Public Enemies

On the surface, Public Enemies seems to be about bank robbers. But it's actually about the triumphs and travails of celebrities in a time of great upheaval – which is to say, it's about Hollywood today.

Johnny Depp, playing Dillinger, is charismatic, masculine, bold, even reckless. He seems unwilling to admit that his lifestyle is a dead-end, preferring instead to live in the moment. And yet he seeks human companionship in Billie Frechette (Marion Cotillard), swooping in to claim her as his "girl" without really asking her permission. He is a titan among men, striding into her humdrum life to sweep Billie off her heels and, throwing caution to the wind, seek his own fortune.

Christian Bale, playing Special Agent Melvin Purvis, is the man tasked with taking Dillinger down. He navigates the world of public opinion and the bumbling incompetency of a young FBI task force not yet hardened by adversity. Purvis has a lot to prove, balancing his own morality with a new era of government ruthlessness.

This movie isn't really about facts, though. A trip through Wikipedia shows the number of liberties – and there are many – that the movie took with actual events. Instead, Michael Mann tries to craft a narrative out of the battle between these two sides, creating the classic duality where two actors at the top of their game face off.

Purvis is the principled, dark, brooding character that bucks authority and follows his own noble path by being smarter and more dedicated than the authorities in charge. Dillinger is the wild man that criminals turn to, pushed to the edge because of the Great Depression and the law. Both men have nothing to lose but their very souls. If this sounds familiar, it's pretty much the same plot as The Dark Knight, only with gangsters instead of comic book villains.

For all the great action sequences, close-ups, and monologues, there isn't much we know about the characters in the end. Without the benefit of a prequel like The Dark Knight, Purvis is as much a cipher as Dillinger. Missing is the exploration of the environments that helped craft the careers of both men, and it becomes clear that Mann is more interested in making modern analogies (about torture, about wiretapping, and government abuse in general) than sharing a sense of history.

And that's the problem. While Public Enemies retells the tale, more or less, of the rise and fall of Dillinger, it fails to provide the backdrop for why it happened. We get occasional insights into the evolution of the FBI, but not of public sentiment, of the Great Depression, of how society helped create cops and robbers. At one point Dillinger provides a veiled reference to his past that's just as cryptic as the Joker's – because it doesn't really matter. This movie isn't about why things happened; it's more about giving two actors their chance to shine.

In that regard Public Enemies is a success. It's long, filled with philosophical dialogue and occasionally improbable shootouts. Although there's a stab at some kind of pathos, connecting Dillinger's own devil-may-care lifestyle with his romance ("blackbird"), it feels contrived. The most compelling character is steel-eyed Charles Winstead, played by the awesome Stephen Lang. I'd rather see a movie just about him…and got my wish with Avatar.