By Matt Zoller Seitz
"The only thing important is where somebody's going." That bit of existential wisdom comes from none other than John Dillinger (Johnny Depp), the soft-spoken, bank-jacking antihero of Public Enemies, Michael Mann's latest epic about unhappy tough guys doing what they do best. It's offered by way of flirtation, as part of Dillinger's out-of-nowhere and all-out attempt to impress a gorgeous hat-check girl named Billie Frechette (Marion Cotillard) -- a pitch of woo so intense, and so divorced from what Billie considers realistic feeling, that it both unsettles and amuses her. "I'm catching up, meeting someone like you," he tells her. "Boy, you're in a hurry," she deadpans. "If you were looking at what I'm looking at," Public Enemy Number One informs her, "you'd be in a hurry, too."
On first viewing, I was inclined to call Public Enemies minor Mann, a characterization meant not as a putdown, but a simple summary. As anyone who's read me before well knows, I'm a student of the poetic-bombastic filmmaker, whose worst films are more visually arresting and artistically committed than almost any recent Oscar winner I can recall. His films often play like Samuel Fuller by way of Michelangelo Antonioni -- violent tone poems exploring the angst of machismo and the impossibility of deep and lasting connection by way of dreamy montage, hypnotic music and disorienting, off-center compositions. I'm hugely impressed by Mann's formal restlessness, his thematic consistency and his willingness to change up his game over time (moving from the Stanley Kubrick-level anal retentiveness of his work prior to 1999's The Insider to a more visually and dramatically loose aesthetic, much of it stemming from his recent conversion to high-definition video and mostly handheld camerawork).
To read the rest of the article, visit IFC.com, where the author -- a Brooklyn-based filmmaker and the founder of The House Next Door -- is the guest critic for the month of July.
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5 comments:
This is take two, after blogger lost my first post...less pith and focus this time- my apologies.
Saw the film tonight. Wow. So much to confront. Thematically, I'm not sure I know what to make of it. But that's hardly the pressing matter for me.
The video...'Discombobulating in a good way' was my impression of the opening prison-break. I'd never before seen a Tommy-gun that didn't feel embalmed to me. That whole sequence told me how the video could work. Loved Purvis' intro as well. Throughout, the immediacy of it made it a whole new kind of experience. But the eliding of the details really gnawed at me. The hand-held and/or blurring was really confronting here, more than any other movie shot on video that I've seen. I'm a huge junkie for the period, and while I suppose that the trade off was for the better in this project (obviously losing the grandeur was a big part of Mann's point), I'm not sure how I feel about it as a filmmaking movement.
It's similar to my problem with the Romanians- the immediacy of it is undeniable, but I don't see myself ever becoming fully comfortable with the loss of the smoothness (terrible word to use, but I can't think of a better one at the moment) and comfort of the films I've lived with my whole life. But, then again...this movie really kinda worked for me. Not sure why- my heart sank every time a beautiful shot had the blurring of a characters movement (and the headlights looked particularly uncinematic).
On a side note- I was struck by how long it's been since I'd seen Depp being a recognizable human being. Loved him here. I was also surprised at how well Crudup worked here- I was sure from the trailers that the theatricality would horribly clash with the video. Bale was good. I liked him more here than I have in a long time, even though I don't think his character is given nearly enough meat.
I am really pissed off that the video was the disasterous thing I thought it might be based on the trailer. I was fine with hating video on principle, now Mann comes in and confuses the issue.
p.s. I know it's a no-no in the current climate to like Sam Mendes, but I can't wait to see Road to Perdition again now. With Public Enemies in mind, that could be a fascinating viewing (even if it isn't...I still think that Road to Perdition is one of the most pure cinematic experiences of the past decade).
Matt,
Really liked the take on the film. I thought that your comment "And yet, in the two-plus weeks since I first saw "Public Enemies," it has lingered in my mind more vividly than almost any Hollywood film of the past couple of years." is very true. I haven't seen the movie yet but something about Mann's films do that. They linger. When I first watched Miami Vice, I wrote it off as perhaps a mistep by a director unsure of what direction he wanted to take. Perhaps I was expecting something with measured pace and structure like Collateral but instead got something more free form. After a few weeks though I found myself still thinking about the movie and the characters standing in the dark miami nightscape.
I think a lot of critics tend to look at a director's career as a timeline; i.e. "This is where he started doing this... and this is where he refrences this" Although this may be true to some cases/films, I think for the most part it is assuming too much. That being said I do think that Mann is going someplace different. His films, although genre pictures, have purposely gone in different directions. His films were so rich with atmosphere and story structures so well arched that I could feel at home watching one of his movies and feel safe in them. He is no longer purely interested in simply perfectly excecuting all the steps in the specific dance; he wants us to pay attention to more than that. I think the Digital video is a brilliant way of doing that and as you say capturing the "right now" of the moment. His films have always been about characters making choices in the moment, life changing choices that will alter the course of their previously structured lifesyles. Somehow through HD the choices they have to make seem more real, more dangerous, more "right now". I can only imagine how much more unnerving Dinero's decisions in Heat would have been if it was shot in HD.
I've only had a couple of hours to digest Public Enemies but I'm already certain it's the best American film I've seen this year. Give me two weeks and I might be calling it a masterpiece. Your pairing of Fuller and Antonioni is as dead-on as it is inspired; but which genetic strand leads Mann to those visions of prison walls cutting low across the sky, hallways that recede into Lynchian, stygian silence, trees and grass brutally divotted by machine gun fire?
I echo Shlomo and Anthony in appreciation for your insight on the immersive "nowness" of Mann's digital features. Public Enemies might be the most striking of the bunch for the way it refreshes tropes that have gone long past stale to calcified, finding a pulse where other directors only mine hard stone. The grim depression mother, for instance, stepping with her son into a Walker Evans pose before her homestead--a cliché revitalized by the camera backing away in guilty sympathy, capturing with equanimity the people and the endless sky against which the clothesline's burden snaps. (A rejiggering of the overfamiliar working in concert with the script; she'd slid onscreen trying to run away from all this but Dillinger shot her down.)
One parting I have from this and most other reviews I've read, is the supposed superfluity of Bale's Purvis. Narratively, perhaps, since Mann's clear outrage at the birth of America's War on Crime lacks passion in its argument. But I think to find the movie's logic you have to look at it more abstractly. Dillinger is movement, Purvis stillness.
Even at a red light Dillinger can't tamp down the urge to bolt, fidget, reach for the heavy reassurance of his gun. He's constantly active, even in repose, shrugging an arm or tilting his head or letting new ideas and emotions surface on his pretty face. (His realization of his love for Billie, a series of quick smiles that crest and recede across his lips like gentle waves, is one of the loveliest things I've ever seen Depp do.) He embodies the ethos he frequently claims, of constant momentum, the freedom to be found in moving on.
While Purvis tends to fill the frame as imposingly and steadily as a tree, or a locked door. Pretty Boy Floyd's race through the woods (hypnotically blue suit racing through pale green horizon lines--another dazzling Mann composition) is halted because Purvis stops himself, and fires from a calm but rigid stance. His few bits of physical business--trying to charm the reporters or put his underlings in a winning vibe--are deliberately, painfully staccato, the measured tics of a company man ("Men like us," he warns Mr. Hoover, "can't catch him.") trying to act like one of the boys.
Baby Face Nelson's fatal shooting is hammered home when his breath stops misting in the night air; we cut to Purvis, watching, and there's no breath coming from him either. Forsaking Dillinger's mercurial impulsiveness for the lockstep of bureaucratic compromise, he's dead without even knowing it. Or maybe he did; his titlecard sendoff is rather nasty in its plain-spoken way, and while I haven't settled all the questions the film raises it does seem consistent with Mann's worldview that compromise is an underling's first step toward self-immolation. Seated in the theater Dillinger takes Clark Gable's "better to burn out" lesson to heart; waiting outside with his cigar, anxiously drawing out his matches before the crowd begins to exit, Purvis might have heard some muffled, incoherent echo of the line, a mumble that haunted him several decades down the line.
Me, I'd much rather be a live coward all things considered.
BTW, I've been loving the soundtrack to the film. Mann has a great ear for the music in his films, and I think this is no exception. The score is a bit too gushy at times (I suspect due to Mann's testing how old practices mesh with the new form), but Goldenthal does a good job. The song selection is particularly strong here. Otis Taylor's 'Ten Million Slaves' kicks all kinds of ass, alone and in the film.
Really strange to read all your impressions of Mann's use of HD. To me, it was exactly the opposite: the HD-look in Public Enemies often took me out of scenes/the movie and made me totally aware that what Iam watching is NOT really happening, but a movie. A movie, that -in the worst scenes- has the video-loook of some 80s-porn-movie. No kidding: do you remember those porn flicks were they tried to make a gangster pic, with old cars, tommy guns and all...but shot on video.
Really strange how different the effect can be to different viewers. In "Collateral" and "Vice" the HD-look worked quite well, though, I think. Maybe it's the fact that "Enemies" is a period "film", were the contrast feels even more pronounced?
I think I preferred the "anal rententive" Mann... ;-)
Greetings
kai
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