rated R

Director Michael Mann (“Heat,” “Last of the Mohicans”)  has said that his driving goal with “Public Enemies” was not to tell a story about the 1930s, but to actually recreate the experience of living in them. It was an era of fantastic innovation. Automobiles were just learning to roar, commercial air travel was only in its fourth year, long distance phone lines were still being wired across the windblown dustbowl. As magazines and moving pictures presented the nation with its first real collective cultural understanding, America itself walked the wild lands of frontiers sociological, political and technological. As history (or at least the history of the movies) would arguably bear out, frontiers breed the best outlaws. And along comes Johnny: Last American Gunslinger.

A born-and-bred whiskey-fed troublemaker from the Wild Wild Mid-West, John Dillinger earned his first prison term at 21 for knocking over a corner grocery store in his Indiana hometown. The $50 haul won him eight and a half years in a cold cell with a bona fide criminal mastermind—Walter Deitrich. Deitrich had made it his life’s work to perfect the art of bank robbery as small unit military combat.

Apparently, Deitrich was a pretty good mentor. Dillinger (Johnny Depp), arrested after a very brief parole in 1933, cherry picked a posse of bag men, weapon specialists and getaway drivers and instantly broke them all out of jail. The audacity of the operation was matched only by the precision of its success, and by the sensation stirred up in the hearts of a hopelessly broke American populace by the gang’s subsequent series of famously clockwork victories at opulent financial palaces across the countryside.
Enter J. Edgar Hoover (Billy Crudup) and his law enforcement bloodhound Melvin Purvis (Christian Bale). Their tenacious pursuit—and their endless deployment of press releases, newsreel footage, radio announcements and nationally distributed wanted posters labeled “Public Enemy #1”—fueled the flame of Dillinger’s fame, making his the second most recognized face in America after only the president. And still they couldn’t find him.

Peculiar thing with Mann’s movie, though: In his admirable efforts to defy conventional Hollywood through-lines with honest to God reach-out-and-touch-it verisimilitude, he effectively sidesteps a majority of the obvious dramatic implications of these opposing forces. Though each side is shown swinging out at the other from their respective corners of the ring of public opinion, their lines are never drawn with any great clarity. The relationships are evident, but never really explored.

Many characters drift in and out of the film with little to no introduction. Pretty much everybody with a speaking role, good, bad and in between, all wear grey suits and shoulder holsters (except, of course, for those wearing red dresses). It doesn’t help that these gentlemen all wear the same damn hats. But then again, back then, everyone was wearing those same damn hats. It’s at once invigoratingly challenging and a little confounding to pay such close attention to who’s who and what’s what. But that may be Mann’s point.

Depp, who’s made an indisputably engaging run as roguish outsiders, drunken thieves and murderous hooligans, is just a shade wasted as Dillinger. He does a fine enough job of minor keying what could have been an awfully over-the-top role. He exudes certain middleclass nobility, but leaves it up to the audience to decipher what’s going on in his head. Though there’s something priceless about the subdued introspection flickering behind his eyes in the movie house as he watches Clark Gable go to the electric chair, it may just be slightly too meditative for its own good. Mann works very hard, and with exquisite scrutiny, to explain that despite all the guts, gats and glory, Dillinger was really just an average guy. Though able to research, prepare and execute his close-term operations to infinitesimal detail, he was a man of the moment, and little more. For all his smarts, he just couldn’t see until next Thursday. “Public Enemies,” by all probable intention, is just like that.