Ebert’s Public Enemies review

John Dillinger and Johnny Depp

Roger Ebert gives Public Enemies 3.5 stars, though it reads like a 4-star review right up to very last paragraph.

This is very disciplined film. You might not think it was possible to make a film about the most famous outlaw of the 1930s without clich√©s and “star chemistry” and a film class screenplay structure, but Mann does it. He is particular about the way he presents Dillinger and Billie. He sees him and her. Not them. They are never a couple. They are their needs. She needs to be protected, because she is so vulnerable. He needs someone to protect, in order to affirm his invincibility.

The movie is well-researched, based on the book by Bryan Burrough. It even bothers to try to discover Dillinger’s speaking style. Depp looks a lot like him. Mann shot on location in the Crown Point jail, scene of the famous jailbreak with the fake gun. He shot in the Little Bohemia Lodge in the same room Dillinger used, and Depp is costumed in clothes to match those the bank robber left behind. Mann redressed Lincoln Avenue on either side of the Biograph Theater, and laid streetcar tracks; I live a few blocks away, and walked over to marvel at the detail. I saw more than you will; unlike some directors, he doesn’t indulge in beauty shots to show off the art direction. It’s just there.

On Johnny Depp and Christian Bale, after the cut:

This Johnny Depp performance is something else. For once an actor playing a gangster does not seem to base his performance on movies he has seen. He starts cold. He plays Dillinger as a Fact. My friend Jay Robert Nash says 1930s gangsters copied their styles from the way Hollywood depicted them; screenwriters like Ben Hecht taught them how they spoke. Dillinger was a big movie fan; on the last night of his life, he went to see Clark Gable playing a man a lot like him, but he didn’t learn much. No wisecracks, no lingo. Just military precision and an edge of steel.

Christian Bale plays Melvin Purvis in a similar key. He lives to fight criminals. He is a cold realist. He admires his boss, J. Edgar Hoover, but Hoover is a romantic, dreaming of an FBI of clean-cut young accountants in suits and ties who would be a credit to their mothers. After the catastrophe at Little Bohemia (the FBI let Dillinger escape but killed three civilians), Purvis said to hell with it and made J. Edgar import some lawmen from Arizona who had actually been in gunfights.

And the last paragraph, where Ebert expresses his only let-down:

This is a very good film, with Depp and Bale performances of brutal clarity. I’m trying to understand why it is not quite a great film. I think it may be because it deprives me of some stubborn need for closure. His name was John Dillinger, and he robbed banks. But there had to be more to it than that, right? No, apparently not.

See, for me, that “lack of closure” won’t be a problem. Was there a feeling of closure with “Breathless,” “Rififi,” “Le samoura√Ø,” or even “Bonnie and Clyde”? Not for me, and those films are all the more fascinating because they don’t try to wrap up a man’s life with a pretty bow.