Public Enemies

“Public Enemies,” the new Michael Mann film, is about the legendary bank robber John Dillinger, played by Johnny Depp, and the fatal game of cat and mouse he plays with Melvin Purvis, an FBI man played by Christian Bale. I thought it was a rather pedestrian reenactment of America’s dark love affair with glamorous gangsters and their breezy but doomed fleecing of the conventional world. It felt like “Bonnie and Clyde” drained of appealing characters, wit and verve. Pretty standard stuff, played sotto voce by Depp, perhaps as Frank Stella and the Minimalists played off Jackson Pollack and the Abstract Expressionists.

That said, every once in a while I felt tendrils of soulful meditation on the why and wherefore of Dillinger and the Great Depression which spawned him, something like the narrator’s voice in Terrance Malick’s “Thin Red Line.” What drives a person like Dillinger to a life of extreme crime and what makes non-criminals so fascinated him and others like him (such as Al Capone), even to the point of making them culture heroes and matinee idols? But no. Director Mann never committed to sustained musings about the mysteries of human nature, let alone our species’ place in nature. That would have made this film too Art House and killed Box Office (or at least held it hostage).

Still, there is plenty of art in this flick. I liked the low-angle shots of desolate, Hopperesque buildings plastered like monuments against unblinking blue skies. That one crazy orchid-colored baby carriage whipping through a chaotic street scene was a riff, perhaps, on Eisenstein’s “Potemkin.” And what was going on with Dillinger disguising himself in wimpy mustache, granny glasses and straw boater, a dead-ringer for James Joyce? Another kind of outlaw in not-quite-post-Puritanical America?

Perhaps. But in the end, this is a cautionary tale. Dillinger famously robbed banks because that’s where the money was. What’s left unsaid is that it wasn’t anywhere else.

Millions of hard working Americans had lost their jobs, homes and savings in the financial collapse of 1929. They had also lost their confidence in a financial system which had nodded and winked at extreme margin trading and other instruments of under-secured investment. No one in government had been watching the store and those most responsible for the crash seemed to get off with a slap on the hand. People were hungry, humiliated and angry. The banks at the center of every community in the nation were the smiling corpse of a deeply flawed financial and governmental system, a daily reminder of conquest and cruelty.

John Dillinger, like Clyde Barrow and Bonnie Parker, became a kind of avenging angel, punishing the banks in ways that the government could not. He violated their integrity with his guerilla attacks and made banks feel worried about their future, insecure, diminished. Through Dillinger and his outlaw confreres, the banking system began to feel some of the same kind of pain that the average person was feeling. It was, to be sure, a brutal form of justice which also hurt and killed innocent people. Never a good thing. But in the absence of effective, reasoned correctives, human society demands that something be done, and this was how it came down. I suppose it makes for interesting drama with all its relentless pursuit and duels to the death. But it certainly isn’t the best way to foster a healthy nation.