Dir.
Michael Mann, US, 2009, 140 mins
Cast:
Johnny Depp, Christian Bale, Marion Cotillard
Review by Carol Allen
Mann's movie about the last 13 months in the life of Depression era gangster John Dillinger looks terrific. It's like a black and white film noir only in colour and with contemporary production values, giving a real feeling of the period, certainly as it's been immortalised in the movies, through such iconic images as men with machine guns on the running boards of cars. Dillinger became a legend in America of the thirties - a media sensation and a folk hero for robbing the banks that robbed the public. He was also the first man to be named Public Enemy Number by J Edgar Hoover's newly born FBI.
At the beginning the film throws you right into the middle of the story with Dillinger springing his associates from jail in Indiana in 1933. It takes a while to sort out who's who, which is where of course it helps having well known faces. Depp, oozing charisma and with the sort of mournful demeanour which almost indicates he knows the fate in store for him, convinces as Dillinger, though we learn little about how he got to the place where we find him, apart from one speech about being beaten up by his father as a kid in Indiana. At one point this strong and silent type says "“I like baseball, movies, good clothes, fast cars and you. What else do you need to know?” Well, when it comes to the hero of a movie, a bit more than that please. The remark is addressed to his girlfriend Billie Frechette (Cotillard) and it's in his scenes with her where the character is seen at his most emotionally vulnerable. They're also the only times we see him smile. Although Cotillard has much less screen time than the male characters, she makes a very strong impression.
Returning to Dillinger himself, although we get lots of shoot ups and a good bank robbery sequence, apart from one scene of a crowd cheering him and a bizarre sequence, based one assumes on fact, of him as a prisoner giving a press conference, we get very little sense of him being the sort of Robin Hood figure, championing the people against the banks, which made him such a hero to his fans, and that's a shame as that's something which should surely strike a chord with today's audiences. Despite the film's length, there's also little sense of the socio-political background, though we do get a little of that from Billy Crudup, looking untypically nerdish as the ambitious Hoover, bringing his baby, the FBI, into the world as America's first country wide police force against considerable opposition.
Dillinger's personal nemesis in the story is FBI agent Melvin Purvis (Bale), the man charged with tracking him down, who in real life was credited with being the inspiration for the way the Dick Tracey cartoon hero looked. Here too there is little context to the character but Bale does succeed in giving him an aura of quiet strength and of being an honest and righteous man in a corrupt, dishonest world, particularly towards the end, when he rescues Billie from a bullying police interrogator. There are also some disquieting moments looking forward to modern surveillance techniques with the implication that the FBI instigated such things as phone bugs very early on in its history. Some of the smaller roles stand out with clarity - Dillinger's lawyer and the aforesaid bullying cop - but a lot of them, including legendary names such as Pretty Boy Floyd, Baby Face Nelson and Harry 'Pete' Pierpont, are so undercharacterised that they just come over as a lot men with guns wearing soft fedora hats.
Despite the fact that too much time is devoted to gunplay and not enough to character and context, the last section of the film from Billie's arrest onwards, which includes an almost surreal sequence of Dillinger wandering through a deserted police station and shots of him sitting in the packed Biograph cinema in Chicago watching his own "most wanted man" image flashed on the screen before walking out into the street to be mown down by Purvis's men, is totally gripping and satisfyingly dramatic. And like the whole film, beautifully shot.
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