It was the movies that killed John Dillinger -- Gangster No. 1 until he was gunned down outside a Chicago theater after taking in the pictures one hot night in 1934 -- and it was the movies that brought him back to life. More than once. But this time it's different. This time Michael Mann is in charge.
Win, lose or draw, Mann, director of "Heat," "Ali," "The Insider" and the current "Public Enemies," is inescapably one of the masters of modern American cinema. He's a restless soul, a striver, pushing his work toward dramatic intensity and the recapturing and recasting of reality.
Mann often wants to do traditional films but do them differently, do them better, enabling the audience to feel both the newness and the tradition. With "Public Enemies," he has made an impressive film of great formal skill, one that inescapably has a brooding dark-night-of-the-soul quality about it.
Simultaneously an art film and a crime film, Mann's latest work (he shares screenplay credit with Ronan Bennett and Ann Biderman) may not give you a ton to hang on to emotionally, but the beauty and skill of the filmmaking keep you tightly in its grasp.
"Public Enemies' " title, though taken from Bryan Burrough's history of Depression era crime, offers uncanny -- and deceptive -- echoes of one of the iconic gangster films of the period, William Wellman's "The Public Enemy," which starred an incandescent James Cagney as a hooligan so hard-boiled he shocked America by squeezing a grapefruit into girlfriend Mae Clarke's face.
But if Cagney is all exuberant, anarchic energy, Johnny Depp's Dillinger is just the opposite. There is a formal, almost existential quality about his fatalistic portrayal of the scourge of the Midwest, more "Le Samourai" than "White Heat," more Alain Delon cool than Cagney hot.
It's almost as if Depp, who lives in France, and his French costar Marion Cotillard have unconsciously collaborated with Mann to channel the spirit of the classic French gangster genre director Jean-Pierre Melville into these decidedly American proceedings.
A restrained performance like that only succeeds when it's given by an actor as intrinsically charismatic as Depp. His Dillinger can be as ruthless as the next guy and handy with a submachine gun when his bank robbery spree demands it, but what we end up admiring are his nerve, his style, his long gabardine overcoats (reminiscent of the long dusters worn by those other Midwestern movie outlaws, the James gang) and his hip, round sunglasses. This is star power acting with magnetism to spare.
