film: Public Enemy

Handsomely mounted, beautifully shot, and not very good.

Mann's strengths as a director didn't mesh very well with this Robin Hood-ish tale of a popular bandit navigating a hardscrabble Depression America. The casting was up and down- Billy Crudup was a surprising and excellent choice for J. Edger Hoover, but Marion Cotillard was distracting and annoying as the love interest (what was that mess of an accent she was using? It sounded like a beginning ESL student who learned 30's slang from dubbed Jimmy Cagney gangster flicks).

And about 3/4ths of the way through the fact that the whole philosophical foundation of the movie (wayward individuals vs increasingly mechanized, regimented society) was already done a thousand times better in Bonnie & Clyde. Which wouldn't be a problem if Mann were making a straight gangster picture, but he so desperately wants it to be a BIG SERIOUS PICTURE you can't help comparing it with its famous (and vastly more successful) predecessor.

There are also some heavy handed parallels between the formative years of the FBI and our current Great War On Terror that don't really work- the end result is a stale muddle, a movie with too many conflicting impulses and directions to reconcile.

Johnny Depp is tremendously appealing but oddly de-emphasized in a cinematic landscape happy to shift focus between several other less interesting, compelling characters. Christian Bale seems to have been cast mainly for his cheekbones, his acting limited to displaying a fixed rictus of righteous determination. Billy Crudup does a bang up job as noted- paring the story down to a face-off between Depp and Crudup, with Bale's Purvis reduced to a catspaw, would've eliminated a lot of the distracting clutter.

There's a good, lean gangster story buried under the muck here, but Mann wasn't the guy to excavate it.