Venue: Cine 5, Ster-Kinekor, Maerua Mall
Film: PUBLIC ENEMIES
Director: Michael Mann
Screenplay: Michael Mann and Ann Bidemann
Players: Johnny Depp; Christian Bale; Marion Cotillard; Jason Clarke; Billy Crudup; Giovanni Ribisi
Genre: crime; true life drama; historical
Rating: ****
This is a superbly atmospheric crime drama, dealing with the chequered career of America’s notorious bank robber, Johnny Dillinger (Depp). Based upon a book by Brian Burrage, the film has been criticised for historical inaccuracies but, nevertheless, the essentials of Dillinger’s life of crime have been captured with riveting mood,action and violence.
The film possibly massages Dillinger’s capers by omitting a dull, 9 year-old marriage and affairs with prostitutes. It also creates a ‘doppelganger’ in the form of FBI Agent Mervyn Purvis (Bale). Purvis rates little mention in the Wikipedia account of Dillinger’s life but the film builds him up as a formidable opponent and tool of the ambitious J. Edgar Hoover, whose FBI at the time was in a fledgling state; it was Dillinger and the capers of others like him who provided the impetus for Hoover to modernize his organization, using as much technology as was available, and to exploit internal politics and public outcry to force through legislation which enabled the Federal Bureau of Investigation to become the bureaucratic and invasive behemoth it is today.
The classic scenario of hunted and hunter has worked successfully before (Insomnia and Road to Perdition, for example) and does so again here, particularly because of the superb level of acting of Depp and Bale. They complement and balance each other exceedingly well. Depp’s Dillinger benefits from his good looks, sultry facial expressions and the omission of the seedier aspects of his life. In real life Dillinger looked mentally challenged and crude; Depp plays him with style, aided by a storyline which creates a heroic devotion to his mistress, Billie Frechette, a waif-like ‘loser’ and hat-check girl, burdened in 1933 by half-Indian parentage at a time which made no allowance. Dillinger’s devotion is portrayed as a noble gesture to protect her. The film does document her arrest and subsequent imprisonment; in fact, she served three years for aiding and abetting, during which time Dillinger moved on to a liaison with a prostitute, Polly Hamilton. This detail is glossed over in the film in an effort to establish some purity of spirit in a man who was, essentially, a ruthless thug.
Melvyn Purvis is presumably largely a fiction of the film makers, although the credits do reveal that he left the FBI a year after the brutal killing of Dillinger and eventually committed suicide in 1960. Bale, whom I regard as one of the finest actors of this generation, turns Purvis into a complicated character, whose aim (pardon the pun!) is initially pure. He attracts the attention of Hoover by aiming accurately to gun down Pretty Boy Floyd in an apple orchard. He is then given media exposure and is elected to become head of the Chicago Crime Unit, with the specific mandate of tracking down and arresting Dillinger. There’s no character development with Dillinger but Purvis’ transformation is subtly depicted: he begins as a rural agent with one success under his belt to develop by degrees into a ruthless puppet of Hoover’s, someone who would stop at nothing to bring Dillinger to justice.
Billie Frechette, resigned to mediocrity in her life, is beautifully played by Cotillard: there is a naivety in her wistful smile. There is tragic irony in the fact that Dillinger was the best thing to have happened to her.
In addition to the superb standard of acting, however, the stylishness of direction, sets, sound and, above all, cinematography, lifts this film into greatness. The film starts moodily in the State Penitentiary in Indiana, 1933, with a chain gang of striped-suited convicts, jogging briskly in unison to the exaggerated sound of crunching boots and rattling chains. The film does not disappoint thereafter. Moody jazz clubs are opaque with cigarette smoke, where concretized wavy-haired bottled-blondes move mystically in the gloom to dusky soul songs. A hotel corridor in Hoover Falls oozes menace through its muted lighting, while the camera angle stretches it to infinity. A camera catches a complete reflection on the polished bonnet of a car of sky and silhouettes of trees during Dillinger’s transportation to jail: crowds line the route to cheer this American Robin Hood hero.
Hoover vowed to fight his ‘public enemies’ (Dillinger, Baby Face Nelson and Pretty Boy Floyd) “on the front page”. He took his crusade to the media, manipulating the media as successfully as he did telephone tapping. Establishing Dillinger and Purvis centre-stage, against a backdrop of crime during the Depression and political intrigues to grab the moral high ground, was a directorial master stroke.