Public Enemies – The Worst Movie Of The Summer

There’s countless ways for movies to be bad, but Michael Mann’s Public Enemies embodies one of the few unforgiveable sins of cinema – complete disdain for the audience. I can only honestly review the first hour of it, because that was how long I lasted before walking out in a haze of boredom.

 The film begins with a giant title announcing that it’s 1933. Then a subtitle locating us in Michigan City, Indiana. From there, you’re on your own. Mann is operating in his Miami Vice mode, freely indulging his fetish for grim men carrying weapons. Men carry guns out of a farmhouse, through an apple orchard, into a bank, down a hallway, across another hallway, and out of a train station before riding off on the sidecar of a nifty automobile.

Who these men are, and why they carry guns everywhere is never explained as Mann seems perversely opposed to exposition. Take the moment Johnny Depp’s laconic John Dillinger introduces himself to his love interest. There’s any number of interesting and stylish ways to present this moment. What’s on Dillinger’s face when he reveals himself, what’s on her face as she reacts, what’s the tension in the air between them? Mann skips all the conventional options and cuts to a wide angle shot that deliberately obscures Dillinger behind a passing waiter when he whispers his name.

In that moment – and the first 30 minutes has several other similar exchanges – Mann announces his narrative agenda for Public Enemies, and telling a story isn’t anywhere in sight. Nor is providing historical context, parallels with the modern day, or fun. His directorial indulgences are the worst sort of film-school arrogance, the disregard for the fundamental function of cinema – communicating with the audience.

In the first hour of Public Enemies, Mann communicates nothing. The film that’s projected is essentially an egotist having a private conversation with himself, and occasionally scowling at the other people in the room for listening in. The action moves from Indiana to Chicago to Miami to Tucson without warning or explanation.  

The emotional detachment is so extreme that Mann has managed to hammer out any sense of charisma from both Depp and Bale. Each man turns in a tautly minimal performance, but Mann refuses to provide any context for Dillinger or his nemesis, Melvin Purvis, to operate in. Neither man is a hero or an anti-hero, just a grey suit, a grim jaw, and a gun. Perhaps the portrayal is historically accurate, but unless you’re a Depression era scholar, how would you know what’s going on, or why would you care?

Movies, at the most basic level, have to be about experiences that are elevated above the mundane. They are where we cast modern legends, not where we scrupulously re-create the tedium of reality. Every enjoyable experience you’ve ever had at the movies – fiction or non-fiction –  involves elevating the mundane into a world of the fantastic. Public Enemies does the opposite, hammering the fantastic into the pedantic and mundane, then compounds the discourtesy by refusing to explain why it’s doing so.

I keep returning to the quote from The Big Lebowski, “Say what you will about the tenets of National Socialism, Dude, at least it’s an ethos.” It’s easy to criticize garish halfwits like Michael Bay, but at least, in the end, he’s making mayhem for an audience to enjoy. Here, Mann is like the Lebowski nihilists – offering nothing and expecting to be greatly rewarded for it.