Public Enemies – Dillinger, fedoras and Tommy guns

Public Enemies (2009) directed by Michael Mann stars Johnny Depp as Dillinger, Jason Clark (Red), Stephen Dorff (Homer Van Meter), Channing Tatum (Pretty Boy Floyd), James Russo (Walter), Christian Bale (Melvin Purvis), Billy Crudup (J. Edgar Hoover), Marion Cotillard (Billie Frechette), Stephen Graham (Baby Face Nelson), Lili Taylor (Sheriff Lillian Holley), Giovanni Ribisi (Alvin Karpis) and Branka Katic (Anna Sage).

It starts with a prison escape. It is fast and vicious and goes badly wrong as one of the escapees gets shot and never makes it out, left hanging on to Dillinger’s hand while dying as the get away car speeds off. That sets the tone.

This is one of those movies that is going to leave people a little puzzled. I have had that feeling quite a few times when watching Michael Mann’s work. I had it with Manhunter (1986), Heat (1995) and with The Insider (1999). Mann has this obvious thing about surface and visuals and it snags your attention, but you have to be cautious about that kind of thing. I’ll give you an example of what I mean.

In Heat there is a specific scene, just a flash of seconds really, where Neil (Robert DeNiro) puts his gun down on a glass tabletop. Ten years later I can call up that scene and that sound with almost perfect recall. It’s a matter of texture and precision and a certain indulgence on the directors part, I suppose. It didn’t propel the action forwards or have any meaning in the larger sense, but it still left an imprint on this viewer that won’t go away.

Here we are dealing with a lead character that a lot of people will have heard of, at least to some extent. We also have a cast of spectacularly good actors, like in Heat and Manhunter (which I still say is the better version of that particular narrative, despite The Silence of the Lambs). There is always going to be the sense that the actors weren’t used to their full potential.

It’s 140 minutes long. It could easily have been twice that to my mind.

The era, the 1930s, lends itself beautifully to the big screen. The guys are in suits and fedoras, the girls are in pretty dresses, the cars have running boards and the weapon of choice is the Tommy gun. If you’ve seen the still frames, you know what I mean. This is as visually appealing as Arthur Penn’s Bonnie and Clyde (1967).

We are also dealing with “real life”, although many small facts have been altered to fit the narrative here better. Despite that anyone with even a glancing knowledge of the lead character knows that he was shot to death by the FBI, actually on the night of July 22 in 1934. So we know how this is going to end right from the get go.

It sets up a sense of foreboding and inevitability right from that first prison break. That makes this a grim story for a lot of different reasons. There is also less of a glorification of the bank robbers than you would expect. They take hostages on their way out of banks in order to not get shot at by the law, and even though they mostly leave those people unharmed, they still use them as human shields, which must leave them deeply traumatized.

The representatives of the law are likewise not particularly easy to sympathize with. Hoover seems wound extremely tight and his go-to guy, Melvin Purvis (Christian Bale) is a very serious young man. There is a rather unpleasant scene where Dillinger’s girl Billie gets slapped around by a G-man, and that leaves you feeling a little nauseous, despite how delicately it is handled.

When Dillinger’s body was lying in the street outside the Biograph theater, many onlookers dipped their handkerchiefs in his blood as a souvenir. This movie doesn’t do that exactly, but it gives you that same sense of distance, surface and grim interest.

It’s not hard to like a movie as consistent and as visually pleasing as this one. There are some very, very good actors at the core of it, the beautiful and talented Marion Cotillard, Johnny Depp playing a more subtle character than I have seen him do in a while, Christian Bale being a supporting actor and so on and so forth with guys like Billy Graham and Giovanni Ribisi.

If you are looking for a caper movie or an action movie, this is not the thing to watch. This is more of a character study. Many of the locations, like the lodge at Little Bohemia in Manitowish are the actual locations where scenes from Dillinger’s life took place. Rumour has it shell casings from that gunfight between the FBI and Dillinger’s gang can still be found in the woods surrounding the lodge. As a character study, though, it takes liberties with the truth as it has been documented.

I highly recommend it, none the less. I recommend it for the obvious tension in the narrative, for the visuals and the stellar cast. My only caution is that the fewer preconceived notions you have of what kind of movie this is the better you will fare and the more you will enjoy it.

Mule

This is England – murky moral ground and skinheads

This is England (2006) directed by Shane Meadows stars Thomas Turgoose (Shaun), Stephen Graham (Combo), Jo Hartley (Cynth), Andrew Shim (Milky), Vicky McClure (Lol), Jospeh Gilgun (Woody), Rosamund Hanson (Smell), Andrew Ellis (Gadget), Perry Benson (Meggy), George Newton (Banjo) and Frank Harper (Lenny).

The basic premise is that the twelve year old boy Shaun is having a hard time in the early 1983’s in England. He’s just lost his father in the Falkland wars and he is living with his mother in the poor part of town. The opening sequence shows a montage of 80’s news and sets the scene nicely. We then get introduced to the young Shaun who is bullied at school for wearing the wrong clothes and gets into a fight.

On his way home from school Shaun runs in to a pack of skinheads lead by Woody (Joseph Gilgun) and for some reason Woody takes pity on the young boy and tries to cheer him up. The dynamic of the skinhead pack is reminiscent of a pack of dogs, there’s a lot of snarling and physical correction of behaviour, but at the same time they act like Lost Boys with their own screwed up version of Peter Pan in the lead.

There’s a certain lawlessness to their behaviour, tinged with fantasy, and that has it’s appeal for the young Shaun, who has no other friends and nowhere to pour his anger. He quickly becomes accepted into their circle and adopts all the trappings of a little skinhead, boots and shirt and suspenders.

It’s not until Combo (Stephen Graham) appears on the scene that things take a sinister turn. Combo is fresh out of prison and clearly more political than the rest of the gang. Things get worse from here on out. The gang gets split up and Shaun, for reasons that seem very clear when you operate within the logic of the movie, opts to stay with Combo’s fraction.

It doesn’t end well, but then again, why would it?

It’s hard to avoid the parallel to Geoffrey Wright’s Romper Stomper (1992) and Tony Kaye’s American History X (1998), but there is, for lack of a better wording, a kind of innocence to this movie, probably largely due to the fact that the protagonist is so young. The unpremeditated cruelty of the very young lends itself to a more uncomplicated way of relating to this kind of behaviour. Shaun can’t see the sinister undercurrent to everything that Combo says, but we, the adult viewers, see it and understand it for what it is. It’s easy to be seduced by someone who promises to never leave you, to always look out for you and care for you, especially for a young boy like Shaun who has lost his father and is already toeing the line of acceptable behaviour.

It isn’t until Shaun gets to see Combo behave in a way that is not acceptable within the group, assaulting and beating up one of “their own” that Shaun wakes up to what kind of environment he has found himself in. Basically, it’s all fun and games until someone gets kicked in the head.

I’ve had issues with the convoluted morality of all three films mentioned here. I think it is mostly about the seduction – the attempt to portray these fractions from the inside with an insiders more forgiving eye, that makes them seem a little too lax. Even the attempts at moral anagnorisis always come up a little short. Shaun actually has to see his would be father-figure beat seven different kinds of crap out of someone before he clocks on to there being something wrong with this whole thing.

That being said, this is a movie that provides food for thought, gives at least a glimpse into the mechanisms behind what makes a group of people chose this lifestyle. The acting is solid all the way through, and that includes the young Thomas Turgoose, who plays Shaun with a lack of artifice that makes all the difference. The movie stands and falls with his performance so that was a clever piece of casting. Stephen Graham (Combo) also gives a very good performance especially in the scene ending with him assaulting Milky. You can literally see in his eyes where things start going wrong which adds to the sinking feeling in this viewers stomach.

All in all, this is a movie well worth watching. It’s funny in some places and very dark in others, and it is not simple and certainly not unambiguous, but then again – it really shouldn’t be. If it were, the director would have failed miserably.

Mule