Michael Mann's meditation on the landscape of crime and the professions it creates (detectives and narcs, robbers and hitmen), continues with Public Enemies, albeit a look back in time to the criminal landscape of another era, inhabited by a different breed of criminals and enforcers. We spend a good deal of time looking at both sides of the conflict, and are witness to the birth of modern federal enforcement and the demise of one of the most intelligent and successful bankrobbers in US history. At the center of the struggle are two men, John Dillinger (Johnny Depp), the aforementioned bankrobber, and Melvin Purvis (Christian Bale), the federal agent in charge of apprehending him. Other important characters are Billie (Marion Cotillard) as Dillinger's love interest, "Baby Face Nelson" (Stephen Graham), one of Dillenger's accomplices, and J. Edgar Hoover (Billy Crudup), the future leader of the FBI who assigns Purvis with catching Dillinger.
Please note: Entries about media reviewed in this blog are written from the framepoint that the reader has already seen the work in question and desires further commentary or explanation. Plot twists and endings will sometimes be examined.
The movie opens with a jailbreak. It happens even as Dillinger is just being brought to prison. The whole thing proceeds smoothly until one of Dillinger's gang shoots a guard, alerting the other prison guards to their presence. What would've been a quiet getaway, turns into a shootout and a chase. When one of Dillinger's friends is killed during the escape, he furiously beats and then tosses the accomplice who shot the guard out of their getaway vehicle while it's still moving. From the beginning we are given a glimpse of just how hard this man is, and Purvis's "intro" will be much the same. In his opening scene we watch him chase and gun down "Pretty Boy Floyd", another robber, in an orchid with a squad of lawmen at his back.
J. Edgar Hoover is looking to expand the jurisdiction and importance of his bureau, which at this point in time is not on the federal level. He charges Purvis with tracking down and finding Dillinger who has since moved on to Chicago where the seats of organized crime there are giving him shelter. The movie makes no attempt to disguise the drudgery of such a task. Purvis charges his own men with making endless querries into a simple overcoat that Dillinger left at the scene of his last robbery as it is their only piece of evidence, and bureau work for the moment at least looks like the tedious process it mostly is.
We can see in the beginning that Purvis and his group are not yet prepared for the enormity of this task. When he and his men come upon a choice opportunity to catch their quarry, Dillenger, Nelson and the others in their gang slip through their fingers not only because they are willing to shoot first, but because Purvis's own men, lacking procedure, abandon their road block when they hear the gunshots to come to the scene and try to help.
Dillinger hooks up with Billie, a girl he meets and dances with at a club, and very shortly after, even tells her who he really is and what he does to make money. It's hard not to marvel at the directness of this character; when Billie objects to being with him, claiming she know almost nothing about him, he replies bluntly
He lacks almost any sense of humor, is almost always completely focused, and tends to say things in complete seriousness.
"I was raised on a farm in Moooresville, Indiana. My mama ran out on us when I was three, my daddy beat the hell out of me cause he didn't know no better way to raise me. I like baseball, movies, good clothes, fast cars, whiskey, and you... what else you need to know?"
We see what a dangerous opponent he is early in the film when we watch one of his bank robberies. He and his men operate completely aware of how much time they're taking and how much attention they've attracted. They plan for contingencies like the police showing up by posting a man at the front door and marching a few bank patrons in front of them as human shields when they board their getaway vehicles. Dillinger himself knows how to go directly to find the bank manager and get him to take him to the big money.
Dillinger is ruthless, driven, very intelligent, and cool under pressure. He is also a bit cocky and perhaps a little too sure of himself for his own good. At one point Billie worries over him, saying she doesn't want to see him die. Dillinger candidly replies that he's too good for them, and that he can strike any bank he wants anytime, while they can't be at every bank waiting to stop him. While his logic appears to make sense from the standpoint of robbing banks, it's also plain enough to see that this overlooks the fact that there are other ways of catching a crook then staking out potential banks. Dillinger lives in the moment. He doesn't yet realize that the time of bank robbers like himself is coming to an end. "It ain't about we're I've been, it's about where I'm going" he tells Billie. In an important conversation later when an associate of his observes that "robbing banks is getting harder", he says "We're having such a good time today, we ain't even thinking bout tomorrow." "You oughta", the man advises, in essence saying he should take what he can and get out quick. We in the audience as well can see the way the winds of change are blowing when we look at Hoover's agency taking form and realize how the government is formulating their response to the threat of Dillinger and his like.
Dillinger is captured in Arizona and taken by plane back to Indiana. The publicity he receives upon arrival is tremendous; to judge from some of the questions he's asked when interviewed by the press, he's being treated like a near-celebrity. He meets Melvin Purvis face to face through the bars of a jail cell door, and even in this encounter he is aloof and confident. We see the ingenuity of the man as he escapes using a fake gun carved out of wood to threaten the guards, then passes through one secure door after another, obtains real weapons for himself, changes clothes, and then finally sneaks past everyone in the sheriff's own car.
All of this leads to Hoover and Purvis cracking down on all of Dillinger's known associates. Dillinger finds himself without aid from other criminals. In one scene, he is firmly rebuffed by one of them who directs his attention to the phones behind him saying "These phones make more money in a day than you do on one of your heists and they do it continuously every day unless they stop ringing cause the cops come." The creation of federal law enforcement, along with advancements to "modern" crime fighting techniques may not be able to stop crime, but what they aparently did do for a country like america is force it further underground, out of the limelight. While the truly big criminals might indeed be the ones running the phones in the background, Dillinger's exploits have created an atmosphere of sensationalism, and the public's need to feel safe pushes it up in priority. This is coupled with another factor as well. Stunts like using a sheriff's own car to break out of jail create a spectacle and embarrass the law, thus swelling their desire to catch him as well.
Dillinger now is forced to rely on less trustworthy men than those he would prefer to. Their next bank robbery is sloppy and rushed due to the triggerhappy nature of one of the men on his team. The methodical approach we've seen him use so successfully thus far instead turns into a bloodbath. Dillinger is hurt during the escape, but worse yet, one of his men is also wounded and caught. Purvis begins to show how far he is willing to go to catch Dillinger when he denies this captive treatment and inflicts more pain on him until the man divulges the location Dillinger was headed to. It's borderline torture, or perhaps it even crosses the line. Another gunfight ensues when Purvis comes for Dillinger who is hiding out in a cabin in the woods, but once more Dillinger shoots free and slips away under the cover of darkness.
The final robbery Dillinger plans with the same cautious associate who warned him to be careful before. Before this can happen, however, we learn that one of the women who is shielding Dillinger is selling him out for the chance to become a naturalized citizen of the US. Again we see Purvis's hardline as he refuses even to make a promise to the woman to get her what she wants (he'll only recommend she be allowed to stay in the country), instead coercing from her what he wants against the threat of being deported if she doesn't cooperate.
The movie both benefits from and suffers for its realism in its ending. There is no climactic shootout, only the agents staking out, following and ambushing Dillinger to shoot him dead in the street as he leaves a movie theater. It's realistic and true to history, and perhaps even holds some suspense for those in the audience as opposed to another gunfight, though real-life seldom ever is as dramatic as movies would like them to be. The movie closes with one of Purvis's men, telling Dillinger's final words to Billie, who is still in jail at the time. The words refer to a lyric in the song they danced to when they first met and provide someting of a closure to their time together.
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It strikes me how men like Dillinger were ahead of their time when it came to their manner of commiting crimes. They forced the law to up its game and adapt to their new strategies. It really isn't until Dillinger becomes a media beacon that the police harass his associates, and this in turn triggers them to turn their back on him. In a way, it is Dillinger's loss of professionalism when bragging to the media that does him in, as things only proceed to get more difficult from there on out.
The era of bank robberies showcased in this film was a unique one. It sort of progressed out of the old west style of bank holdups, although updating technology like cars and machine guns made things dangerous in a completely different way, and the rise of cities, together with the shriveling of the uncharted west made way for a renewed strategy of hiding within the law's reach but beneath its sight.
If there's a common thread to nearly all of Michael Mann's films it would have to be professionalism, although crime (and the roles it creates) plays a large part in many as well. Public Enemies contains both of these themes and in terms of similarity bears a bit of a resemblance to his 1995 film "Heat" which also shared its time looking over both cops and criminals. It's been said that Mann is the kind of person who has equal amounts of respect for both sides of the law and it shows in both Heat and Public Enemies. Juxtaposing these two films, we can see what a snapshot Public Enemies is, from the metaphor of an american history of crime. While Heat does have a similar story to tell -one of detectives on the trail of some very skilled robbers- its differences reflect the period it takes place in: modern techniques of suvailance, legal manuevres. The second of these two is especially important to note as the characters in Heat have addresses known to the police, are not wanted men but instead are merely suspected of the crimes they commit, and quite simply put, hide in plain view. In short, they are not "public" enemies in the way the characters in Dillinger's time are.
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