countermyth, and in the process has given us not only a great film, but a masterpiece.