Depp No. 1 reason to see 'Public Enemies'
By Robert W. Butler
McClatchy Newspapers
Tucson, Arizona | Published: 07.02.2009
Is there any role Johnny Depp cannot make his own?
Last seen as a singing Victorian barber and serial killer in "Sweeney Todd," the human chameleon has effortlessly mutated into Depression-era desperado John Dillinger for director Michael Mann's "Public Enemies."
Charismatic, funny, dangerous — Depp blends derring-do, cocky self-confidence, sly sexuality and a bit of madness to give us a crook we can cheer for.
From a distance of more than seven decades, it's difficult to imagine a time when a bank robber was considered by millions to be a national hero. Depp helps us understand why.
He is the tireless motor that drives the film and is the main reason it succeeds. Though well-mounted, "Public Enemies" is a fairly generic crime drama filled with underdeveloped characters. Without Depp's weight, the film would be flimsy. With him, it's a heady romp through a legendary era of America's criminal past.
In adapting Bryan Burrough's sprawling nonfiction best-seller, Mann and co-writers Ronan Bennett and Ann Biderman jump on two story lines. First there's the relationship between Dillinger and nightclub hatcheck girl Billie Frechette (Oscar winner Marion Cotillard), a doomed Bonnie-and-Clyde romance fueled by adventure, sex and a recklessness born of fatalism.
Then there are the G-men — top federal cop J. Edgar Hoover (Billy Crudup) and especially agent Melvin Purvis (Christian Bale), who are determined to bring down the working-class gangsters who shot up the Midwest in the early '30s.
Depp's tasty performance views Dillinger as a folk hero in the making. The son of a poor Indiana farmer, this criminal quickly learned the value of publicity. He even developed a trademark — once in a bank, he'd loudly introduce himself and gracefully vault over the teller's counter, tommy gun in hand. People remember an entrance like that.
Dillinger would clean out the vault but leave untouched the cash held by individual customers, saying he was there for the bank's money, not theirs. At a time when many had seen their savings wiped out in bank collapses, this was sweet revenge.
While some members of his gang — particularly the psychopathic Baby Face Nelson (Stephen Graham) — were crazed killers, Dillinger seems to have shown restraint. It never has been proved that a bullet fired by him killed anyone.
And he had a devil-may-care attitude that many found intoxicating. Told by a colleague that he should stop going to nightclubs and baseball games, Dillinger answered: "We're having too good a time today. We ain't thinkin' about tomorrow."
Mann's film takes some liberties, particularly with time lines (the movie opens with Agent Purvis gunning down Pretty Boy Floyd; in reality, Floyd died months after Dillinger, and Purvis wasn't there).
But it faithfully re-creates some of the book's most memorable moments, such as Dillinger's daring escape from an Indiana jail using a "gun" carved from wood and the FBI's wintry nighttime shootout with the gang at a remote Wisconsin resort.
"Public Enemies" tries to establish a sort of personal duel between the taunting, charming crook and Bale's grim, unemotional lawman. But the film's true emotional core lies in the Dillinger-Frechette affair. Cotillard is excellent as the unremarkable young woman who falls hard for the electric excitement radiating from her lover's every pore.
Depp is so dominant here that Mann's casting of familiar faces in smaller roles — James Russo, David Wenham, Stephen Dorff, Giovanni Ribisi, Leelee Sobieski, Shawn Hatosy, Matt Craven, Lili Taylor — seems a bit distracting. By the time you recognize these actors, they've vanished.
A few manage to make an impression. Peter Gerety has a scene-stealing moment as Dillinger's mobbed-up lawyer, delivering an impassioned courtroom speech (one pulled directly from the trial record) that is a wonder of hyperbole. And Stephen Lang is intense as a lethal old Texas lawman brought in to show Hoover's college-boy agents how to track down and kill a bad man.
The film's violence is furious and graphic. Occasionally it is genuinely upsetting, as in the FBI's brutal interrogation of Billie Frechette (this was way before Miranda rights).
Mann and his cast achieve a grim atmosphere of fatal inevitability as the net slowly tightens around Dillinger and his freewheeling criminal cohorts.
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