Public Enemies A-

In Theatres, 140 minutes, Rated R

You’ve never seen a period piece that looks anything like Public Enemies. Technically, that’s because the film is shot 100% on digital cameras, with a good chunk appearing to be handhelds. Thematically, it’s because director Michael Mann isn’t interested in wowing with gorgeous reproductions of yesteryear, a la The Untouchable. He’s interested in immediacy and shooting a universal story like something I might put together on my Mac. He uses the look to shrink the distance between the audience and Dilinger’s America. To emphasize the dirt, the grain, the flash of gunfire, the crimson black of blood, the unflattering hard light and the lines on the face and forehead it betrays. In so doing, he tells again his favorite story—of two men on a crash course with the other, each attempting to be true to himself and his code in a society bent on destroying both. In this case the two men are bank robber John Dilinger (Johnny Depp) and FBI man Melvin Pervis (Christian Bale). And, as is the case with Mann, there’s a woman that ties them together—that keeps Dilinger from walking away from the society that would un-make him, allowing Pervis to reel him in—and what a woman. Marion Cotillard (Oscar for La Vie en Rose) burns as Dilinger’s love Billie Frechette. She and Depp bring an intensity to their brief romance that makes sense of the risks the take. If the American movie-going mind only has room for one French actress at a time, Audrey Tautou’s time is over (as Juliette Binoche’s was before her).

The plot is straight-forward simple. During the Depression, Dilinger and his ilk (Pretty Boy Floyd, Baby Face Nelson) steal from the banks that are themselves acquiring swaths of treasure through foreclosure, making them folk favorites. After busting his gang out of prison, Dilinger sets to hitting as many banks as possible, meanwhile falling for the half-French/half-Indian Frechette. J. Edgar Hoover (Billy Crudup) names him public enemy number one in an attempt to squeeze funding from congress and sets his favorite bulldog Pervis on his scent. History sealed the outcome long ago, but Frechette new from the beginning how the story would play out, even as she loved John all the more for his blindness. But the plot’s beside the point. Who gets to determine right and wrong? Is it better to be a man of principles acting outside the law or a man without inside? Do you live life by your rules or kowtow to society’s? And, in the case of Billie, do you love a man who’s completely alive today knowing there’s hell to pay tomorrow?

Some are complaining about Depp, but he hits it perfect. This is no psycho-analysis; it’s a man who knows what he wants, takes it, and isn’t thinking too much about tomorrow. He’s a little too cocksure, but he’d have to be to think he could keep hitting banks, and has the perfect charismatic veneer over an intellect that’s not quite as strong as he thinks. Bale is solid as a basically decent G-man not interested in asking existential questions while he hunts his man. The supporting cast is excellent, with Giovanni Rabisi turning in a solid minutes. The digital shooting makes the gunfights explode, as it did in Mann's Miami Vice, with Mann keeping the cameras a little closer to everything than we’d like. Mann continues to wrestle with what it means to be a man, the violence that seems inherent in the search, and situational ethics. If he’s asking the same questions over and over again, it’s because no one is providing convincing answers. A-