There’s a lot of sleepwalking present – as if robbing banks were pretty routine.Ĭhristian Bale is stoic as the Midwestern G-man in charge who’s determined to capture the culprit. As with everything, it’s played in such a quiet, bland way that it has no spark. There also is a scene in which Dillinger walks into FBI headquarters and talks with agents, unrecognized.
This version has Billie hauled away by the FBI while Dillinger was near her on the street and unrecognized by the apparently dim G-men. Cotillard’s main effort, one guesses, is to say her lines in English. Marion Cotillard, Oscar winner for “La Vie En Rose,” plays Billie Frechette, pictured as the great love of Dillinger’s life. His performance is intelligent, but perhaps he was too obsessed with capturing the “real” Dillinger (a brooding psychopath) to give us a real show. The new film is based on Bryan Burrough’s book “Public Enemies: America’s Greatest Crime Wave and the Birth of the FBI, 1933-34,” but it is about only Dillinger, making one wonder if another script exists somewhere – one written, perhaps, before Johnny Depp agreed to play Dillinger. Elliot Goldenthal’s original score is little more than a background hum. Ballads of the era, particularly the repetitive “Bye, Bye Blackbird,” are performed as funeral dirges – suggesting that no one in the ’30s had any fun. Part of the insomnia-curing quietness is due to a misfire in the use of music. The shootout at Little Bohemia Lodge, where Dillinger and his gang hide out in Wisconsin, is a highlight, but photographed in digital video it’s all dark and very difficult to tell the good guys from the bad guys. The action scenes seem like something out of a high school play – toy guns and no real menace, even if Mann does resort to slow-motion bullets that splatter blood in the famous style of Sam Peckinpah. He robs banks as if he were performing a ballet – jumping over counters and treating his hostages as if they were his guests. Mann gives us, instead, close-ups of Johnny Depp – pondering.ĭepp plays the gangster cocky and cool – and distant. With just a few close-ups of country folk, Arthur Penn in “Bonnie and Clyde” showed us why common people not only sympathized with the criminals but set them up as heroic urban legends. Can this be the role that brings Depp a long-overdue Academy Award? (Alas, no.) Can this re-create the desperation of the Great Depression, which we fear might be repeated today? (No, because we learn little or nothing about the times that produced the celebrity bank robber.)Ĭentering superficially on Dillinger’s apparent obsession to rob banks, it tells us nothing of the starvation, lack of employment, and hatred of crooked institutions such as banks.
#JOHNNY DEPP PUBLIC ENEMIES BLACK BACKGROUND MOVIE#
We use the word “strangely” because the movie is a bizarre kind of art film that specializes in stylized shoot-outs, rather than traditional action, and endless close-ups that ask us to wonder what the bad guy is thinking.Īfter sitting through “Transformers” twice (five hours of my life) in the past week, the mere ratta-tat-tat of a Tommy gun is, if anything, refreshing. “Public Enemies,” directed by Michael Mann, arrives, strangely, on a Fourth of July weekend as a vehicle for the always-interesting and often-mesmerizing Johnny Depp. This movie kills Dillinger with pretension. In reality, he was fatally shot leaving the Biograph Theater in Chicago, where he saw Clark Gable and Myrna Loy in “Manhattan Melodrama,” a better gangster movie than the present overly “arty” treatise on his life. E-Pilot Evening Edition Home Page Close MenuĪs it turns out, in more ways than one.
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