Public Enemies

Bank robber John Dillinger was so good at what he did, no law man could stop him. So the law got better.
The engrossing Public Enemies, directed by crime auteur Michael Mann (Heat, Miami Vice, et al), is about the showdown between the cocky, smooth-talking, slightly jaded Dillinger (a captivating Johnny Depp) and the up-and-coming FBI, led by the smarmy and ambitious J. Edgar Hoover (deliriously creepy Billy Crudup).
Hoover wisely places his best agent, Melvin Pervis (Christian Bale) on the case—knowing that the dogged Pervis will make him look good.
Mann does a great job of showing you Dillinger’s world. Everything—from the fedoras, to the Tommy guns, to the audacious way Dillinger and his men broke out of prison (twice!) and their balletically choreographed bank heists— bristles with authority. (And no wonder: Mann payed meticulous attention to detail, even recreating some pivotal shootouts in the actual locations they occurred.) The film looks gorgeous—all sumptuous blacks and grays and inky figures in the night—and the soundtrack is equally seductive.
But, as is often my complaint with Michael Mann films, Public Enemies feels a little cold. Mann tries to up the human factor by highlighting a romance between Dillinger and Billie Frechette (Marion Cotillard), a pragmatic but beautiful hat check girl (Dillinger woos her the way he approaches a bank heist—with little doubt of his success) but the director’s mind is clearly on the cops and robbers.
There’s little sense of the Depression Era mood and only a glancing reference to Dillinger’s status as a folk hero. More importantly, we hardly get to know Bale’s Pervis. There’s a moment, early on, when Hoover surprises Pervis by introducing him to the media as the new head of the Chicago crime bureau. Pervis never blinks—he takes the mike and calmly talks about catching Dillinger. I understand this is supposed to demonstrate how cool under pressure Pervis was. But if Bale (and Mann) could’ve just given us something here—a tiny tic, a bead of sweat on the lip, an awkward clearing of throat—to show Pervis’s humanity, it would’ve gone a long way. Instead, Pervis, like the film itself, is as smooth and focused as a bullet.