Public Enemies provides a welcome shock to the system. This tough-minded, visually electric movie about Great Depression bank robber John Dillinger (Johnny Depp) takes audiences into the center of the action in its opening minutes. It keeps them there as it expands into a bristling chronicle of a country in flux. Without ever telling viewers what to think or how to feel, it raises more questions about the corruption of crime and crime fighting than any expose or thesis. And if it sometimes registers too coolly, by the end it rouses more bruised feelings than any four-hankie weepie.
Depp goes all the way with the role of a wry, wily Midwesterner; he gives a performance equally alert and emotional. He really nails this character - the scion of an age of speed who says he wants "everything" and wants it "right now." According to Raoul Walsh's terrific old crime film High Sierra, which starred Humphrey Bogart as a Dillinger-like bandit, the real Dillinger once said that he and his fellow criminals were all "rushing toward death."
Even after Depp's Dillinger sees that he's racing toward the grave, he can't change course. Depp has become as great an actor-star as Bogart. He conveys the calculation of a self-made celebrity who won't do kidnappings because he knows his public wouldn't like it. But he also brims over with the romance of a folk hero who tries to practice honor among thieves and hands bank customers back their petty cash (he wants only "the bank's money"). He risks everything for his true love, a Chicago hat check girl, Billie Frechette (Marion Cotillard), who's tired of rich people judging her by her clothes and men rejecting her because she is half Indian.
Cotillard acts with passionate limpidity. You know exactly what she's feeling, even when Billie is trying to figure out whether she can take a chance on a self-styled Robin Hood like Dillinger. (He's willing to slam the noggin of a customer into the coat counter because the man interrupts their first lovers' quarrel.) She draws you in like a friend giving you a heart-to-heart, yet she does it in character. It's the opposite of the bravura performance as Edith Piaf that won her an Oscar in La Vie en Rose, but it's just as affecting.
These stars act with dynamic subtlety, and that's how Michael Mann has made this movie. He puts viewers right on the running board of speedy cars, the vehicles that were key to the "golden age of bank robberies." But Mann also puts them in Congress with FBI director J. Edgar Hoover (Billy Crudup) when he argues that he should lead America's War on Crime - though Hoover had never made a single arrest himself.
