Page 68
Spoilers May Be Below!
Page 68
Spoilers May Be Below!
From The Examiner
Michael Mann's Public Enemies, starring Johnny Depp
July 7, 11:20 PMFor years now, Johnny Depp has done everything in his power to deny the fact that he’s a legitimate movie star. A glance at his curriculum vitae – Edward Scissorhands, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, Sweeney Todd – reveals an actor with an almost clinical obsession with de-beautifying his handsome features, as if there was an unwritten rule that a great actor cannot, by definition, be a sex symbol.
In 2003, Depp was named the “Sexiest Man Alive” by People magazine; the same year he hit box office pay dirt with the first installment in the Pirates of the Caribbean franchise, a movie in which he hid behind more mascara than Bret Michaels wore during the height of Poison’s “Open Up and Say…Ahh!” tour.Johnny Depp in Michael Mann's Public Enemies
It thus comes as a bit of a shock to see Johnny’s actual face appear again on the screen as legendary bank robber John Dillinger, absent any prosthetics or other tricks of the makeup artists. From the first frames of Public Enemies, it’s clear we’re in the presence of a movie star, and a good one at that.
Dillinger’s real-life mug could hardly have won him any Sexiest Man awards. His wide forehead sloped up severely to a receding hairline, his hair cropped high above pointed ears with a pencil thin mustache framing a crooked mouth and cleft chin. Warren Oates bore the closest physical resemblance to Dillinger in John Milius’ 1973 biopic, and no one can match Lawrence Tierney’s 1945 portrayal in pound-for-pound menace. But Dillinger was also a charismatic man, with the kind of folk hero status normally reserved for movie stars or ballplayers, and Depp plays his charm to the hilt, at times to the point of over-romanticization. “We’re here for the bank’s money, not yours,” he remarks to a petrified customer, clearly channeling his inner Warren Beatty from Bonnie and Clyde.
Crime may not pay, but it’s certainly exhilarating, at least in a Michael Mann movie that is. Public Enemies offers further proof that nobody is better than Mann among modern directors at staging action sequences, and specifically at gunfights. As in his masterpiece Heat, the gunshots just sound more real than your average movie. The FBI’s raid on the Little Bohemia Lodge, where Dillinger and his gang holed up in April 1934, is a virtuoso scene, shot by Mann from a myriad of camera angles, with Depp waking from a sound sleep to bullets ripping through the cabin windows. Despite a wounded shoulder, he grabs a tommy gun and begins blasting, the orange glow from the gunfire illuminating Dante Spinotti’s noirish cinematography like a bonfire on a moonless night.
The meat of the film’s story revolves around the love affair between Dillinger and Billie Frechette, played by the French actress Marion Cotillard, who won the 2007 Best Actress Oscar for her portrayal of singer Edith Piaf in La Vie en Rose. She is perfectly cast as the part French/part Menominee Indian hat check girl, her waif-like features and tremulous voice recalling such Depression-era starlets as Myrna Loy and Sylvia Sidney.
Like Heat, there is also a cop/criminal storyline, with Christian Bale portraying FBI agent Melvin Purvis, whom J. Edgar Hoover put in charge of the Chicago district office in 1932. Bale gives a wooden performance, albeit in a wooden role, his Southern drawl having all the inflection of a bored telephone operator. More interesting is Stephen Lang as Charles Winstead, the laconic Texan who put three of the five fatal bullets in Dillinger, but he isn’t given enough screen time to be an appropriate foil to Depp’s dominating presence.
The brilliance of Heat was that equal care was given to developing Pacino’s cop and De Niro’s criminal, and even if we couldn’t help but root for the “bad guy” to get away at the end, there was a wholly satisfying symmetry to its fatalistic conclusion. Lacking a strong protagonist/antagonist interplay, Public Enemies leaves us no choice but to revel in its criminal violence, even as the corpses become too high to count.
Dillinger was ultimately gunned down while leaving Chicago’s Biograph Theater, and Mann wisely takes his time with the climatic sequence. The picture that evening was Manhattan Melodrama, starring Clark Gable as crooked gambler Blackie Gallagher, and the lingering close-ups of Depp’s wistful face suggest that Dillinger conceived of himself in terms of popular superstardom and may have been influenced by the very gangster movies he helped to inspire.
One can only hope that life won’t once again imitate art and that the country’s next John Dillinger or Whitey Bulger won’t be similarly inspired by Public Enemies.
From Daily Actor
From Herald Review
Brush with Fame: Depp's graciousness will always be rememberedChelly McCauley of Macon and her daughter, Laura, were in Oshkosh, Wis., at 4 a.m.
"It was cold, mid-20s, and windy," Chelly McCauley said. "We took our place with lawn chairs, blankets, heavy coats, hats and mittens, along with several other dedicated people to wait behind the soon-to-be-put-up orange fence.
"I had been waiting for this day for years.
"We were in the midst of a Hollywood production company filming the movie 'Public Enemies,' starring Johnny Depp as John Dillinger, the 1930s bank robber.
"The reason we drove hundreds of miles, sacrificed sleep and braved harsh weather was to see Johnny Depp. He is the greatest actor of our time.
"Laura was excited to not only see Johnny but also to view how a movie is produced. She had applied to be an extra. My husband, David, was holding down the fort at home with our three other children.
"Oh, my gosh, up pulls a black SUV and out steps Johnny. He smiles and waves and heads into a building for interior shots. We wait and wait. We learn that people are here from Arizona, California, Tennessee, Kentucky, Florida and Canada to see Johnny.
"Now it's night and we decide to go to base camp, the area where Johnny's trailer is located. I decided we would wait in an area near his trailer.
"More waiting. About 10 p.m., Johnny was outside and walking toward us. I can't believe this! Johnny holds my hand and arm. I thank him. His soft voice replies: 'No, thank you, thank you so much.' "
Then he took Laura's hand.
"We followed Johnny down the block to take photos. One woman fainted. Johnny spent more than an hour and a half on that cold night, meeting and greeting his fans. He impressed me as a humble, genuine, gracious, down-to-earth person."
Chelly and Laura, now a 17-year-old sophomore at Millikin University, also have visited the jail from which John Dillinger escaped in Crown Point, Ind., and attended the premiere showing of "Public Enemies" in Chicago.
Laura was offered an extra role in "Public Enemies." She declined because she would have had to cut her long hair.
Michael Jackson memory
Freddy McEwen-Randle of Decatur said "no" to Michael Jackson when he was a young member of the Jackson Five.
"I was working in a men's tailor shop at Country Club Plaza in Kansas City," she said.
"Some of the Jackson Five, including Michael, came in the shop. He was 6 or 7 years old. He admired the necklace I was wearing. He said he wanted it. He thought I would give it to him. I wouldn't let him have it.
"Michael thought he could have anything he wanted."
From Bonnie & AnaMaria
Found by emma at Radar Online
Johnny Depp Gives "Scruffy" a Good Name Johnny Depp Gives "Scruffy" a Good Name
Jul 05, 2009 @ 06:07PMSeeing him in Paris for the French premiere of his new movie, Public Enemies, RadarOnline.com is asking the question: Why do we love Johnny Depp so much?
Is it the tattoos? His manly jewelry? Those sunglasses? His stache? Or maybe it just always comes back to the hair. No matter how long, unkempt or just plain dirty, Depp's do is a powerful thing!
Depp is seen here at the Plaza Athenee where many of the Public Enemies premiere festivities took place. Johnny lives not far from there with
his long-time girlfriend, singer/songwriter Vanessa Paradis and their two children.
Found by emma at NWI
From On Milwaukee
Critical mass: The experts review "Public Enemies"
Johnny Depp stars as John Dillinger in "Public Enemies."
By OnMilwaukee.com Staff WritersPublished July 4, 2009 at 4:14 p.m.
Here is a look at what movie critics from around the country wrote about the new movie "Public Enemies," which was filmed in Wisconsin by director Michael Mann and stars Johnny Depp as John Dillinger.
David Denby
The New Yorker
"For all its skill, "Public Enemies" is not quite a great movie. There's something missing-a sense of urgency and discovery, a more complicated narrative path, a shrewder, tougher sense of who John Dillinger is. The bank robber had a brief run as a national figure.Paroled after nearly nine years in the Indiana pen, on May 10, 1933, he rampaged his way around the country, often living openly in Chicago and smaller cities, and was shot dead by a variety of cops and agents fourteen months later, on July 22, 1934. As the movie tells it (Mann wrote the screenplay with Ronan Bennett and Ann Biderman, adapting Bryan Burrough's 2004 book, also called "Public Enemies"), Dillinger was a gentleman thug, loyal to his friends and to his hat-check girlfriend, Billie Frechette, played by Marion Cotillard with a combination of desperate hope and fear that is enormously appealing. Relaxed and assured, Depp, with his fine, sharply cut features and lithe body, turns Dillinger into a supremely confident young man.
"What do you want?" Cotillard asks him. "Everything, right now," he says. It's the quintessential movie gangster's demand, although Depp speaks softly, without the snarling boastfulness of the great actors (Paul Muni, James Cagney, Edward G. Robinson) who played gangsters when Dillinger was alive. There's a faint tone of mockery in Depp's mildness, in his secret half smile, though his face can darken with rage. Mann and Depp's idea of Dillinger as an unruffled prince of crime is extremely enjoyable. Yet, as the movie goes on, you begin to question whether it makes much sense."
Roger Ebert
Chicago Sun-Times
"This Johnny Depp performance is something else. For once an actor playing a gangster does not seem to base his performance on movies he has seen. He starts cold. He plays Dillinger as a Fact."Manohla Dargis
New York Times
"A grave and beautiful work of art. Shot in high-definition digital by a filmmaker who'€™s helping change the way movies look, it revisits with meticulous detail and convulsions of violence a short, frantic period in the life and bank-robbing times of John Dillinger, an Indiana farm boy turned Depression outlaw, played by a low-voltage Johnny Depp...."... Much of what makes the movie pleasurable is the vigor with which it restages our familiar romance with period criminals, a perennial affair. But what also makes it more than the sum of its spectacular shootouts is the ambivalence about this romance that seeps into the filmmaking, steadily darkening the skies and draining the story of easy thrills."
Kenneth Turan
Los Angeles Times
"Mann often wants to do traditional films but do them differently, do them better, enabling the audience to feel both the newness and the tradition. With "Public Enemies," he has made an impressive film of great formal skill, one that inescapably has a brooding dark-night-of-the-soul quality about it...""... A restrained performance like that only succeeds when it's given by an actor as intrinsically charismatic as Depp. His Dillinger can be as ruthless as the next guy and handy with a submachine gun when his bank robbery spree demands it, but what we end up admiring are his nerve, his style, his long gabardine overcoats (reminiscent of the long dusters worn by those other Midwestern movie outlaws, the James gang) and his hip, round sunglasses. This is star power acting with magnetism to spare."
Claudia Puig
USA Today
"Director Michael Mann mounts a technically proficient, visually enthralling crime drama anchored by the low-key but captivating performance of Johnny Depp as legendary bank robber John Dillinger."Peter Rainer
Christian Science Monitor
"Hollywood has made so many 1930s-era gangster movies that the only excuse for a new one is novelty. Why else endure yet again all those rat-a-tat shootouts? Nostalgia has its limits.Michael Mann's "Public Enemies," starring Johnny Depp as John Dillinger, doesn't attempt to break new ground. It tills the old ground, albeit with new-style star power and Mann's signature cinematic flourishes. But Depp is unduly subdued and Mann's cape work is oversold."
Kurt Loder
MTV
"Depp's charm works against him in portraying Dillinger as a cold-blooded gunman - he lacks the requisite sense of menace, no matter how energetically he goes through the motions of bullet-fueled mayhem. Still, the motions - the jailbreaks, robberies and ferocious shootouts, with tommy guns barking and gangsters in their new Ford V-8s leaving underpowered lawmen in the dust - are spectacularly well-staged.There's an opening escape from the Indiana State Penitentiary in which the bleak, towering walls of the prison, and the flawless blue sky they can't quite blot out, convey feelings of both hopeless confinement and beckoning freedom in a single resonant image. Equally striking is the sequence in which Dillinger is recaptured and flown back to Indiana, where he's met at the airport by a roiling herd of reporters and cameramen, whose smoke-belching flashguns light up the windy night with a lurid magnesium glare. (It feels like we're present at the birth of paparazzi journalism.) Mann and Dante Spinotti, the great cinematographer with whom he worked on such movies as "The Insider" and "Heat," opted for HD cameras in shooting the film, and digital has rarely been used to such rich effect."
Michael Sragow
Baltimore Sun
"Public Enemies provides a welcome shock to the system. This tough-minded, visually electric movie about Great Depression bank robber John Dillinger ( Johnny Depp) takes audiences into the center of the action in its opening minutes. It keeps them there as it expands into a bristling chronicle of a country in flux. Without ever telling viewers what to think or how to feel, it raises more questions about the corruption of crime and crime fighting than any expose or thesis. And if it sometimes registers too coolly, by the end it rouses more bruised feelings than any four-hankie weepie."Lisa Schwarzbaum
Entertainment Weekly
"The gangster-in-chief is played by Johnny Depp, one of the most effortlessly elegant, intriguingly self-contained American movie stars on screen today. But that mystery comes with a price. By the end of this arm's-length study, Depp's Dillinger comes across as an interesting cat, but never a knowable man - he's a pop cultural phenomenon because the movie asserts he is, not because we believe it. We don't feel the bank robber's heartbeat the way we felt the agonies of Russell Crowe's whistle-blower at the end of "The Insider" - or even grooved on the rhythms of cops Sonny Crockett and Rico Tubbs on Mann's stylish "Miami Vice."Gary Thompson
Philadelphia Daily News
"So the classic Mann setup is formed - smart and dedicated men on either side of the law, working with cool precision to destroy the other. There are other familiar Mann figures here - the woman who both loves and fears the obsessions of her man. Here it's Marion Cotillard as Dillinger's lover, a fellow social outcast for whom money means access to speakeasy society. Class resentment is a theme; the script positions Dillinger as an outlaw "Seabiscuit," capturing the imagination of a beleaguered country, but Mann leaves it underdeveloped."It's one of a dozen pithy ideas floating around "Public Enemies" half-formed. Like Dillinger as doomed individualist - he was dimed-out by the Chicago syndicate, which saw that his small-time freelancing attracted unwanted federal attention.
"Mann also mocks Hoover's expansionism (the title is a double entendre), and his movie warns against unchecked federal power, which pointedly takes the form of high-tech surveillance and then torture (though in "Enemies," torture actually works). Purvis, partly because he tolerates such excess, loses a bit of his soul in apprehending Dillinger, while Dillinger himself is elevated to tragic mystic. He spends his last hours in Chicago's Biograph theater watching a Clark Gable gangster movie, a scene that fuses notoriety with celebrity, and hints that Dillinger sensed the squad of executioners who waited outside.
"It doesn't all work, but quite a bit of it does, like the strangely lyrical final scene. There are enough good moments to please Mann's fans, but the "Transformers" crowd may be lost."
From the Star
Wanted: Johnny Depp
Desperate times call for desperate movies
Set during the Great Depression, Public Enemies dramatizes the true tale of charismatic gangster John Dillinger, whose anti-establishment attitude enthralled an economically desperate public.
Star of Dillinger movie was inspired by those on the wrong side of the law, his stepfather and granddad among themJun 27, 2009 04:30 AM
John HiscockCHICAGO–It seems fitting that Johnny Depp spent time in a maximum-security prison while preparing to play notorious 1930s gangster John Dillinger. What may come as a surprise is that he followed one of his lawless family members there.
While researching his role in Public Enemies, in theatres July 1, Depp stumbled upon a mug shot of his late stepfather, Robert Palmer, in the files at Statesville Prison in Illinois, where coincidentally some of the movie was shot.
"My stepdad was an inspiration to me," Depp says in a hotel suite the morning after the film's premiere. "I knew about his past and I remember when I was growing up him referring to it as his `college years.'
"When I got older and asked him what college he had attended, he said it was Statesville Prison. So for me to be able to get that much closer to him now, especially since he's passed on, was huge for me. He did what he did and I'm proud of him for doing what he had to do to survive. And he and my grandfather were great inspirations for me for Dillinger."
Ever since he was a boy, Depp says, he's been fascinated by the Dillinger legend – partly because he was born in Owensborough, Ky., 250 kilometres from the Indiana farm where Dillinger lived as a teenager – but more significantly because Depp's grandfather and stepfather had also operated on the wrong side of the law.
"It has to do with my family and my upbringing," he explains. "My grandfather, who I was very close to as a kid, had run moonshine into dry counties, and my stepfather also had been a bit of a rogue and done burglaries and robberies ... there was some kind of inherent connection I had."
Depp, who has been known to be chronically late for interviews – sometimes even days – was two hours late for our appointment. He arrived, smiling broadly, wearing a grey vintage trilby hat, grey Armani waistcoat over a beige Prada shirt and baggy, dark blue slacks. The evening before he had been besieged by screaming fans at the premiere. Later, at a private party, Chicago bigwigs and socialites had swarmed around him, pushing and struggling to get near.
"It was really weird, wasn't it?" he muses. "Oh man, you don't ever get used to that kind of thing. You just don't.
"That's why I hardly ever leave my house. I don't go anywhere. I understand what it's about and I appreciate it on a very profound level, but there's only so much of that sort of thing a human being can deal with. If the choice is between being constantly gawked at and sitting in a chair in a dark room, I prefer the dark room."
Depp is briefly back in the public eye to promote director Michael Mann's story of the audacious Dillinger, whose bank-robbing exploits captured the imagination of a Depression-era America and turned him into a folk hero. Christian Bale has the role of Melvin Purvis, the square-jawed FBI agent who tracks him.
The cocky Dillinger and his gang, including Baby Face Nelson, stole the equivalent of what would be nearly $6 million today during a one-year crime spree that ended in a hail of bullets on a sticky July night in 1934. Dillinger had just come out of Chicago's Biograph Theatre, where he had been watching Clark Gable in Manhattan Melodrama. Government agents had been tipped off and were waiting for him.
"John Dillinger was that era's rock 'n' roll star," says Depp. "He was a very charismatic man and he lived the way he wanted to and didn't compromise. I feel he was a kind of a Robin Hood because he truly cared about people. I believe he had found himself and was at peace with the fact that it wasn't going to be a very long ride, but it was going to be a significant ride."
Dillinger was passionately in love with his girlfriend, Evelyn "Billie" Frechette – played by Oscar-winner Marion Cotillard – who was sent to prison for helping to hide him from authorities.
This is something Depp can relate to, having fallen in love with his girlfriend, French singer-actress Vanessa Paradis, at first sight. "I was standing in a hotel in Paris about 11 years ago and I saw this back," he recalled with a smile. "Literally a back and a neck. And it turned around and looked at me and I was done. That was Vanessa. So two kiddies and 11 years later, I completely understand."
One of the few actors in Hollywood who genuinely does not seem to crave stardom, he has, despite himself, become one of its most bankable stars. This is in large part due to his role as the eccentric Captain Jack Sparrow in the Pirates of the Caribbean trilogy, which has brought him an Oscar nomination and catapulted him into the ranks of the leading Hollywood money earners.
He received another Oscar nomination for his singing role in Sweeney Todd. With Public Enemies, he turns in another intense performance that could well be remembered at Oscar time.
He credits his time with Paradis and their two children, Lily-Rose, 10, and Jack, 7, for providing him with a grounding domesticity he had never previously known. They spend their time between homes in the south of France, Los Angeles and, when he really wants to get away from it all, on a 45-acre island he owns in the Caribbean.
"Like everything else in my life, it wasn't planned. It just kind of happened," he says with a shrug. "After I had done the first Pirates movie and Secret Window, I went on vacation to escape with my kiddies and my girl, and someone said that there was an island down the road for sale. I said, `Oh well, let's go see it.' I looked at it, I walked on it and I was done. It had to be. So I immediately called my business manager and said `Please,' and that was it." He laughs. "It came at the perfect moment for me.
"The island can be perceived as a luxury and it certainly is, but it provides me with simplicity and somewhere I can go where no one is looking at me or pointing a camera or a finger at me. I can just be: that's the importance of it. When we're there we do absolutely nothing. My kiddies don't have any toys there and they build houses out of shells."
Financially secure, with a fourth Pirates instalment in the works, Depp is now looking for different roles, tending to veer towards projects that offer him a challenge rather than a big salary.
He has just finished filming The Rum Diary, his second role in a Hunter S. Thompson adaptation, in Puerto Rico. He is soon to hook up with director Tim Burton for the seventh time, playing the Mad Hatter in Alice In Wonderland. He is also waiting for a script to be completed for a movie about the Lone Ranger, in which he wants to play Tonto.
"I like the idea of experimenting with all different sorts of genre," he said. "Being comfortable with what you're doing is not good because you get lazy."
Depp is the first to admit his career has been random and unplanned. "I've never felt particularly ambitious or driven, that's for sure, although I like to create stuff, whether it's a little doodle, a drawing, a small painting or a movie or a piece of music, so I suppose I'm driven by that," he says.
"Everything I've done has felt very natural and it's happened because it's happened. I've never done anything because I thought it would move my career forward or anything like that.
"I'm just an actor and if I can leave something behind that my kids will be proud of, then that's what I want. I don't want my kids to be embarrassed by anything I've done."
Then, with a tip of his trilby and a wide grin, he saunters out into the hotel lobby to face the waiting crowds.
Found by Lucky 13 a new poster From the LA Times
Michael Mann and Johnny Depp make art of Dillinger.
By Kenneth Turan FILM CRITIC >>>LATimes
July 1, 2009
It was the movies that killed John Dillinger -- Gangster No. 1 until he was gunned down outside a Chicago theater after taking in the pictures one hot night in 1934 -- and it was the movies that brought him back to life. More than once. But this time it's different. This time Michael Mann is in charge.Win, lose or draw, Mann, director of "Heat," "Ali," "The Insider" and the current "Public Enemies," is inescapably one of the masters of modern American cinema. He's a restless soul, a striver, pushing his work toward dramatic intensity and the recapturing and recasting of reality.
Mann often wants to do traditional films but do them differently, do them better, enabling the audience to feel both the newness and the tradition. With "Public Enemies," he has made an impressive film of great formal skill, one that inescapably has a brooding dark-night-of-the-soul quality about it.
Simultaneously an art film and a crime film, Mann's latest work (he shares screenplay credit with Ronan Bennett and Ann Biderman) may not give you a ton to hang on to emotionally, but the beauty and skill of the filmmaking keep you tightly in its grasp.
"Public Enemies' " title, though taken from Bryan Burrough’s history of Depression era crime, offers uncanny -- and deceptive -- echoes of one of the iconic gangster films of the period, William Wellman's "The Public Enemy," which starred an incandescent James Cagney as a hooligan so hard-boiled he shocked American by squeezing a grapefruit into girlfriend Mae Clarke's face.
But if Cagney is all exuberant, anarchic energy, Johnny Depp’s Dillinger is just the opposite. There is a formal, almost existential quality about his fatalistic portrayal of the scourge of the Midwest, more "Le Samourai" than "White Heat," more Alain Delon cool than Cagney hot.
It's almost as if Depp, who lives in France, and his French costar Marion Cotillard have unconsciously collaborated with Mann to channel the spirit of the classic French gangster director Jean-Pierre Melville into these decidedly American proceedings.
A restrained performance like that only succeeds when it's given by an actor as intrinsically charismatic as Depp. His Dillinger can be as ruthless as the next guy and handy with a submachine gun when his bank robbery spree demands it, but what we end up admiring are his nerve, his style, his long gabardine overcoats (reminiscent of the long dusters worn by those other Midwestern movie outlaws, the James gang) and his hip, round sunglasses. This is star power acting with magnetism to spare.
The story Mann and company set out to tell is in part the traditional one of the doomed love of outsiders on the run and in part a newer, more socially aware interpretation of gangsterdom, the story of lone criminal wolves, in Mann's words, "being pressed on both sides by twin evolutionary forces -- on the one hand J. Edgar Hoover inventing the FBI, and on the other, organized crime evolving rapidly into a kind of corporate capitalism." We're a long way from "The Untouchables" here.
"Public Enemies" opens with one of the standards of the crime genre, the prison escape, with Dillinger, just released after nine years inside, returning to break his gang out of the Indiana State Penitentiary. It didn't happen quite that way, but that matters less than the vivid style in which masterful cinematographer Dante Spinotti has shot it.
Spinotti, working with Mann for the fifth time, combines intense close-ups with a polished, energetic style of shooting action that brings a fluidity to the film's bank robbery sequences. Spinotti's use of digital equipment, which creates, he says, "the ability to see into shadows," makes possible one of the films several rat-a-tat set pieces, a nighttime shootout with the FBI at the Little Bohemia lodge in northern Wisconsin.
Once he and this entourage are out of prison, Dillinger heads to the big city of Chicago, where he meets the beautiful Billie Frechette (Cotillard), a hat-check girl with a bit of a chip on her shoulder. She is dubious of his attentions at first, but when he tells her he has a weakness for "baseball, movies, good clothes, fast cars, whiskey and you," she is hooked.
Though even his criminal pals tell him that what they're doing won't last, Dillinger says he's too smart for the opposition. He reckons without the more modern and scientific nature of the other side, led by the FBI's fussy, obsessive J. Edgar Hoover ( Billy Crudup) and his man on the ground in the Midwest, Melvin Purvis.
Efficiently played by Christian Bale, Purvis is an icy and implacable nemesis who keeps after Dillinger with the help of handpicked Texas lawmen like Charles Winstead (Mann veteran Stephen Lang at his best). Purvis may have doubts about Hoover's methods, but he knows he has time on his side, even if Dillinger does not.
Though any number of name actors, including Lili Taylor as a confident sheriff and Giovanni Ribisi as gangster Alvin Karpis, make appearances, what's unusual about "Public Enemies" is Mann's determination not to have any face be an ordinary one.
A full 15 people (led by Avy Kaufman and Bonnie Timmerman) are credited with casting work on the film, and every face that appears on screen, from the members of Purvis' Chicago FBI squad to youthful junior G-men, are clearly hand-picked for individuality and impact.
Mann's attention to nominally small things, his insistence that every detail be authentic, including the clothes (Colleen Atwood is the costume designer) and the often historic locations (Nathan Crowley is production designer), lend a sense of rightness to the entire endeavor.
Just as potent, as always with Mann, is the eclectic musical landscape, which here includes, in addition to Elliot Goldenthal's score, Billie Holiday doing "Am I Blue," Diana Krall singing "Bye Bye Blackbird," blues by Blind Willie Johnson and Otis Taylor, and the Smithsonian Folkways recording of "Guide Me O Thou Great Jehovah" sung by a group of Old Regular Baptists. Not your ordinary tunes.
One of the interesting side effects of this exceptional care is to make "Public Enemies" so real it seems to transcend its period and exist out of time. Though the Depression was a major factor in Dillinger's career, we don't see or feel it all that much. What we get instead is the sense of a man whose name has lasted until now for a reason and, if the movies have anything to say about it, will last longer still.
Daily Blog of the "Public Enemies" author Brian Burrough
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