By Bruce Dancis
Scripps Howard News Service

Filmmaker Michael Mann’s lofty aims have usually been matched by his significant achievements. As executive producer of TV’s “Miami Vice,” he modernized the police crime drama and made it hip to be an undercover police detective.

As a film director, he’s excelled in a variety of genres, including the historical adventure (“The Last of the Mohicans”), the modern crime drama (“Heat,” “Collateral”), the sports biopic (“Ali”) and the political thriller (“The Insider”).

In “Public Enemies,” out on DVD this week (one- and two-disc editions, Universal Studios Home Entertainment, $29.98/$34.98 special edition/$36.98 Blu-ray, rated R), Mann tries his hand at a genre — the gangster movie — that may be America’s greatest contribution to international film and broadcasting. He’s carrying on a tradition that ranges from groundbreaking early-1930s films like “The Public Enemy,” “Little Caesar” and “Scarface,” through “Bonnie and Clyde,” “The Godfather” trilogy, “GoodFellas” and TV’s “The Sopranos.”

“Public Enemies,” which Mann directed, co-produced and co-wrote, tells the story of infamous bank robber John Dillinger (Johnny Depp), his love affair with hatcheck girl Billie Frechette (Marion Cotillard) and his pursuit by FBI agent Melvin Purvis (Christian Bale), during Dillinger’s short reign in 1933-34 as “Public Enemy Number One.” All of the stars turn in impressive performances in Mann’s tightly constructed and well-paced film.

Mann emphasizes how a gangster like Dillinger had to battle two distinct forces. There was Purvis and the new FBI led by J. Edgar Hoover (played by Billy Crudup), which was creating America’s first national police force and using new crime-fighting techniques like telephone wiretaps. But Dillinger also was a threat to organized crime — in this case the Chicago mob, led by Frank Nitti, that was concentrating on lucrative illegal activities such as gambling and prostitution, and didn’t like the heat that bandits like Dillinger brought on them from law-enforcement authorities.

Although “Public Enemies” was based on a non-fiction book with the same title about ‘30s gangsters and the birth of the FBI by Bryan Burrough, Mann undoubtedly chose the title because of its proximity to the 1931 James Cagney gangster classic, “The Public Enemy.”

Mann’s film also shares certain obvious traits with Arthur Penn’s “Bonnie and Clyde” (1967) in its portrayal of the public actions and private lives of notorious American bank robbers in the ‘30s, and with Sam Mendes’ “The Road to Perdition” (2002) in its emphasis on the outlaw and the lawman pursuing him. By keeping the protagonists, Dillinger and Purvis, apart for all but one crucial, if apocryphal, scene, Mann echoes his own use of Robert De Niro (the thief) and Al Pacino (the cop) in “Heat.”

In Mann’s audio commentary and his comments in several short documentaries included in the Special Edition and Blu-ray versions, he dwells on his painstaking effort to capture and replicate the historical era and social milieu in which Dillinger lived. He explains in the commentary that he wanted his film to not only show how 1933 “looked,” but how “people in 1933 thought.” The “challenge,” says Mann in a short behind-the-scenes documentary, “was to try to make 1933, 1934 be alive — as vivid, as complex, as detailed as 2:17 Thursday afternoon in 2009.”
Mann’s attempts to achieve this realism included filming “Public Enemies” entirely on location and, where possible, in the actual places where the events depicted took place, a matter explored in the DVD documentary “On Dillinger’s Trail: The Real Locations.”

He shot Depp’s Dillinger escaping from the same county jail in Crown Point, Ind., from which Dillinger made his most famous prison escape. He filmed the FBI-Dillinger gang shootout in the northern Wisconsin Little Bohemia Lodge where it actually took place. His production designers refurbished Chicago’s Biograph Theatre so that it looked just like it did in 1934 when Dillinger was shot and killed by the FBI after attending a screening of “Manhattan Melodrama,” starring Clark Gable as a gangster very much like Dillinger.

Depp, who also visited Dillinger’s hometown of Mooresville, Ind., as part of his character research, and Bale, who met with Purvis’ ancestors in South Carolina and FBI agents in Washington, share Mann’s commitment to realism and submerging themselves in their characters and the period in which they lived. As Depp put it, describing the exhilaration of filming in the Little Bohemia Lounge, “Firing from the place that (Dillinger) was firing from, escaping out the window that he escaped from, running through the woods … You can’t imagine how useful it is to be able to be in the situation that he was in.”

Yet “Public Enemies” fails to show an America that was at its lowest point economically in the Great Depression. Neither the rural poverty of Dust Bowl destruction and foreclosed farms nor the urban despair of unemployment, bread lines and soup kitchens appears in “Public Enemies,” though Mann refers to their existence in the DVD’s bonus features. And by choosing to begin his movie in 1933 and thus ignore the societal and familial factors that led Dillinger to pursue his life of crime, Mann doesn’t provide sufficient insight into why the outlaw turned out the way he did.

In these ways, Mann’s film is inferior to “Bonnie and Clyde,” in which some of the most powerful scenes depicted the rural poverty of the ‘30s and the world Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow had left behind when they began to rob banks. Also unlike “Bonnie and Clyde,” “Public Enemies” is almost entirely devoid of humor.

“Public Enemies” is expertly made and very well acted, but clinically cold. The skill of Mann and his cast and the precision of the film’s robberies, prison escapes and shootouts are undeniable. Yet ultimately, “Public Enemies” inspires admiration, but nothing approaching awe.