Happiness Is A Warm Tommygun

John Dillinger, as every schoolkid (or at least every juvenile delinquent) knows, was gunned down in 1934 outside the Biograph Theater in Chicago after watching Clark Gable, William Powell, and Myrna Loy in Manhattan Melodrama. In his new movie Public Enemies, Michael Mann spends a lot of time sitting with Dillinger in that movie theatre — Dillinger knows that the cops are on his tail, and that in all likelihood this could be the last night at the movies he ever enjoys. Mann does an uncanny job of letting us see Manhattan Melodrama through Dillinger’s eyes, isolating those snippets of dialogue that resonate with his live-for-the-moment criminal philosophy, pulp screenwriting given mystical significance by the silvery black-and-white images simmering on that gigantic movie screen.

But Public Enemies is not shot in silvery black-and-white; instead, Mann, working with cinematographer Dante Spinotti, films everything with handheld digital cameras that gives the faces, the period costumes, the cars, and the buildings a startling, hard-edged immediacy. There’s none of the Armani catalogue look of The Untouchables or the sepia-toned mythmaking of The Godfather Part II; as a writer for The Onion A.V. Club put it in their recent podcast about the film, when Dillinger gets gunned down, the scene looks like some tourist went back in time and filmed it with a camera he pulled out of his fannypack.

If I’m lingering on the look of Public Enemies, it’s because there’s very little else about the film to get excited about. Which is a surprising thing to say about a film in which practically every character has a Thompson submachine gun on him at all times. The script covers the 10 eventful months leading up to Dillinger’s death, starting with his daring jailbreak from the Indiana State Prison in October of 1933, his subsequent string of bank robberies throughout the Midwest, and his romance with Billie Frechette (Marion Cotillard). (There’s a second escape from police custody in there too, not to mention several deafening gun battles — I haven’t heard gunshots this loud since Mann’s previous film, Miami Vice.) But it’s also the story of the birth of the FBI, of J. Edgar Hoover’s (Billy Crudup) attempt to use Dillinger’s notoriety as a lever with which to expand the scope of his powers. And it’s the story of Melvin Purvis (Christian Bale), the G-man who spearheaded the hunt for Dillinger.

That’s enough material for three movies, so it’s a mystery to me why Public Enemies feels so undercooked. In Heat, his masterpiece, Mann told a similar story about a lawman on the trail of a professional outlaw, but there he gave the proceedings an epic grandeur — you felt an almost mystical connection between the cop and the crook, so much so that every gun battle, despite their frenzy, felt like a Zenlike meditation on male codes of power and honour.

But there’s none of that metaphysical frisson in Public Enemies. Depp does a decent job of playing Dillinger’s bravado — the quips to the reporters at his arrest, the way he walks right into the “Dillinger room” at the Chicago police station in broad daylight, just to have a look around, practically daring the cops to recognize him — but without any crazy wigs to wear or childlike affectations to fall back on, Depp doesn’t seem to know what to do with the role. What makes him want to rob banks? Or fall in love with Billie? Is he motivated by fame? Greed? Adrenaline? Social factors, maybe? It’s impossible to know. And Bale is a total blank as Purvis — you need to keep reminding yourself he’s even in it. The best performances are the funniest ones: Crudup as Hoover, and Peter Gerety as a slick gangland lawyer.

I suppose it’s not enough these days for a gangster picture to be “just” a gangster picture; these days, it’s got to run more than two hours and serve as some kind of grand statement about America. Mann toys with a few big themes in Public Enemies — the morality of American justice, love and loyalty, the rise of social institutions — and there’s a whiff of The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford in there too, in its sympathetic twilight portrait of an outlaw watching the world change around him. I think Mann knows what his themes are, but not what his story is. It’s a movie that really makes you want to watch Manhattan Melodrama again.