I’ve spoken with a few people recently who are jazzed-up to see Michael Mann’s new movie, Public Enemies. I admire Mann as a director though I find his movies humorless and grim. He makes serious-minded pulp. Public Enemies? Why not? I like a good genre movie as much as the next guy. Then I read a few reviews that were not impressed with the movie and figured, eh, I can skip it.
Writing in today’s New York Times, Manohla Dargis, who like the great Pauline Kael is prone to writing effusive, adoring reviews when she falls for a movie, has a different take:
Michael Mann’s “Public Enemies” is a grave and beautiful work of art. Shot in high-definition digital by a filmmaker who’s helping change the way movies look, it revisits with meticulous detail and convulsions of violence a short, frantic period in the life and bank-robbing times of John Dillinger, an Indiana farm boy turned Depression outlaw, played by a low-voltage Johnny Depp. Much of what makes the movie pleasurable is the vigor with which it restages our familiar romance with period criminals, a perennial affair. But what also makes it more than the sum of its spectacular shootouts is the ambivalence about this romance that seeps into the filmmaking, steadily darkening the skies and draining the story of easy thrills.
…When not in pirate drag, Mr. Depp can be a recessive, even inscrutable screen presence, which is crucial to his strengths and performative limits. He’s a cool cat, to be sure: veiled and often most memorable when he’s staring into space while the camera soaks in his subdued but potent physical charms. He might have made a great silent star, as earlier roles suggest. Part of his initial appeal was that he seemed almost Garboesque in a movie world that increasingly makes no room for sacred idols.
Mr. Depp looks good as Dillinger — few contemporary actors can wear a fedora as persuasively — but the performance sneaks up on you, inching into your system scene by scene. The same holds true of “Public Enemies,” which looks and plays like no other American gangster film I can think of and very much like a Michael Mann movie, with its emphasis on men at work, its darkly moody passages, eruptions of violence and pictorial beauty. Mr. Mann’s digital manipulations, in particular, which encompass almost pure abstraction and interludes of hyper-realism, is worthy of longer exegesis, one that explores how this still-unfamiliar format is changing the movies: it allows, among other things, filmmakers to capture the eerie brightness of nighttime as never before.
I’m particularly curious about how the film looks. Richard Corliss thinks it comes off as cheap:
Shot and projected digitally instead of on film, the picture gains in gradations of night shades but loses in visual clarity. Some shots look like iPhone photos enlarged to 50 feet; any sharp camera movement results in a blur.
Is it ground-breaking or cheesy? Hmmm.
A good friend of mine, who is a film buff and in a previous life wrote books on movies, has warned me about the "look" and "blurriness" of the film. I tend to trust her judgment.
This might be one for Netflix, even with as much admiration as I have for Johnny Depp (for one thing, he and I share the exact same birthday).
I'm going tonight and am definitely excited for it. I'm a big Mann fan (yes I even liked the Miami Vice movie), even when his movies don't exactly work (Ali comes to mind) they're still at least original/interesting.
I'm not in love with the idea of shooting on digital, it just comes off as a little cheap to me...but I guess that's the world we live in now. This is all Lucas' fault anyway, he started this madness back in '99 when Yoda stopped being a Muppet.
I like the passion of the Times' reviewer but often don't share her enthusiasms. Still, I think she's dead-on when she writes that Depp could have been a good silent film star.
I'd much rather Dargis review a genre movie than AO Scott.
Just from the TV commercials, I'd have to agree with Corliss: This movie looks like ass to me. I'm not a film snob either as I liked the way Miami Vice and Collateral looked just fine.
And this looks far less film-esque than those last two Star Wars movies, digital effects aside.
Saw this on Wednesday.
Was NOT impressed and I'm generally a Mann fan.
HD does NOT work here and, for that matter, neither does the insistence on shooting so much hand held.
I'd say 5% of the film looks gorgeous, 45% looks fine and 50% looks like something you'd find on the History Channel.
Yeah, it looks THAT bad.
The film itself it rather remarkably boring given the subject matter, and somehow manages to be too long and still missing relevant scenes.
It can't decide what it wants to be, doesn't really develop *any* of the characters it introduces and the central love story between Depp and Cotillard never really takes life, no matter how much the treacley swelling music insists.
Depp's pretty good, but gets little to work with, Bale's pretty good, but gets nothing to work with (seriously, there's no internal on Purvis at all) and mostly it feels like a set of scenes from a gangster popup book.
So, maybe a matinee?
Depends on if you, like Dillinger just wanna go to the movies to beat the heat ...
[5] Treacly??? Oh no!
Seriously, though - great write-up!
It is slick, polished, often gorgeous (men and cars, spurts of machine gun fire - a Mann trademark). But there's not much there there. There's no real sense of WHY Mann wanted to film this, unless to make something slick and gorgeous (in the middle of the Great Depression, which is utterly ignored).
Too many death shots of Depp or Bale watching some anonymous buddy/cop die ... and we don't remember the dying guy, or care about him at all.
I didn't dislike the film, found it entirely watchable, but came out with nothing to think and little to say.
The way I see it, this is a pretty simple decision:
Johnny Depp in a fedora.
Yeah, I'll be there.