Public Enemies ★★★½

There's always a sheepish excitement in the air when a movie is filming in town. For those of us that live outside of Hollywood or Toronto, it's kind of a rare thrill that reminds us of the glitz and allure that cinema has had since it's early days. There's that goofy feeling that only a brush with fame can provide. In Chicago, the experience is surprisingly rare; any major films shooting in the city are typically heard about more than seen, as they do their business on the outskirts of town, late in the evening, or otherwise out-of-sight.

Not so with Public Enemies. Shot in several different locations, the film used the Windy City as it's home base, and appropriately so, as John Dillinger did live and die here. When the film was shooting, it did so on largely his real home turf, meaning that tons of Northsiders had to avoid walking onto the set for several weeks last year as they went about their business. A nuisance for some, I know that many were willing to overlook it because of the sheer cool-factor of having Johnny Depp hanging out on your street corner, not to mention Christian Bale's exodus from the dark depths of Lower Wacker to the relative sunniness of Lincoln Park.

Grim and dangerous, there's little sunny about Public Enemies, but it certainly has a cool-factor of its own, thanks to the great performances we've come to expect from actors like Depp, Bale, and Marion Cotillard (see La Vie en Rose, please). The costumes, makeup, and music are all spot on, and the added effect of the sets make one wonder how the producers were able to afford a time machine to send the cast and crew back to the 1930s. This is even true for scenes set in Chicago, where somehow the most familiar streets have lost their modernity. It is truly something to behold.

Perhaps it is this high standard the film has set for itself visually, and for its nuanced characters, that left me wanting more overall from the script and editing. We're told the story of a stretch of John Dillinger's life that's interesting, but so long that it must be recounted through often disconnected anecdotes. He's in prison, he's out of prison, he's in Indiana, he's in Chicago, he's in Florida, he's back in prison again, he's…well, it's not hard to find oneself wondering how he managed to get from one scene to the next. Characters are often introduced with an abundance (J. Edgar Hoover) or dearth (Baby Face Nelson) of fanfare that's inconsistent with their importance to the script. Entire scenes exist simply so we get to hear a single "classic" Dillinger quote.

All of this creates a notion that John Dillinger was a complex and interesting – even likeable – man, that Melvin Purvis (Bale) was trying to compensate for having a ridiculous name, and that the '30s were a hell of a time for anybody fortuneate enough to have a little of what money there was to go around. But Public Enemies fails, as so many biopics do, to hold together as a great film in and of itself, absent of its subject's (in)famous greatness. That said, it's hard to imagine any film living up to the grandeur of this particular character, and many of the moments recreateed here are truly spectacular. How perfect, for example, is the parallel tthe film offers us between the film Dillinger sees in the Biograph before he's shot (Manhattan Melodrama) and Dillinger's real life as a criminal? Leave it to Hollywood, I guess, to create that kind of magic. Hollywood…or Chicago.

Comments

[LeonidEVSEEV32]

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[xlpharmacy]

public enemies film is really that good?? hmm I have not heard good things about it, but I have to watch it to see if it is that good, thanks for the synopsis though!