- #Johnny depp public enemies movie#
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This ennui threatens to infect the audience's experience, but then comes a genuinely great sequence, in and around the Biograph Theater in Chicago.
#Johnny depp public enemies series#
Though Dillinger is no villain, like the off-his-rocker Baby Face Nelson ( Stephen Graham), he's no hero, and his life looks like a miserable series of near escapes and disappointing scores. "Public Enemies" deglamorizes Dillinger and his life as a public enemy. Cotillard, ferocious and vulnerable, has the complexity and transparency of a big star. Pay close attention to the scene in which FBI interrogators beat up Billie. She emerges as a powerhouse in the classic Hollywood tradition, with looks like Olivia de Havilland's and the attitude of Bette Davis. French actress Marion Cotillard ("La Vie en Rose"), in her first major role in an English-language feature, loses nothing in the translation. Michael Mann is known as a tough guy director, but "Public Enemies" is more along the order of Mann's "Last of the Mohicans," with a male-female relationship at its emotional center. What a shame it would be for a woman to get caught in that crossfire - and then one does: Billie Frechette, the hatcheck girl who becomes Dillinger's girlfriend. And Hoover is the worst, talking and moving like a robot, a rigid and thoroughly inauthentic figure. Dillinger has a screw loose, of course, but then so does Purvis, who, as played by Bale, is strangely bottled up and angry. "Public Enemies" can be watched as the story of three neurotic men. Edgar Hoover ( Billy Crudup) needs to resolve the Dillinger case in order to cement his status in Washington. But Melvin Purvis (Christian Bale), head of the FBI's Chicago office, is closing in on America's public enemies. To a nation in panic, a fellow who goes around robbing banks seems more enterprising than criminal, and so Dillinger, the most wanted man in America, is able to hide among the people. It's 1932, a time of bank failures and mortgage foreclosures. Depp conveys this wordlessly, taking what might simply have been a good performance and raising it to an exalted level. It also makes him irresistible to women - though looking like Johnny Depp doesn't hurt, either.īeyond that, Depp suggests that there's a part of Dillinger that Dillinger himself can never know - some deep place of longing that propels (but can never be fulfilled by) his criminal existence. This understanding makes him both impossible to incarcerate and a master of public relations. Depp gives us a Dillinger of many shadings, whose special talent is his uncanny understanding of human nature. That Depp is onto something special is apparent from the movie's first minutes, as we see Dillinger breaking out of prison on his first day under lockup. Christian Bale in "Public Enemies." Peter Mountain/UniversalĪccept that, and you'll be in a better place to appreciate Depp's best performance in years, perhaps in his career.
#Johnny depp public enemies movie#
You remember how "Bonnie and Clyde" was about Bonnie and Clyde but also seemed, in a haunted way, about America in the 1960s and about the collision between youth and age and freedom versus conformity? "Public Enemies" is a movie about Dillinger that, days later, is still a movie about Dillinger. A movie about the Great Depression, for example, could have had some special resonance during a bad recession, but the issues Mann explores here are personal to the characters. Mann takes on a great American subject, but with no desire to make a great American statement. The only thing "Public Enemies" lacks is the sense of a story bigger than itself. Instead, he digs past the surface to find the wellspring of Dillinger's anger and criminal genius. This time Depp doesn't play his own legend, or even Dillinger's. He has also rescued Johnny Depp from cliche.
#Johnny depp public enemies full#
Director Michael Mann has taken the story of John Dillinger, the notorious bank robber and Depression-era folk hero, and has made from it a drama full of dread and atmosphere, a 140-minute film that in no way seems long, that's a succession of compelling scenes, with no dead wood. The only way that you will leave a jail cell is when we take you out to execute you.If "Public Enemies" lacks anything, it's something audiences can't legitimately expect to find: a certain extra something. But up close, toe to toe, when somebody's about to die right here, right now - I'm used to that.
Probably pretty good from a distance, especially when you got the fellow outnumbered. That'll keep you up nights.Īnd what keeps you up nights, Mr. And then they just drift away into nothing. It's the eyes, ain't it? They look at you right before they go. That fellow, the one who got killed at the Sherone Apartments - the newspaper said you found him alive.
Damn good thing he was pretty, 'cause he sure wasn't Whiz Kid Floyd. Well, here's the man who killed Pretty Boy Floyd. Not here for your money, I'm here for the bank's.
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