Eye Candy #89 - "Public Enemies"

Public Enemies: I enjoy most of Michael Mann’s films. This one just seems gratuitous in most respects. Overlong, dramatically flat, packed to the gills with historical inaccuracies, all in an effort to do…what exactly? Dillinger was as smart as he was lucky and brazen, sure. He had the eye of the nation, but he wasn‘t a folk hero like Jesse James. And he surrounded himself with some bona fide sociopaths. So hero worship is hard to muster here. And what is Mann‘s obsession with killing every Dillinger associate when the historical record shows that most of them outlived Dillinger? Baby Face Nelson? Outlived him. Pretty Boy Floyd? Outlived him. Homer Van Meter? Outlived him. Yet “Public Enemies” subscribes violent deaths to all of three of them BEFORE the death of John Dillinger. What’s the point? The film seems like an excuse for Mann to stage gun battles with tommy guns. It’s “Heat”, but in the 30’s. Which means you’ve seen it before, done better. Depp is fine as Dillinger, though he isn’t terribly relatable. Marion Cotillard plays Billie Frechette, Dillinger’s lady love. Most of his cronies are painted in fairly broad strokes, as is his FBI counterpart Melvin Purvis, played by Christian Bale (in the film, he is portrayed as having a direct hand in the deaths of Floyd, Van Meter, and Nelson, even though 2 of the 3, he wasn’t involved in). Which leads me to ask, “Michael, if your story was strong enough to stand on its own, why would you change all these ancillary facts, particularly when they had no real bearing on the course of the story?” Sadly, Mr. Mann has yet to reply. If you are presenting something as a historical narrative, and you’re demonstrably willing to alter the truth to tell your tale, what else are you willing to fudge in the telling? A middling effort at best from Mann. Woodchuck sez, “Not bad, but not really good either.”