Review: 'Public Enemies'

The story Mann and company set out to tell is in part the traditional one of the doomed love of outsiders on the run and in part a newer, more socially aware interpretation of gangsterdom, the story of lone criminal wolves, in Mann's words, "being pressed on both sides by twin evolutionary forces -- on the one hand J. Edgar Hoover inventing the FBI, and on the other, organized crime evolving rapidly into a kind of corporate capitalism." We're a long way from "The Untouchables" here.

"Public Enemies" opens with one of the standards of the crime genre, the prison escape, with Dillinger, just released after nine years inside, returning to break his gang out of the Indiana State Penitentiary. It didn't happen quite that way, but that matters less than the vivid style in which masterful cinematographer Dante Spinotti has shot it.

Spinotti, working with Mann for the fifth time, combines intense close-ups with a polished, energetic style of shooting action that brings a fluidity to the film's bank robbery sequences. Spinotti's use of digital equipment, which creates, he says, "the ability to see into shadows," makes possible one of the film's several rat-a-tat set pieces, a nighttime shootout with government agents at the Little Bohemia lodge in northern Wisconsin.

Once he and this entourage are out of prison, Dillinger heads to the big city of Chicago, where he meets the beautiful Billie Frechette (Cotillard), a hat-check girl with a bit of a chip on her shoulder. She is dubious of his attentions at first, but when he tells her he has a weakness for "baseball, movies, good clothes, fast cars, whiskey and you," she is hooked.

Though even his criminal pals tell him that what they're doing won't last, Dillinger says he's too smart for the opposition. He reckons without the more modern and scientific nature of the other side, led by the fussy, obsessive J. Edgar Hoover (Billy Crudup) and his man on the ground in the Midwest, Melvin Purvis.

Efficiently played by Christian Bale, Purvis is an icy and implacable nemesis who keeps after Dillinger with the help of handpicked Texas lawmen like Charles Winstead (Mann veteran Stephen Lang at his best). Purvis may have doubts about Hoover's methods, but he knows he has time on his side, even if Dillinger does not.

Though any number of name actors, including Lili Taylor as a confident sheriff and Giovanni Ribisi as gangster Alvin Karpis, make appearances, what's unusual about "Public Enemies" is Mann's determination not to have any face be an ordinary one.