Full of rocketing DeSotos and crackling shootouts in the woods, Public Enemies looks and feels as though it should work. The bank jobs (innumerable) and prison breaks (two) are staged with cross-cutting zeal. Mann's longtime cinematographer, Dante Spinotti, imbues the '30s decor and sets with sleekness and cool (deploying lots of vertiginous handheld shots), and Billie Holiday works her melancholy magic on the soundtrack.
But ultimately, the movie's a bust. In a recent interview in the New York Times, Mann laid out his artistic mission for the film: (SPOILER ALERT ahead for the history-challenged!)
"You know John Dillinger is going to die," Mann said. "So . . . the story has to have hijacked the show-and-tell nature of the plot. The story has to be about the inner experience of the guy, so that by the end, it's not about him getting shot. Do you understand his inner experience? Is your heart with him? Do you know him? That's the battle."
A battle lost.
Inner experience comes down to a couple of lines of Depp's Dillinger muttering, like a Zen heistman, "We're having too good a time today, ain't thinking about tomorrow."
His romance with a French-Indian hat-check girl, Billie Frechette (Oscar-winning Edith Piaf portraitist Marion Cotillard), is presented as soul-shaking, but whether it's Cotillard's difficulty with the English dialogue, or just the fundamental inadequacy of that dialogue, the love between these two doesn't seem epic. In fact, Cotillard's best scene comes in the epilogue, when she's face-to-face with a G-man - intense, her eyes on fire and streaking tears at the same time.
