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starladyMy sister and I took advantage of my day off on Monday to go see the new Michael Mann film Public Enemies. Short review: Well worth seeing.
The movie tells the story of John Dillinger's violent, infamous and short career as one of the best bank robbers in America--it starts eight weeks after he's paroled in the ninth year of a ten year prison sentence (for robbing a grocery store of $50 as a minor), when he returns to break some of his mates out of the clink, and ends roughly two years later, when he's shot to death outside a movie theatre in Illinois in which he'd just seen a gangster movie starring Clark Gable. The metacinematic elements of all this are obvious, and too good to be true, except that they are.
I really, really like the director Michael Mann's movies (though I didn't see his Miami Vice movie)--his Tom Cruise pic, Collateral, is both excellent and criminally ignored--and one of the things that's most notable about Public Enemies is the style it oozes, the sheer filmmaking skill in the framing of every shot (and how good they look on digital video), and the graphic, because relatively realistic, violence. While Johnny Depp looks good and acts better as Dillinger, a self-proclaimed lover of good clothes, Christian Bale, as the FBI agent Melvin Purvis, proves once again that no one, but no one, can wear a suit better than Christian Bale--the blue pinstripe three-piece he wears in the scene in which J. Edgar Hoover assigns him the Dillinger case and the Chicago field office is killer. Of course, everyone in the movie dresses to impress, because that's what people did in the 1930s, to the point where the lawmen and the criminals they pursue look essentially the same--and it's no accident that Purvis first comes close to snaring Dillinger through one of his cast-off coats.
As my sister commented, Public Enemies is another movie with Christian Bale as a good guy bringing down a rampaging criminal in Chicago (and other parts of the Midwest, including Wisconsin, where parts of the movie were filmed); as I said, it's also another movie in which the good guy and the bad guy are essentially the same--relentless, driven, out of control, and yet ruled by a code. What drives Purvis and Dillinger, the movie suggests, is essentially the same quality, and it's something that the efficiency-enamored J. Edgar Hoover will never really understand. We first see Hoover being skewered by a Senate appropriations committee, and it's dispiriting to think that that was probably one of the last times anyone ever told Hoover, who is forced by the committee chair to admit that he's just an administrator and has never made any arrests himself, where to get off. I was literally nauseated when Hoover told Purvis, "As they say in Italy today, it's time to take off the white gloves"--meaning, torture uninvolved innocents like the fascists do! and his obsession with "modern, scientific methods" makes an ironic foil to the brutal violence with which Purvis and his handpicked Texan agents (the members of the Chicago field office being shown to be lethally incompetent) pursue Dillinger and his crew, who are brutally violent right back. I've read at least one novel (Don DeLillo's Underworld) that implies that Hoover may have been homosexual and closeted; whatever the truth of that, it's clear that repression was a major component of his personal MO. Blech. It's no wonder that Purvis quit the Bureau a year after Dillinger's death (and apparently killed himself 25 years later).
In some ways the rise of the FBI is both the perfect metaphor for and an actual instance of the rise in what Foucault called "governmentality," which I would argue was an important legacy of the Great Depression and Roosevelt's response to it in America--the scenes in which agents stand in the middle of telephone switchboards, listening to conversations that operators transfer in and out of tagged exchanges, epitomize the seductive aesthetic and the creepy mechanization of modern life. Dillinger and his compatriots like Pretty Boy Floyd and Babyface Nelson were in some ways making the last stand against this phenomenon, and as Dillinger rightly grasps, part of their vast popular appeal was that they were sticking it to the government in general and to banks in particular--it's no accident that the career of Hungary's greatest bank robber, Whiskey, spanned that country's difficult transition from communism to contemporary Europe, and that there has been no rash of contemporary Robin Hoods in the wake of the financial crisis, much as we probably wouldn't mind seeing someone take back a bit of our own from all the financial institutions that have screwed us over.
Dillinger himself is the quintessential "carpe diem" ruthless criminal who lives high from job to job and doesn't think about folding until it's far too late; like all such, his destiny is inevitable, but his true victory comes, the movie makes clear, not in his eluding the law or stealing oodles of cash but in his giving rise to that other great American story, the ganster romance. It's Clark Gable, fittingly enough, who's left to express the idealized ethos that the movie both pokes holes in and wears closely as an armored vest--Mann is too smart to give any such noble bullshit to Dillinger, who for all his incongruous courtesy and media savvy was too smart to buy into it, though not above seeing some of himself in the silver screen portrayal of the type he (briefly) personified.
I wish I had more to say about Dillinger's girlfriend, Billy Frechette, but other than "bitter half-Native disaffected," I really don't, though I did think Marion Cotillard turned in an excellent performance.
The movie tells the story of John Dillinger's violent, infamous and short career as one of the best bank robbers in America--it starts eight weeks after he's paroled in the ninth year of a ten year prison sentence (for robbing a grocery store of $50 as a minor), when he returns to break some of his mates out of the clink, and ends roughly two years later, when he's shot to death outside a movie theatre in Illinois in which he'd just seen a gangster movie starring Clark Gable. The metacinematic elements of all this are obvious, and too good to be true, except that they are.
I really, really like the director Michael Mann's movies (though I didn't see his Miami Vice movie)--his Tom Cruise pic, Collateral, is both excellent and criminally ignored--and one of the things that's most notable about Public Enemies is the style it oozes, the sheer filmmaking skill in the framing of every shot (and how good they look on digital video), and the graphic, because relatively realistic, violence. While Johnny Depp looks good and acts better as Dillinger, a self-proclaimed lover of good clothes, Christian Bale, as the FBI agent Melvin Purvis, proves once again that no one, but no one, can wear a suit better than Christian Bale--the blue pinstripe three-piece he wears in the scene in which J. Edgar Hoover assigns him the Dillinger case and the Chicago field office is killer. Of course, everyone in the movie dresses to impress, because that's what people did in the 1930s, to the point where the lawmen and the criminals they pursue look essentially the same--and it's no accident that Purvis first comes close to snaring Dillinger through one of his cast-off coats.
As my sister commented, Public Enemies is another movie with Christian Bale as a good guy bringing down a rampaging criminal in Chicago (and other parts of the Midwest, including Wisconsin, where parts of the movie were filmed); as I said, it's also another movie in which the good guy and the bad guy are essentially the same--relentless, driven, out of control, and yet ruled by a code. What drives Purvis and Dillinger, the movie suggests, is essentially the same quality, and it's something that the efficiency-enamored J. Edgar Hoover will never really understand. We first see Hoover being skewered by a Senate appropriations committee, and it's dispiriting to think that that was probably one of the last times anyone ever told Hoover, who is forced by the committee chair to admit that he's just an administrator and has never made any arrests himself, where to get off. I was literally nauseated when Hoover told Purvis, "As they say in Italy today, it's time to take off the white gloves"--meaning, torture uninvolved innocents like the fascists do! and his obsession with "modern, scientific methods" makes an ironic foil to the brutal violence with which Purvis and his handpicked Texan agents (the members of the Chicago field office being shown to be lethally incompetent) pursue Dillinger and his crew, who are brutally violent right back. I've read at least one novel (Don DeLillo's Underworld) that implies that Hoover may have been homosexual and closeted; whatever the truth of that, it's clear that repression was a major component of his personal MO. Blech. It's no wonder that Purvis quit the Bureau a year after Dillinger's death (and apparently killed himself 25 years later).
In some ways the rise of the FBI is both the perfect metaphor for and an actual instance of the rise in what Foucault called "governmentality," which I would argue was an important legacy of the Great Depression and Roosevelt's response to it in America--the scenes in which agents stand in the middle of telephone switchboards, listening to conversations that operators transfer in and out of tagged exchanges, epitomize the seductive aesthetic and the creepy mechanization of modern life. Dillinger and his compatriots like Pretty Boy Floyd and Babyface Nelson were in some ways making the last stand against this phenomenon, and as Dillinger rightly grasps, part of their vast popular appeal was that they were sticking it to the government in general and to banks in particular--it's no accident that the career of Hungary's greatest bank robber, Whiskey, spanned that country's difficult transition from communism to contemporary Europe, and that there has been no rash of contemporary Robin Hoods in the wake of the financial crisis, much as we probably wouldn't mind seeing someone take back a bit of our own from all the financial institutions that have screwed us over.
Dillinger himself is the quintessential "carpe diem" ruthless criminal who lives high from job to job and doesn't think about folding until it's far too late; like all such, his destiny is inevitable, but his true victory comes, the movie makes clear, not in his eluding the law or stealing oodles of cash but in his giving rise to that other great American story, the ganster romance. It's Clark Gable, fittingly enough, who's left to express the idealized ethos that the movie both pokes holes in and wears closely as an armored vest--Mann is too smart to give any such noble bullshit to Dillinger, who for all his incongruous courtesy and media savvy was too smart to buy into it, though not above seeing some of himself in the silver screen portrayal of the type he (briefly) personified.
I wish I had more to say about Dillinger's girlfriend, Billy Frechette, but other than "bitter half-Native disaffected," I really don't, though I did think Marion Cotillard turned in an excellent performance.