Where the money is: Michael Mann's Public Enemies

 Johnny Depp, Marion Cotillard, Billy Crudup, Stephen Graham, Leelee Sobieski. Dir. Michael Mann, Universal, 2009

I've been a fan of director Michael Mann ever since I caught his first feature film, THIEF, starring James Caan, on cable in the early '80s. I missed his next two pictures, BAND OF THE HAND and MANHUNTER, the first filmed version of Thomas Harris's RED DRAGON, featuring a then-unknown Brian Cox as the notorious Dr. Hannibal Lecter, though I ultimately did see MANHUNTER sometime in the Aughts, and loved it. It's sort of sacrilege to say so now, but I think Cox gives Anthony Hopkins a run for his money as Lecter.

The funny thing about collecting based on what I find in the thrift stores is that some of my favorite directors barely exist in my collection, where others predominate. I have something like nine Spike Lee joints, about 18 Scorsese pictures, and around half of Eastwood's filmography, both as star and director/star. On the other hand, I own four Coppola movies, all GODFATHER movies (I count GODFATHER III and GODFATHER CODA as separate entities), two Woody Allens, and to my great shame, one Michael Mann movie, 2009's PUBLIC ENEMIES. People seem to hang onto their Mann films. It seems unbelievable that I've never found HEAT or COLLATERAL or THE INSIDER in the wild.

I do own PUBLIC ENEMIES, however, and if it is not top-tier Mann it is far from a bad movie. Some say Mann never made a truly terrible movie. Others say BAND OF THE HAND is execrable. For me, never having seen BAND, my least favorite Mann pictures are MIAMI VICE, ALI, and now, PUBLIC ENEMIES.

That said, neither VICE nor ALI count as truly awful movies, just not the director at the top of his game. PUBLIC ENEMIES, about John Dillinger, his gang, Babyface Nelson, and Melvin Purvis, the FBI Special Agent who brought Dillinger, Nelson, and Pretty Boy Floyd down, fares the same. Not a bad movie by any means, but flawed.

PUBLIC ENEMIES' biggest problem lies with its cast, or rather Mann's handling of it. Johnny Depp gives a great performance as John Dillinger, perfectly capturing the simmering class resentment and charisma the real Dillinger was known for. It's a confident, self-assured performance, a high in a career which routinely sees Depp subsumed by his character.

In real life, Dillinger appealed to the common man of the Depression Era, a Robin Hood figure who stole the banks' money, not the individual depositors'. Dillinger became a symbol of the working poor, who suffered the worst depredations of the Depression while the wealthy largely floated above it. Mann, however, never shows us a single shot of the desperate conditions most of the country endured. No bread lines, no shantytowns, no roads thronged with families on the move. Everyone has money here, and jobs, and nice clothes, and hangs out in Mob-owned nightclubs. Without that sense of the Depression's depth and bredth, it's difficult to invest emotionally in Depp's Dillinger. Mann tells us he's a folk hero yet never bothers showing us why.

This continues throughout the cast. Marion Cotillard, who has never again had a role as magnificent as her portrayal of Edith Piaf in LA VIE EN ROSE, has almost nothing to do here other than reflect Dillinger back to himself. She gets one great monologue after she's arrested, but even then the monologue concerns Dillinger's greatness. We never know or understand her except as an extension of Dillinger's personality. Christian Bale, as Agent Melvin Purvis, did extensive research into the role, concluding that Purvis had genuine sympathy for the social conditions which drove men to bootlegging or robbing banks, but the script gives almost no outlet for that compassion. The most we see is his increasing unhappiness with FBI director J. Edgar Hoover's gratuitous abuses of civil rights and the Constitution in his pursuit of not so much justice as his own reputation, and one scene where he rescues Cotillard from a brutal and degrading interrogation during which the cops force her to urinate on herself. It's a great moment, but the movie needed many, many more.

This problem applies from top to bottom of the cast. Mann always gets great casts, but here either he or his dogged determination to be historically accurate robs actor after actor of the identification it needs in an antihero movie. Stephen Dorff is wasted as Dillinger gang member Homer Van Meter. Billy Crudup does a good job of capturing Hoover's prissiness, but is not allowed to give the role any more depth or dimensionality. All the cast do as good a job as the material permits, but it doesn't permit much.

Stephen Graham, a British actor who specializes in playing American mobsters (he played Al Capone in HBO's BOARDWALK EMPIRE) shines as Babyface Nelson, and Stephen Lang, as Texas lawman Charles Winstead, actually gets most of the character beats showing that some of Dillinger's pursuers understood and felt for their criminal prey. Lang, who played the vicious coward Ike Clanton in George Cosmatos's TOMBSTONE, more or less steals the movie, the one character - apart from Depp -I could not stop watching and of whom I could not get enough.

Still, there is much to enjoy. ENEMIES marked the first time Mann shot entirely in HD. He and cinematographer/frequent collaborator Dante Spinotti make the most of the new technology, crafting a film beautiful even by Mann's exacting standards. If the performances give us little in which to invest none are bad. In most cases, there simply isn't enough. Giovanni Rbisi, Jason Clarke, and Leelee Sobieski deserve much better, and far more screentime. Ditto The Irishman's Domenick Lombardozzi and Compliance's Bill Camp as Capone's righthand man, Frank Nitti.

Ultimately, PUBLIC ENEMIES works well enough to entertain - it must, since I never even noticed the film's 140-minute length - but never transcends in the way HEAT or THE INSIDER or COLLATERAL do. Though qualified, I recommend the picture to anyone who likes Depression Era mob movies or Johnny Depp, as long as they adjust their expectations. Not a Mann masterpiece, it still ably fills part of a slow Sunday. Which is a special and vital sort of excellence in its own right.