PrintOn a Wednesday night in San Francisco, opening night, in a theater no more than half full, the truth was as inescapable as rain at a picnic. Johnny Depp just wasn’t cutting it. He wasn’t even making the attempt. Once again, Michael Mann had poured his nearly liquid talent over a gangster picture without ever thinking to ask himself why. That oddly vague title Public Enemies--why isn’t it called Johnny D. or just Dillinger?--was turning into a startlingly detached and affectless movie. And the digital coverage, as elected by Mann and his photographer Dante Spinotti, was such that you couldn’t even see the stuff happening. Public Enemies isn’t a rapture of bodies breaking open, dropping to the ground and coupling in motel rooms--it is a blur. It’s like the Michael Jackson rehearsal video for the concert tour that never would be when compared with the feral litheness of any of those great videos made when he was still free and uncaptured.
When the gangster film sinks into being merely a genre, a mine for nostalgia, period clothes, and 30s jazz, then it’s exhibiting fatal symptoms. It has allowed itself to be prettified when it should be authentically shocking. If you look at the original Public Enemy (1931), there’s that scene at the breakfast table with Mae Clarke as the rather sour-faced mistress and Cagney as the grumpy hood. What’s he going to do? you ask yourself. He sees the grapefruit--we see it, too. Oh no, you say, he’d never do that in a movie! But he does it. He takes the cut fruit and jams it in the woman’s face. It’s one of the ecstatic moments in the gangster film, utterly shameless, in that our childish urge to be outlaw is summoned to the screen itself, and it is our energy that makes Mae’s face sadder still. Take that! Fuck you, America!
The thrust of that last line--insolent yet full of camaraderie--is crucial. The American movie has always been about rapport: the unity of the packed house, us and U.S. all together, the huddled mass and the unreachable screen in wondrous harmony. The gangster film is unique in Hollywood in that it takes that aspiring “us” and gives it a whole range of fresh and dangerous dreams--you wanna see Tommy gun bullets meeting a body? You wanna see the banks blown apart? You wanna see the grapefruit hit the girl?--and then sneers in the public’s face at the ridiculous “happy” and “positive” ending where law and order is restored and the huge illicit thrill is allegedly buried. The gangster film whispers in our ear, don’t expect censorship or law and order to look after you. This thing called film is a very dangerous drug, but here it is for a quarter.
The gangster film has to be possessed by that danger and insolence. Never forget that Cagney’s self-destructive dance was an essential release for the early 30s--when the country was breaking apart. Never forget that The Godfather--with its sultry insinuation that a really lethal but wise manager could look after us--came to soothe the era of Watergate. Never forget that the burning unruliness of Bonnie and Clyde coincided with 1967 and America in turmoil at home and abroad. And who could possibly forget the superb insolence of Warren Beatty (the producer) in offering “We rob banks” to the anti-social instincts of the young, in a vehicle that would carry him personally to the bank in triumph? That’s what I mean about Fuck You, America: It’s the exultant yet fond cry of deep patriotism in love with unbridled freedom--but fuelled by personal vanity, ambition, and recklessness.
So the true blur of Michael Mann’s new film comes from his failure--and it is a psychological and intellectual failure as well as an artistic lapse--to understand that America in the summer 2009, when unemployment is climbing to ten percent, yearns to explode on a line like “We rob banks.” When Beatty said that line in 1967, it was full of the actor’s cockiness, and the dispossessed farmer was as tickled by its candor, but also as moved, as we the audience. It wasn’t simply an ironic admission of occupation; it was a statement of identity, and of idealistic enterprise. Bonnie and Clyde is constructed as to tell Clyde’s story. It is only when Bonnie Parker writes the poem about them and sends it to the papers that Clyde is freed of his rather far-fetched sexual inhibition. He is identified, and at that moment Clyde Barrow became far more than the real Texan kid had ever managed before 1934. Beatty’s Clyde was also Clyde’s Beatty--this was the film in which an unusually shy actor bursting with public ambition came into its own. The several talents who made Bonnie and Clyde, from the director Arthur Penn to the writers Robert Benton, David Newman, and Robert Towne, knew they were making a portrait of their producer just as surely as the team on Citizen Kane recognized that the secret target of their exercise was not William Randolph Hearst but George Orson Welles.
Public Enemies is naked in this area of identity and conviction. I said that Beatty was a shy actor, and sometimes that helped to spoil his performances. But his shyness could be immensely seductive, and the vital metaphor in Bonnie and Clyde is of an impeded personality who longs to find a melodrama to make him vivid, to make him known. That is why the names in the title are so important, and why Bonnie and Clyde is still so moving a picture. Yes, we know that the Barrow gang is doomed. We know that these lovers will be turned to chaff in a fusillade of bullets. So where’s the tension? It’s in wondering whether two beautiful blooms--Beatty and Dunaway--can flower in unison before death. They do make it--only just--and then the death scene (voluptuous in its slowed violence) comes as an astonishing, liberating orgasm and one of the sexiest scenes in American film.
That is the standard in electing to make a film about John Dillinger. It is not enough that for a moment he was a hoodlum celebrity, or that he was eventually gunned down by Melvin Purvis and a small army as he came out of a Chicago movie house where he had been watching Manhattan Melodrama. We have to care about him--and for that the film has to love him, and see an exuberant demon in his casual brutality. That’s what made Beatty, and Cagney, and Pacino in his playing of Michael Corleone.
But this film never knows why it is interested in Dillinger. He has no mission, no need--he seems as dumb as the real Dillinger probably was. When he meets his girl, Billie Frechette (played by Marion Cotillard), we don’t feel the pressure of death on their relationship. We don’t even feel that he likes her more than the other available dames. Remember, we are not dealing with real gangsters here. In life, we understand that just about everyone from Billy the Kid to John Gotti was close to cretinous promiscuity, but in our fascination with the “bad” we easily admit these stooges to our world--thus they become at least as smart and faithful as we are. The glory of the gangster film rests in that potential metaphor of the figure from history stepping forward into the limelight to be really “bad,” to ask, like Edmund in King Lear, that “God stand up for bastards.” It is that insurrectionary “us” being appealed to, the dark Hyde figure that has always longed to thrust a grapefruit (or something more obscene) in a nun’s face.
Is that objectionable enough to make clear the subterranean violence being courted in gangster pictures? Is it frank enough to explain the enervating vagueness of Public Enemies? Johnny Depp has been famous for two decades. He is sometimes called one of our great actors. And he has had his moments of cheek and charm, from What’s Eating Gilbert Grape to Donnie Brasco and the spurious panache of his laid-back pirates. But isn’t it clear by now that he lacks the creative need or the emotional stamina to seize a part and to dominate a film?
And there’s something else: Depp’s looks are fading into cheeks and jowls--he is 45 now, a fate that the real Dillinger was spared (he died at 31). Dillinger the movie character should be an animal or a dancer--he needs to have been inspired by Pacino’s outrageous Tony Montana in Scarface. He should sing the way he shoots, and as often. He has to have zing, and a sense of counting away his own seconds of life--and if you don’t know what zing is, then you don’t understand commanding a screen as time passes. But Depp is stiff and listless (which isn’t the same as thoughtful). Encased in the skin and lifestyle of an actor, he doesn’t know what to do with the perilous adventure of crime (and on film it’s easier to see the crime done for risk instead of reward). Cagney taught us the lesson 70 years ago and more: A gangster is so full of life that he makes death seem like a bogey-man and a spoil-sport we can smell and taste.
Depp’s Dillinger is a male model in his own movie. Public Enemies suffers not just in comparison with Cagney or Bonnie and Clyde. Six years after that classic, American International Pictures (a house of cheerful exploitation) hired writer-director John Milius to make Dillinger. That picture has the advantages of brevity, directness, and a performance by Warren Oates as Dillinger that is all coarse redneck--and plainly closer to the truth. In addition, Dillinger has a lovely rogues’ gallery of supporting players: Not just Ben Johnson as Melvin Purvis, but also Richard Dreyfuss as Baby Face Nelson, Harry Dean Stanton as Homer Van Meter, and Steve Kanaly as Pretty Boy Floyd. This Dillinger knows it’s a gangster film, and understands the savagely split response in its audience.
The script of Public Enemies does not understand that Dillinger needs big, knockout lines: He kills people with talk before he uses bullets. When he and his girl talk, we should feel arousal in the banter--but it’s not there. In Bonnie and Clyde, the sensuality of the picture began in the way the two kids talked to each other, and it was a romance that climaxed in words. The supporting characters in Public Enemies are as drab as their coats. They don’t really figure in the film (a huge departure from Mann’s Heat, say, where the surrounding characters are rich and strange and 15-deep). But in Beatty’s film, every person with a line was memorable--not just Gene Hackman and Estelle Parsons as other Barrows. Remember the couple picked up on the road--Gene Wilder and Evans Evans--true bystanders who comment on the central theme in a brilliant cameo. That panorama of special people amounted to a climate; it said that Bonnie and Clyde had an entertaining life. Michael Mann cannot get past the boredom of being John Dillinger. This may be truer to life, but it is lousy art.
Yet the most profound vagueness is in every frame and gray hue: in the digital--the way it’s been shot. An enormous self-inflicted crime of vandalism has been committed against American film--I mean the replacement of film with digital. The only comparison is with the deliberate and stupid forsaking of Technicolor in the 1950s in favor of color systems that were supposedly more life-like. Life-like is irrelevant; we are talking about the movies, after all. Technicolor and photography were beautiful. They looked like dream, like imagination. Whatever the technical and economic advantages of digital (and they are in dispute, as witness the April 2009 forum on cinematography in Sight & Sound), it looks like death. When characters move quickly--as they are inclined to do in gangster pictures--the image blurs. Whenever it fixes on a face you see uncommon and unnatural detail. It may sometimes be useful to see the pores in the skin, but it is far removed from the romance of cinematography. Public Enemies is forlorn not least because digital is less expressive than photography. But digital is the natural resource of a director who regards himself as a mechanic, and who has not begun to think through the moral implications of his abiding subject--gangsterism.
Public Enemies is a travesty and a terrible indicator of how America has retreated from one of its own greatest inventions--the movies. Arthur Penn, in Bonnie and Clyde, was an artist and a man of deep feelings. Michael Mann is as bored with his own movie as his Dillinger is with his own life.
David Thomson is the author most recently of Have you Seen? A Personal Introduction to 1,000 Films (Knopf) and Try to Tell the Story (Knopf).
By David Thomson
COMMENTS (24)
Shorter David Thomson: Bonnie & Clyde was good, Public Enemies was bad, somehow it's America's fault.
Shorter David Thomson: Bonnie & Clyde was good, Public Enemies was bad, somehow it's America's fault.
Ok, maybe it's not the greatest film ever, but "travesty" seems a bit strong here. Also, I'm not sure I can take film advice from a man who longs for the return of Technicolor. Hey, I know - we should bring back painted sound stages, too! Give every film the awe-inspiring cinematography of "Seven Brides for Seven Brothers".
Ok, maybe it's not the greatest film ever, but "travesty" seems a bit strong here. Also, I'm not sure I can take film advice from a man who longs for the return of Technicolor. Hey, I know - we should bring back painted sound stages, too! Give every film the awe-inspiring cinematography of "Seven Brides for Seven Brothers".
Ratner:
oh geez. haven't we had enough of the conservative line that we libs think everything is America's fault. do you not have the ability to understand nuanced thought? Thompson is lamenting the road cinema has, in his view, mistakenly traveled towards a less dreamy, more digital form. He doesn't blame America. He simply sees the partnerships of digital production, lifeless directing and acting, and the complacent audience as a sign of losing our way in the grand scheme of cinema. That is far from saying America is to blame!!!! IDIOT!!!
Ratner:
oh geez. haven't we had enough of the conservative line that we libs think everything is America's fault. do you not have the ability to understand nuanced thought? Thompson is lamenting the road cinema has, in his view, mistakenly traveled towards a less dreamy, more digital form. He doesn't blame America. He simply sees the partnerships of digital production, lifeless directing and acting, and the complacent audience as a sign of losing our way in the grand scheme of cinema. That is far from saying America is to blame!!!! IDIOT!!!
Thomson: "This may be truer to life, but it is lousy art." That's the whole issue.
Public Enemies is based on a book by Bryan Burrough--Public Enemies: America's Greatest Crime Wave and the Birth of the FBI, 1933-34. Unfortunately the FBI part of the story is underdeveloped in the film. It should have been truer to life, to history--which would make it even lousier art in Thomson's terms, but a better film, IMHO.
Thomson: "This may be truer to life, but it is lousy art." That's the whole issue.
Public Enemies is based on a book by Bryan Burrough--Public Enemies: America's Greatest Crime Wave and the Birth of the FBI, 1933-34. Unfortunately the FBI part of the story is underdeveloped in the film. It should have been truer to life, to history--which would make it even lousier art in Thomson's terms, but a better film, IMHO.
I'll admit I'm a little lost here. Is the writer complaining that the movie didn't give him an orgasm?
I'll admit I'm a little lost here. Is the writer complaining that the movie didn't give him an orgasm?
Johnny Depp gave a stunning performance. Low-key, in control. What ever emotion he did feel was acted out through a glance, a stare, very difficult to convey feelings this way. This is a different kind of gangster, not worse, just different. Move on from the past. As to Johnny Depp's aging - he looks perfectly fine. This writer is bitchy, angry, and over the top. Get over it.
Johnny Depp gave a stunning performance. Low-key, in control. What ever emotion he did feel was acted out through a glance, a stare, very difficult to convey feelings this way. This is a different kind of gangster, not worse, just different. Move on from the past. As to Johnny Depp's aging - he looks perfectly fine. This writer is bitchy, angry, and over the top. Get over it.
"Is it time to mourn the death of the gangster film?"
Dear Mr. Thomson, welcome to the eighties. Love, Godfather III.
"Is it time to mourn the death of the gangster film?"
Dear Mr. Thomson, welcome to the eighties. Love, Godfather III.
This will be my first TNR post ever, though I've been a daily reader for the last year following the election coverage. Love the mag, the site, and almost all of you regular commenters-- iambiguous notwithstanding (cheap shot?).
Anyway.
I simply have to reiterate that this essay loses all of its credibility as soon as the author laments the fall of Technicolor. It's as though Mr. Thomson is purely antediluvian in his approach to film, that any advancement in technology (at least to a certain point) is a negative on the entire art form. I admit, I'm not thoroughly convinced with digital filmmaking-- though, digital projection, digital home video, and digital storage are certainly a net-plus for ... view full comment
This will be my first TNR post ever, though I've been a daily reader for the last year following the election coverage. Love the mag, the site, and almost all of you regular commenters-- iambiguous notwithstanding (cheap shot?).
Anyway.
I simply have to reiterate that this essay loses all of its credibility as soon as the author laments the fall of Technicolor. It's as though Mr. Thomson is purely antediluvian in his approach to film, that any advancement in technology (at least to a certain point) is a negative on the entire art form. I admit, I'm not thoroughly convinced with digital filmmaking-- though, digital projection, digital home video, and digital storage are certainly a net-plus for the industry and the audience, and are here to stay. Still, as soon as he mentions Technicolor, I immediately imagined him watching Al Jolson sing, not in awe or amazement, but in barely restrained, violent anger.
"A movie with SOUND conveyed via in the mise en scene?! The nerve!"
This was truly a stupid and unfortunate review of a great film.
This was truly a stupid and unfortunate review of a great film.
This is like comparing the original "Longest Day" to "Saving Private Ryan." Cagney was acting out a fake character with a real name. If the portrayal of Dillinger is more real, then that's a better movie. Maybe the real problem is that Thomson wants a "gangster" film instead of a study of a real gangster and his less-than-really-romantic life.
This is like comparing the original "Longest Day" to "Saving Private Ryan." Cagney was acting out a fake character with a real name. If the portrayal of Dillinger is more real, then that's a better movie. Maybe the real problem is that Thomson wants a "gangster" film instead of a study of a real gangster and his less-than-really-romantic life.
Still shorter David Thomson: This movie doesn't lie enough.
Still shorter David Thomson: This movie doesn't lie enough.
I haven't yet seen "Public Enemies," so I can't comment on Thomson's view of the movie. His notion that the best gangster films are necessarily Outlaw Romances, rather than something more realistic ("The glory of the gangster film rests in that potential metaphor of the figure from history stepping forward into the limelight to be really bad....") is interesting if debatable. But I find Thomson is always compelling when he has an excuse to turn to writing about one of his favorite films, and "Bonnie and Clyde" is certainly one of those favorites. In fact, this review is reminiscent of his recent review of a new biography of Elia Kazan, which Thomson turned into an essay about about anothe ... view full comment
I haven't yet seen "Public Enemies," so I can't comment on Thomson's view of the movie. His notion that the best gangster films are necessarily Outlaw Romances, rather than something more realistic ("The glory of the gangster film rests in that potential metaphor of the figure from history stepping forward into the limelight to be really bad....") is interesting if debatable. But I find Thomson is always compelling when he has an excuse to turn to writing about one of his favorite films, and "Bonnie and Clyde" is certainly one of those favorites. In fact, this review is reminiscent of his recent review of a new biography of Elia Kazan, which Thomson turned into an essay about about another favorite, "East of Eden" - about which his remarks were far more interesting than the ostensible subject of that piece.
I do have to defend Thomson's elegy for the loss of Technicolor, which was indeed the most beautiful color the movie screen has ever known. dhauck, have you ever had the chance to see a quality print of a Technicolor film on a big screen? It really is a treat - though the opportunities to do so are unfortunately limited these days. Still, you can get a flavor of the experience by looking at the Criterion DVD versions of "The Red Shoes" or "Black Narcissus" (by Powell and Pressburger) or Renoir's "The River" or Warner's excellent DVD of "The Adventures of Robin Hood" from 1938. There ar plenty of other beautiful Technicolor films, but these are particularly eye popping. The Blue Ray releases of these movies should be something special - the first two are out in Europe (Region 2) but are not yet available in Region 1. (Coming soon, I hope.)
I'm not sure the gangster movie is dead just yet, though the gangster movie tradition celebrated by Thomson, the one inaugurated in the early Thirties (by "Little Ceasar," the original "Scarface," the original "The Public Enemy") may be coming to a close. It's possible. But there are competing visions of what a gangster movie can be. Last year's remarkable "Gommora" is one example. I doubt the gengster movie will ever disappear.
To ljv: I don't think anyone here was saying Technicolor was bad. I recently watched The Thief of Bagdad for the first time and was blown away by the color scheme. It's simply the idea that, movies that are made after Technicolor went the way of the Dodo are automatically inferior to movies made with Technicolor, and only by virtue of the fact that they don't use a prettier, yet more archaic, process of filmmaking. That plainly ignores the movement of film into a less fantasy-based artform into an art that seeks to represent reality as close as possible. Hell, even our fantasy movies (like the original Star Wars and recently the LOTR trilogy) seek to represent very specific, gritty realities ... view full comment
To ljv: I don't think anyone here was saying Technicolor was bad. I recently watched The Thief of Bagdad for the first time and was blown away by the color scheme. It's simply the idea that, movies that are made after Technicolor went the way of the Dodo are automatically inferior to movies made with Technicolor, and only by virtue of the fact that they don't use a prettier, yet more archaic, process of filmmaking. That plainly ignores the movement of film into a less fantasy-based artform into an art that seeks to represent reality as close as possible. Hell, even our fantasy movies (like the original Star Wars and recently the LOTR trilogy) seek to represent very specific, gritty realities. This has been happening since the 1970s, and now, in 2009, it just comes off as utterly ludicrous to decry the progression (or, regression depending on your POV). Thomson had well over 30 years to launch a campaign to bring Technicolor back to the movies, to return them to their fanciful roots, and to push directors to make "art" not "reality". He didn't. Instead, he waited until what he wants is so old and out of synch with modern film, and chooses to remark about it in a review for a movie made by a director with a very specific, modern visual style. And when he mentions this change from Film to Digital, he sounds surprised. Where has he been?, one wants to ask. He may as well be telling Michael Mann and the "kids today" to get off his damn lawn.
I thought Public Enemies was good but decidedly not great. And I thought Orr’s was the superior piece of film criticism. I don’t like Thomson’s essay very much at all and find it much more pontificating, ponderous and pretentious than penetrating.
What strikes me immediately are his grandiloquent assumptions, which he does not demonstrate—they are his assumptions after all—and which are not necessarily the case:
1. Firstly he conflates “the gangster film” with this gangster film and then makes ominous predictions as to the viability of the genre as though this film carries the weight of the genre on its closely held camera shoulders.
2. Gangster films, he says prescriptively, need ... view full comment
I thought Public Enemies was good but decidedly not great. And I thought Orr’s was the superior piece of film criticism. I don’t like Thomson’s essay very much at all and find it much more pontificating, ponderous and pretentious than penetrating.
What strikes me immediately are his grandiloquent assumptions, which he does not demonstrate—they are his assumptions after all—and which are not necessarily the case:
1. Firstly he conflates “the gangster film” with this gangster film and then makes ominous predictions as to the viability of the genre as though this film carries the weight of the genre on its closely held camera shoulders.
2. Gangster films, he says prescriptively, need to be authentically shocking.
3. Beginning to get warm up to his various generalizing, they need, he also says, to say, however they do, “Fuck you, America!”
4. The American movie has always been about rapport. Gangsters movies in their unique instance of that, in bringing us in, allow us to take part in fictional transgression—“grapefruit hit the girl”, ‘Fuck you America!”—without positive resolution. We get vicarious danger for cheap, the price of admission.
5. Explaining “Fuck you America!”, Thomson prescribes that Gangster films *must have*, *must be* “possessed by” that danger and insolence. As he says,
“…Never forget that The Godfather--with its sultry insinuation that a really lethal but wise manager could look after us--came to soothe the era of Watergate. Never forget that the burning unruliness of Bonnie and Clyde coincided with 1967 and America in turmoil at home and abroad. And who could possibly forget the superb insolence of Warren Beatty (the producer) in offering ‘We rob banks’ to the anti-social instincts of the young, in a vehicle that would carry him personally to the bank in triumph? That's what I mean about Fuck You, America: It's the exultant yet fond cry of deep patriotism in love with unbridled freedom--but fuelled by personal vanity, ambition, and recklessness….”
In the passage, as I read it, the unsubstantiated assumptions build on themselves. Not only do gangsters movies need to fit the Thomson mould, they must vindicate or bear some kind of cultural convergence with their times (as, presumably, generalized about by Thomson.)
Applying these assumed and prescribed criteria Public Enemies is a manifest failure principally because, he fatuously suggests, Mann fails “…to understand that America in the summer 2009, when unemployment is climbing to ten percent, yearns to explode on a line like "We rob banks." That’s vintage Thomson: unerringly read the times, unerringly know what the times call for and make critical judgments accordingly. Public Enemies must conform to the standard set by Bonnie and Clyde 40 years ago as Thomson sees it. It has a critically fulfilled tension-- So where's the tension? It's in wondering whether two beautiful blooms--Beatty and Dunaway--can flower in unison before death.—missing from Public Enemies. We have to care about Depp’s Dillinger and “for that the film must love him and see an exuberant demon in his casual brutality.”
Apparently, it’s not enough, as Orr says in his superior, penetrating, and decidedly not ponderous, review, thankfully free of Thomson’s prescriptive assumptions and banal cultural generalities, “Moments after the curtains fall at the Biograph, it's curtains, too, for Dillinger: What better way to conclude a movie about outlaw glamour? Public Enemies is a sharp, diverting entertainment but it is not, in the end, a particularly rich or memorable one. It's more than enough, though, for these hazy days of summer. Or, as Dillinger himself reminds a fretting gang member, ‘We're having a good time today. We ain't thinking about the future.’”
For Thomson, Mann’s Dillinger being more like who he was in real life—Clyde barrow was no Warren Beatty: www.commentarymagazine.com/.../clyde-and-bonnie-died-for-nihilism-15205-... without some burning mission that we partake in, “Fuck you America!”, and get our friss on, is an artistic failure. “Remember, we are not dealing with real gangsters here. In life, we understand that just about everyone from Billy the Kid to John Gotti was close to cretinous promiscuity, but in our fascination with the "bad" we easily admit these stooges to our world--thus they become at least as smart and faithful as we are.”
For myself, I could gag on such condescending advisories. In Public Enemies, for Thomson, we are denied his necessary prescriptive condition for the successful gangster movie—our vicarious participation in imagined transgressive dangerousness.
I don’t remember Bonnie And Clyde well enough, having last seen it over 40 years ago to try to dispel the comparison between it and Public Enemies, the frame for Thomson’s criticism. But he does mention the Godfather along the way of his generalizing. Godfather Part 11 is in my pantheon of the 4 or so greatest movies I have ever seen. Its complexity, its brooding undercurrents, its detaching of Michael from our sympathy, its refusal to let us see anything but the hollowness that engulfs him as he shrinks into himself as his power ascends, its refusal to let us participate vicariously in the violence and the danger, and other things too, demolish in their particularity (adding up to a magnificent film sum greater than its parts) Thomson’s glib, patronizing and empty prescriptions.
I thought it was pretty OK. WTF. I'm not a dunce, as far as I know. IT was a little cold, but that was it's unique vision: bank robbers are kind of dull and violent. Why is it necessary to re-affirm the supposed glamor of these guys, when you can do a revisionist take on it where things aren't so splashy? Depp was perfectly OK. He could have been a lot more interesting, but he didn't HAVE to be for the film to manage pretty well. I thought his girlfriend was dynamite--totally throwing off cliched ideas of period female simple-mindedness with all the conflicts and thought process having to do with getting involved with a homicidal idiot printed on every expression.
I thought it was pretty OK. WTF. I'm not a dunce, as far as I know. IT was a little cold, but that was it's unique vision: bank robbers are kind of dull and violent. Why is it necessary to re-affirm the supposed glamor of these guys, when you can do a revisionist take on it where things aren't so splashy? Depp was perfectly OK. He could have been a lot more interesting, but he didn't HAVE to be for the film to manage pretty well. I thought his girlfriend was dynamite--totally throwing off cliched ideas of period female simple-mindedness with all the conflicts and thought process having to do with getting involved with a homicidal idiot printed on every expression.
Thomson is calling out Mann for what he is: a window dresser with masculinity issues. Muscular posturing does not a man make no matter how many blazing machine guns he has in his pants.
Thomson is calling out Mann for what he is: a window dresser with masculinity issues. Muscular posturing does not a man make no matter how many blazing machine guns he has in his pants.
To RobP: First, I'm glad to hear your enjoyed The Thief of Baghdad. Great fun, isn't it? If you haven't seen the other Powell-Pressburgers I mentioned(or The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp, or A Matter of Life and Death) give them a whirl some time. You won't regret it.
As far as Technicolor is concerned, I think we may all have lost sight a little, in this thread, of why Thomson mentioned it. His real point is that he's not happy about the current shift from celluloid to digital, and he cites that as one factor in his case against "Public Enemies." Plenty of people agree with him in general on that point. He only mentioned the loss of Technicolor as a point of comparison - a prior o ... view full comment
To RobP: First, I'm glad to hear your enjoyed The Thief of Baghdad. Great fun, isn't it? If you haven't seen the other Powell-Pressburgers I mentioned(or The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp, or A Matter of Life and Death) give them a whirl some time. You won't regret it.
As far as Technicolor is concerned, I think we may all have lost sight a little, in this thread, of why Thomson mentioned it. His real point is that he's not happy about the current shift from celluloid to digital, and he cites that as one factor in his case against "Public Enemies." Plenty of people agree with him in general on that point. He only mentioned the loss of Technicolor as a point of comparison - a prior occasion in film history when a shift that was heralded as a technical advance proved to be a move of mixed merits. Later color film processes do look more realistic, but I take his point to be that the improvement in realism did not compensate for the loss of beauty. I happen to think that's a fair point. Nevertheless, there were other reasons that Technicolor was replaced - for one thing, filming in Technicolor was an unwieldy and time consuming exercise. The greater ease of working in later color processes surely did more to doom Technicolor than any aesthetic decision to opt for more realistic representation. The fact that the move away from Technicolor was probably inevitable doesn't mean that its loss can't be lamented. I doubt Thomson is under any illusion that Technicolor could have survived much longer than it did, certainly not to this day. As for his point about digital filming - I haven't yet seen "Public Enemies" so, again, I can't judge his opinion of its use here. Digital is a boon to independent filmmakers because it's cheaper than celluloid, so it's clearly a method that's here to stay. Mann was obviously in a different position here - he had many millions at his disposal, so opting for digital was an aesthetic choice, not a finacial imperative. So I find it not unreasonable for Thomson to complain about the film's visual "vagueness" if he believes the digital filming contributed to it. I don't see this as resistance to technological change per se, but a comment on the merits of a change in progress, and its impact on the film under review.
And now I feel like I've said too much about a review of a movie I have yet to see, so the next order of business is to get out and see it. Funny thing about Thomson's review is that despite his negative conclusions, it has only further piqued my interest in seeing "Public Enemies."
ljv, Just as I was thinking about what to write in another response, I read this: "And now I feel like I've said too much about a review of a movie I have yet to see, so the next order of business is to get out and see it. Funny thing about Thomson's review is that despite his negative conclusions, it has only further piqued my interest in seeing 'Public Enemies.'"
Heh. I still need to see it, too. And you're right, this review (and every review, positive or negative, I've read on the movie) makes me want to see it all the more. I guess that just goes to show that you don't need to remotely be an expert on the subject at hand to have an opinion. Anyway, a (not-so) quick re: As I said in my or ... view full comment
ljv, Just as I was thinking about what to write in another response, I read this: "And now I feel like I've said too much about a review of a movie I have yet to see, so the next order of business is to get out and see it. Funny thing about Thomson's review is that despite his negative conclusions, it has only further piqued my interest in seeing 'Public Enemies.'"
Heh. I still need to see it, too. And you're right, this review (and every review, positive or negative, I've read on the movie) makes me want to see it all the more. I guess that just goes to show that you don't need to remotely be an expert on the subject at hand to have an opinion. Anyway, a (not-so) quick re: As I said in my original post, I'm not completely sold on digital filmmaking, at least not for its aesthetic value. The advantages for indy filmmakers is surely a great, democratizing aspect of the technology (one I hope to use to my own advantage... eventually, gotta get that right script ready first!). Having said that, I do believe there are some digital cameras coming out that meet the filmic quality Thomson laments that current digital productions don't/can't reach. Now, having said THAT, I think any time a director takes a risk with a new style or technology, they should be given some benefit of the doubt-- especially one as talented as Michael Mann. Similar to Robert Altman exposing his film to sunlight for microseconds before shooting, talk about risky. Maybe Thomson's view of film is a bit of a lost art in itself? In the sense that today we're conditioned to rate the merits of a film almost entirely on its story, the quality of the performances, and the auteuristic florishes of the director, as opposed to the the "art"-fulness of the compositions. We, or I, are much more enamored today with the complicated one-take shots of Children of Men. Maybe that's a by-product of more contemporary filmmaking technologies, and maybe that's why films like Up are universally admired. In any case, films of "art" (The Fall, What Dreams May Come, others I can't think of right now) are simply rare and "art" images in none "art" movies are thought of as icings on the cake. With that in mind, I can see where Thomson is coming from, but I don't agree that it's a death knell for gangster films, or films in general. Or, a sign that our best times are behind us. It's always too easy to lament by-gone eras and "the good old days." But I fear I've drifted off-topic, yet again, and said far, far too much. Cheers!
Is it time to mourn the death of the gangster film??????
One word: "Gomorra"
Is it time to mourn the death of the gangster film??????
One word: "Gomorra"
I had a very hard time detecting that this movie was at all based on Bryan Burrough's or anyone else's historical book. I found Thomson's criticism hard to follow as I recently watched "Bonnie and Clyde" again and like "Public Enemies" found it to be entertaining but very shakey as history. The screenwriters messed with the historical timeline, invented a Purvis-Dillinger confrontation to Tucson at a time when the FBI wasn't even seriously involved with the Dillinger manhunt, and had Baby Face Nelson mysteriously going from brain surgery from a head wound to turning up at Little Bohemia for his death scene with no logical explanation on how he made it out of the hospital. And the whole Purvi ... view full comment
I had a very hard time detecting that this movie was at all based on Bryan Burrough's or anyone else's historical book. I found Thomson's criticism hard to follow as I recently watched "Bonnie and Clyde" again and like "Public Enemies" found it to be entertaining but very shakey as history. The screenwriters messed with the historical timeline, invented a Purvis-Dillinger confrontation to Tucson at a time when the FBI wasn't even seriously involved with the Dillinger manhunt, and had Baby Face Nelson mysteriously going from brain surgery from a head wound to turning up at Little Bohemia for his death scene with no logical explanation on how he made it out of the hospital. And the whole Purvis-Hoover subplot from the book was buried in the film. An entertaining film but a shadow of what it could have been had the writers followed the book.
what a meandering wordy gobbelygook review !! it was horrendous ... 10,000 words could not describe how bad this review was...
what a meandering wordy gobbelygook review !! it was horrendous ... 10,000 words could not describe how bad this review was...
It's not 1931, not 1967. Battered America is not boiling with rage. It's mostly anaesthetized. People stand outside themselves, watching. All decades get the gangster movies they deserve. The point of the film is that even those who are taking action are somehow inert. And there are other public enemies at work: the grim-faced, hollow-spirited FBI. Depp impersonates a hollow man who comes to life, mainly, in the Biograph sequence, as he steps off the edge into oblivion. If the rainy day got you down, David, don't go off the Depp end.
It's not 1931, not 1967. Battered America is not boiling with rage. It's mostly anaesthetized. People stand outside themselves, watching. All decades get the gangster movies they deserve. The point of the film is that even those who are taking action are somehow inert. And there are other public enemies at work: the grim-faced, hollow-spirited FBI. Depp impersonates a hollow man who comes to life, mainly, in the Biograph sequence, as he steps off the edge into oblivion. If the rainy day got you down, David, don't go off the Depp end.
David Thomson is always good reading. Like Pauline Kael, it doesn`t matter if you agree or not with his opinions. Style counts. Just ask Michael Mann.
David Thomson is always good reading. Like Pauline Kael, it doesn`t matter if you agree or not with his opinions. Style counts. Just ask Michael Mann.
The "Public Enemies" I saw about two hours ago is a hypnotic embodiment of mayfly life exploding and dissolving in almost the same instant. It took a while for its digital, frequently hand-held, whip-fast style to take hold, but once that happened -- about half an hour in -- the film never failed to grip and thrill. A few other crime movies can be mentioned in the same breath with "Public Enemies." David Thomson is right to cite its famous near-namesake "The Public Enemy" as well as "Bonnie And Clyde." But none surpasses it as far as I'm concerned. Michael Mann has enriched his style and made his finest film.
The "Public Enemies" I saw about two hours ago is a hypnotic embodiment of mayfly life exploding and dissolving in almost the same instant. It took a while for its digital, frequently hand-held, whip-fast style to take hold, but once that happened -- about half an hour in -- the film never failed to grip and thrill. A few other crime movies can be mentioned in the same breath with "Public Enemies." David Thomson is right to cite its famous near-namesake "The Public Enemy" as well as "Bonnie And Clyde." But none surpasses it as far as I'm concerned. Michael Mann has enriched his style and made his finest film.