Public Enemies

Johnny Depp is an interesting phenomenon. He is, most will agree, a very fine actor. However his range does have some serious limitations. He is not well versed in the subtle, he is not so terribly good at playing ordinary people. He is very much the over actor, but has taken what for many would be unadulterated ham and carefully crafted it, through startling control of body and voice, into it's very own porcine art form. Give him the oddball or the flamboyant and he will generally astound, but put behind the reins of an actual human being and he seems to flounder. So perhaps it is slightly problematic for me to call his performance of folk hero John Dillinger dull.

Perhaps in another actor he might have indeed seemed the charismatic legend that the film needed, but in comparison to other Depp portrayals it seemed awfully flat.

Bale too has carved out his own niche, of intense emotionally troubled characters. And while this type is somewhat smaller than Depp's variety of unusual, I have the impression that he would be the better of the two at falling outside of it. Not that this is particularly in evidence here. While not especially strong, his Melvin Purvis is at least interesting and memorable, as the resolute and stoic individual meant to counterpoint Dillingers apparent freespiritedness (assuming that's an actual word). Though this may be in no small part due to the unusual Carolina accent he sports throughout.

The film has quite a bit going for it. It introduced me to the music of Otis Taylor, for which I am grateful. Stephen Graham entertained as the somewhat psychotic "Baby Face" Nelson (though I can't help but compare it unfavourably to the representation within O Brother, Where Art Thou?). The heists, the breaks and several related gunfights are all solid stuff. This is a Michael Mann picture after all. They make the lifestyle and the larceny of the era look a good deal of fun, which is crucial to the appeal of this sort of film. But, at nearly two and a half hours there is an awful lot to get through and not all of it can be orchestrated violence and car chases.

The driving forces of the film are the relationships Dillinger forms with both his lover and his rival, and I think it's chief problem is that neither happens to work very well.

The romance never shines, lacks "spark" or "charisma" or whatever you want to call the alchemical process invoked when two characters just gel together on screen. While it is formed from some pretty decent lines, Dillinger's technique of essentially bullying her into a relationship leaves little room for interaction and I was never left with the sense that she was an important element of his lifestyle, mythology or even motivation.

But perhaps more crucially we're given very little sense that any real relationship existed between Dillinger and Purvis at all. That this was in any way a hunt and battle of wills. That these dual characters who represented the opposing forces battling for the soul of the American man were ever really more that two men doing their own individual thing. Maybe this was simply the case, such metaphorical terms are an imposed fiction after all. Maybe this was a more realistic representation of the story than we're generally told. I understand Depp spends much of the movie wearing a genuine pair of Dillinger's trousers, which tells me they were taking that sort of thing seriously, but authenticity is not always such a good thing (though in my experience, trousers generally are).

There is a reason you print the interesting lie. It's such things that legends like Dillinger are founded upon, the reason he maintains a position within the American psyche. Refraining from that leaves you, and this without the beating heart it required.