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Christian Bale as Special Agent Melvin Purvis

Mann was one of the first directors to embrace digital technology. Working with famed cinematographer Dante Spinotti, Mann employs HD (as well as quite a bit of shaky cam), a method I feared, from the trailers, would be far more distracting than it really was. I was concerned that the HD cameras would jar me from the immersion of the period, calling attention to the equipment used to produce it rather than be the world it reproduces. Instead, the digital format gave the film an odd sense of hyper-reality. The amount of detail and depth of field is breathtaking. Most noticeably employed in night scenes (not coincidently the occasion of several of the gun battles), the digital medium gave it a greater air of authenticity, one more level of veracity that made the incandescent muzzle flashes, singing bullets and sickening collisions with either wood or human flesh that much more frightening.

The gunfights are extraordinary

Most firefights are shot with an aesthetic nod to what looks most glamorous and evocative. But this is the director of Heat and its seminal cinematic heart—a firefight on a crowded L.A. street—which is still the standard by which all gunfights are judged. Here, Mann trades aesthetics for claustrophobia and pandemonium. There is nothing exhilarating about being in a Mann shootout. They are terrifying, primal, visceral experiences.

Public Enemies is exactly what you'd want and expect from a gangster movie. Mobsters hang off car running boards, bags of loot in one hand, chattering Tommy guns in the other. This movie isn't all that different than the ones James Cagney used to make, though the R-rated world is a lot tougher and more realistic. Like all Mann's films, there are lulls of peace punctuated by fits of extreme and brutal violence. Gangsters don't crumple bloodlessly like in the olden days, they are hewn where they stand, leaking crimson like human sieves. 

Mann isn't interested in making a historical film so much as a psychological one. While Public Enemies sticks mostly to history and never plays especially fast and loose with the facts, details are secondary. His leads are not moral archetypes but highly skilled professionals with deeply flawed emotional cores. Mann, a perfectionist and modern auteur in a way that very few directors today are, strives to strike a balance between glamorizing his famous subject and painting him as the sociopath he obviously was. He places his men (for while there are women in his films, his is a deeply phallocentric world dominated by hyper masculine superstars) in crisis situations and then stands back to see how they will react. Public Enemies is his most ambitious project to date, a film in which he shows complete mastery and control over each and every element of the production. Technically and artistically, Public Enemies is a sterling film, a supremely mounted epic of the sort few are willing to undertake anymore.

Talk About It

1. Do the ends ever justify the means? Why or why not?
2. Who are some contemporary examples of cult of celebrity? Are they worthwhile examples? Do you feel that the film glamorized evil?
3. Though the villain, Dillinger is also loyal and selfless. How do we reconcile the fact that sometimes the "bad guys" act with greater honor than the "good guys?"
4. Do you see a resonance with the villain/hero's attack on the banks during the Great Depression and our nation's current financial crisis? Is Mann trying to suggest something?

The Family Corner

Public Enemies is rated R for gangster violence and some language. The language is, for the most part, slight. There is one brief, tame and non-nude love scene and one scene of a woman in the bathtub though her nakedness is obscured by the murky water. Public Enemies earns its R rating almost exclusively because of its pervasive violence—dozens of characters die in a hail of gunfire.

Photos © Universal Films

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Related Elsewhere:

A Mann's World	Printer view
Public Enemies director Michael Mann often blurs the line between the good guys and the bad in the moral crossfire between cops and robbers.