PUBLIC ENEMIES

Finally getting around to sharing some of my thoughts on Michael Mann's new film after many conversations with a lot of different people.

Divisive.  That's the best word to describe audiences' reaction to PUBLIC ENEMIES.  There are those who love its energy, its proclaimed "hyper-realism," the "revolutionary" take on classic genre, or just plain love watching Johnny Depp as a gangster.  Some, including Roger Ebert, even go as far as to call it a brilliant work of art.  I understand this point of view intellectually.  Then there are those who are put off by its lack of empathetic characters, abandonment of traditional story structure, and its utterly bizarre visual style.  There are those who say it is an intentionally heretical wreck of a film.

I suppose I fall somewhere in between, though I mostly see it as a failure.  It's an ambitious but flawed work, and my primary feeling is this: the film is neither revolutionary enough to succeed at breaking down the walls it runs up against, nor is does it succeed on a more traditional level as a genre film.  It's stuck somewhere between, trying to both rebel against period piece films and lure us in with their conventions.

I've read a lot about Michal Mann's visual approach to the film, and it's certainly interesting to consider: shooting in crisp HD with frenetic camerawork, the film might "modernize" the experience of being present during the events the film seeks to recreate.  The experience of the 1930's is engrained in our brains as the films we've seen have presented them to us: certain textures, colors, types of movements, etc.  But the authentic experience is nothing like that, and to shoot the film in a brand new way will bring the experience to life in a new and powerful way.

But one gets the feeling that Mann is surrounded by too many "yes men," because while the visual style of PUBLIC ENEMIES is indeed bold, it's not always successfully so.  What's odd about the many "mistakes" you see is that Mann and his team will brag about them all as an artistic choices.  But that doesn't make them good artistic choices.  I just read an article in which the colorist discusses intentionally changing the brightness of shots to not match within a scene, allegedly to mirror emotional states of the characters.  There are two problems with this.  One, it immediately distances the viewer from the film by creating a visual disjunction that makes the viewer aware that he or she is watching a film (which conflicts with the concept of an immersive experience). Two, the script is so short on character development that we aren't privy to any context for said "emotional states" of characters and thus the visual cues just feel random.

I just can't help but be distracted by the high contrast images of crushed blacks and blown-out whites, of too prevalent pores, and oddly crisp and clean images in a dirty, complicated world.

Indeed, it seems that Mann might have known his script was short on emotional content (problems that also existed but seemed oddly appropriate in the modern-set COLLATERAL and MIAMI VICE).  Perhaps he tried to compensate with bold style, but anyone who has taken Storytelling 101 will tell you the fallacy there.

And while the HD visual style is controversial, there are moments that we're reminded of the many gangster films of the past that it seeks to evoke in one scene and distance itself from in the next.  We can't connect to the film as a genre piece because the style won't let us, but we can't forget the genre in which the picture inevitably exists because the film continuously reminds us of it.

The other problem with the film is that if you take away all of the style and flash, you're left with a pretty dry story.  There is no development of Dillinger's character, or that of any other character really.  He and Billie's love story is hardly more than surface-deep, and there's very little historical context given to the bank robberies.  No time at all is spent on planning the hold-ups (except the train robbery which we never see).  It's all action without background, which, again, is used by some critics as being part of the point of the film.  I said in a review of MIAMI VICE that I thought that on some level the film's style was part of its content, and the same is true here.  But this doesn't change the fact that the film fails to engage us emotionally except for a few powerful scenes.

And there are some good scenes.  The chase through the woods and the final scene of Dillinger watching the Clark Gable film are instant classic moments in cinema.  But without the emotional background and with an inconsistent visual style that shows us too much one moment and not enough the next, these scenes are not as epic as they might have been.