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Comment RSSPublic Enemies Review
2.07.09 # 0:55 # Review # 16 Comments
Director: Michael Mann
Starring: Johnny Depp, Christian Bale, Marion Cotillard, Channing Tatum
Michael Mann is the great American crime director of the last twenty years, his rise tangential to Scorsese’s fall since Goodfellas. The director of Heat, Collateral, Manhunter and Miami Vice, Mann is a master of long-running realist shoot-outs, his films marked by a Hemingway-esque existentialism that sees them transcend the constraints of their genre whilst simultaneously offering up some of the best set-pieces in any modern thrillers. And he’s done it again.
Public Enemies tells the story of the last fifteen months in the life of John Dillinger – the period that saw the bank robber become a folk hero (albeit a cop killing folk hero) to an American public still caught in the wake of the Great Depression. Opening with a brilliant extended set-piece as Dillinger busts his gang out of the Indiana State Penitentiary, the narrative then traces the frenetic months that followed, as Dillinger robbed banks, killed cops, became a media darling, and died on the sidewalk outside the Biograph movie theatre.
Filmed entirely in high definition digital video, using many locations actually trod by Dillinger’s gang back in the 1930s, the film’s aesthetic is eye-catchingly realistic, creating an immediacy to the action which is simply startling. If you were alive and with the Dillinger gang in 1933, this is what it would look and feel like. And it looks bloody terrifying. Thompson machine guns go off like firecrackers with alarming regularity, exploding in the foreground with documentary-like realism, making the many set-pieces simply spectacular. As far the look and feel of explosive action sequences are concerned, this is genuinely a leap forward from Paul Greengrass’s Bourne films – potentially revolutionary, never less than thrilling.
Although the film suffers from a somewhat perfunctory script – the narrative leaves little space for the existential fatalism that made Heat so special, and the moments when Mann does dip into this territory feel somewhat superficial by comparison – the spectacular and ground-breaking visual execution combined with a reliably brilliant performance from Depp, not to mention great supporting performances from Bale, Cotillard and especially Stephen Graham (star of Shane Meadows’ brilliant This Is England), make Public Enemies a dazzling treat, and surely a shoe-in for Oscar recognition. It’s visual dynamite.
Rotten Tomatoes Rating: 61% (from 112 reviews)
Our Rating: A-
Leave your own Public Enemies review in the comments.
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The film may not be as good as Heat (few are) but it really is visually amazing. The way he uses digital video is just incredible, and it really does feel like the start of a new style of cinema. I think he’s shown us that DV has that potential.
Hmmm.
Alright.
I’m convinced.
I’m seeing it this weekend, dammit.
Loved the film a lot. Nice review.
Just got back from the theater. This movie is an abysmal piece of crap. I’ll write more when I’m less angry for spending money on it during an economic crisis.
Oh oh.
But Empire gave it 5/5.
You controversial man you. Of course, you’re wrong.
I was a bit disappointed by the movie. I don’t think it gave justice to the entire time period and didn’t really get into Dillinger.
Here goes nothing …
I rarely walk out of movies. I even suffered through the vine-swinging third act of Crystal Skull. If not for that memory, and knowing that if I endured that then I have no choice but to endure every bad movie I pay to see from now on, I would have skipped out after thirty awful minutes of Public Enemies.
Here’s why.
CINEMATOGRAPHY
- Shot on DV but lit for film, the entire movie looks like a sophomore level student film. The digital does not handle low light well at all so it’s hard to see most of the movie which takes place in night clubs or dark alleys. DV also handles movement poorly, so it streaks and blurs during the action scenes. At one point we see a plane landing at night … the mix of low light and fast propeller blades makes it look like the plane is drifting through the air with no means of propulsion, the blades are completely invisible. It looked so ridiculous I laughed out loud.
- This weird “guerrilla style” approach to a major studio period piece seems to be a deliberate artistic choice, but through the movie Michael Mann throws it away for a more old-school Hollywood style. Half the movie is shot in wide angle, tight close-ups on actor’s faces. There are numerous hand-held shots with needless camera movement. It seems like the whole thing is constructed, through the use of the camera style and the low quality digital video stock, to emulate a modern “in your face” style that we’re used to from YouTube. But then, randomly, he we cut to “beauty shots” with jibs and cranes and dollies, kind of a cheap student film knock off of Gone With the Wind. While the guerrilla style is a horrible artistic choice, it still would have been better if he’d stuck with it rather than jump into standard Hollywood style choices.
- In particular, the scene where the cops chase down Baby Face Nelson is horrible. They lit the night exteriors like a classic movie, with harsh blue “moonlight.” On the DV stock it looks laughable fake and it seems like all the actors are running around on a high school stage for Guys and Dolls.
- The make-up department did not know how to work for DV. Or, the camera department did not know how to shoot make-up. Either way, the result is that in all the close-ups you can SEE the caked-on movie make-up.
SOUND
- The sound design is horrible. It seems like all sound was recorded on a single track. So when a character speaks you hear all of the background noise. A strange hum fills the air when they open their mouths and disappears when they close their mouths. While again it’s probably an artistic choice, it’s a horrible one, because at times it makes it hard to hear what’s going on. So many people talk with sop much background noise and your ears don’t know what to pick out as important. Also, it’s so fucking obvious that it takes you right out of the movie. It’s simply distracting and annoying.
CHARACTERS and ACTING
- While Depp does an adequate job as Dillinger, he has very little to work with. The man was a mystery, to the screenwriters at least, and the flick suffers from this.
- Christian Bale and Billy Crudup turn in wince-inducing performances. To their credit, there are no on-screen motivations for their characters. They simply chase after Dillinger with a fervor that is completely unexplained in this movie. As a result, they’re boring.
- The rest of the characters are under developed and some, like the girl at the end who attends the fateful movie with Dillinger, don’t even show UP until a few scenes from the end.
SCRIPT
- Like most bio-pics, it suffers because it’s bound to reality. Rather than building a creative story arc, it’s limited by chronology. It’s coherent and linear, but does not build to an inevitable climax or weave in themes or story points from different characters.
- No one knows anything about the main character. Dillinger is an enigma and this makes it impossible to relate to him. to compensate, the screenwriters fill dialog with a roundabout explanation about how Dillinger “Lives for today.” It’s cheap, trite, and unconvincing. It’s all a lame excuse not to SHOW any of this on camera.
- It’s boring. All of the obstacles that the protagonist must overcome are political. Some other bad guys are upset at him so they work with government legislation to get him caught. It’s boring.
***
Overall, I felt like I was watching an unfinished work print. If every crappy part was an artistic choice, then it was the wrong artistic choice for this kind of script. And even if it WAS all intentional, then the film makers contradict themselves by shifting filming styles throughout the movie.
In Hollywood you see a LOT of cheap, poorly constructed student-level films. I’m sure Michael Mann has seen these, because it sure seems like he thought it would be fun to emulate them in this big-budget studio picture. The result is an absolute disaster. Not one dollar of the expansive budget is seen on screen, both because it looks cheap, and because you’ll fall asleep half way though.
James, you’re a lucid and intelligent man, but I can’t even begin to understand how you’ve come to almost all your conclusions.
First, I had no trouble at any point with either visual or aural clarity, so perhaps the cinema where you saw the film was having technical issues. As for the way Mann employed the hyperreal look of DV, the only point I’ll come near to agreeing with you on is that the way he used a lot of classical deep focus and two-shots could be seen as odd, although personally I thought it worked given the way the script dealt with the Dillinger/Frechette relationship (which is flawed, but at a script level). I think the only thing “student” about the film is the essential look of DV – the WAY it was employed, as in Collateral, was artistic, visceral, and hugely effective in my opinion. And the way it was filmed was far far less self-consciously documentarian than the Bourne films, which use montage editing and heightened hand-held effects in a far more obvious way. Dario Spinotti’s use of the camera was far more restrained than that, with camera movement on the hand-held shots very limited, and the realist qualities of DV I think added a true quality of immediacy to interior sequences whilst the way he carried out the shoot-out sequences was simply stunning, BECAUSE of his use of DV.
As for not building to an inevitable climax… surely this is the one thing it inarguably does do? Spiralling, unstoppably, toward his inevitable death? And as for not knowing about Dillinger, who he is or why he does what he does – it’s not character drama. You don’t know about Eastwood’s Man With No Name, nor Bogart’s Sam Spade, nor Michael Caine’s Carter.
I think the film has flaws, mostly at script level. But I thought the use of DV was groundbreaking and thrilling, and the performances (including Crudup) were uniformly excellent, even if Bale was underused (a script issue).
The film I saw was so bad I thought it was an unfinished work print. I’ve asked around to friends who saw other screenings and they said it was the same with them.
The theater I was it at has the best picture and sound in Hollywood so maybe the projection was TOO clear for DV.
The theory on the tight shots doesn’t hold up because they did it for everyone, not just those two. And when they did they opted for the cheap, easy up angle which is a trademark of low quality, guerrilla style film making because it cuts on background depth which you have to fill with extras, lighting, etc. I’m not saying that’s WHY they did it cause they had a 100 million dollar budget according to the interweb, but it sure seems like that’s what he’s emulating. It’s like any dozen indie film reels that I’ve seen in my years here, the ones aspiring filmmakers produce on a tight budget to promote themselves as directors.
And either way, it really didn’t seem to be a motif because they’d cut to artsy beauty shots on a whim.
Also in question is this “hyper reality” because when you light for film but use DV everything looks staged. The moonlight was utterly horrific. And at the end they cut to an impossible angle and use CG blood for his death scene, which again would totally break the reality, if that’s what he’s going for.
And, as for sound, if leaving all the background noise in is supposed to convey realism, why then cut in and out of it so it pops like that?
As for the main character, haven’t seen Eastwood or Carter, but Bogart’s Sam Spade is crap and that adaptation suffers for a similar reason. While Chandler’s books live inside the main character’s head, the film uses a totally standard “outside the character” approach and nullifies the core strength of the investigative storyline. His character is lifeless and dull and the only way they can think to make him three dimensional is to make him rub his ear occasionally.
With biopics you always have a long hard battle to make them personal. The fact that they didn’t isn’t the real tragedy, it’s pretty standard stuff. The real shame is that they threw away what strengths they had (letting the audience get a absorbed into the nostalgic world) because it looks like a YouTube video with less than 300 views.
I don’t know man, maybe I’m wrong but it sounds kind of like your problem is with DV, as opposed to Mann’s use of DV. Are there films that have used DV that you’ve found visually arresting?
Maybe I’m pre-disposed to liking what he’s done since I’m a big fan of the expressive qualities of DV. But I didn’t think anything looked overtly staged, I thought the lighting was uniformly excellent.
Collateral, Julian Donkey Boy, Festen, Inland Empire, Once, Zodiac, 28 Days Later, Slumdog Millionaire, Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s films (Distant, Climates, Three Monkeys), and modern digital docs like Tarnation have all done interesting things with the expressive modernist qualities of digital, and I think Mann – a great action director and an existential auteur – is genuinely breaking new ground in the use of digital. It’s not an inferior little brother to film stock, it is its own medium with its own expressive visual qualities.
Anyway, we might have to agree to disagree.
Once and 28 Days Later are two of my favorite films. Ever. Collateral is probably my favorite Mann other than Last of the Mohicans.Most of Inland Empire looked shitty, but shitty worked for the story.
Totally agree with all your arguments for Digital. I’m totally pro for that format, considering I’m poor and all my projects shoot on the stuff.
But when it comes down to it, I consider Public Enemies a major set-back. It IS a different medium and should be treated as such. All they did was treat it like film and thereby turned it into film’s inferior little brother.
If I’m watching a prop plane and I can’t see the propellers, then the filmmaker has failed. Unless the theme of the movie is “Things that Move Around Through the Air Via Magic” then I’ve completely failed at a visual medium. It’s not a matter of style preference. If I string together random words and call it a sentence, someone can claim to love it. But it’s still a shitty sentence because it doesn’t achieve the basic function of a sentence.
I give it 7/10 – Worth seeing.
You guys are getting so technical. I just wanted to know if it was a movie worth seeing not a crash course in film school!
Have to say, I was pretty disappointed with the film. My main problem with it was that the style and the story contradicted each other. What I mean by this is that Mann’s decision to shoot in digital was because he wanted a sense of realism, as though the viewer was actually there in the 1930’s and not just viewing it. To a certain extent this worked however with this realism he then had a narrative which just absolutely glorified Dillinger, presenting him as this Robin Hood figure which he is often remembered as. Instead of deconstructing the myth, done successfully in Soderbergh’s Che films and also in the Jesse James film, he perpetuated it , which is pretty naive. The whole film was too concerned with looking cool to ever be emotionally involving, and as for the cheesy whisper in the ear bit, I think we were meant to be crying at that point, I was but due to the fact I was upset at how lame the film was.
Ok so that’s a bit harsh, but it was average at best. Sure, Mann knows how to direct a shootout, but is that all he knows how to do?