#Public enemies cast movie#
Already au fait with the legend, Depp has embraced his director’s mission to strip away the wise-guy melodrama and Cagney sneer of movie mythology to see what lies beneath. Onscreen he gleamed up as Clark Gable, and there is a sly resonance to Johnny Depp slipping into the role - a star part-Gable and part-Dillinger. Himself a movie-lover, Dillinger was greatly amused at how Hollywood would riff on his moves in B-movie gangster flicks playing to millions. And given most of the population were on the verge of starvation, the public saw a dashing hero sticking it to the man, not an enemy.
This is not a film about bank robbing, but a bank robber. Mann, too, has the sense not to dwell on the old hat of movie heists, gliding in and out of these marbled banks to get on with the business of Dillinger’s rise to fame. It was a slick operation, in and out in minutes. Of not being as good as him), took down scores across Chicago and the Midwest with impunity. His gang, with its shifting headcount of hoodlums (the likes of Baby Face Nelson and Pete Pierpont had an irritating habit Dillinger left prison less corrected than fully educated in the criminal sciences, and confident enough to walk straight back into Indiana State Pen and pluck out a hatful of assistant crooks. Edgar Hoover, we catch up with him cutting loose after nine years in jail. Those familiar with a Mann’s man - embattled souls with good skills - will spot the guile and moral slipperiness in John Dillinger. This is not a film about the ’30s - it is a film in the ’30s. If Mann’s mission was simply to portray the early ’30s with pin-sharp realism, he has triumphed. The genre may seem familiar, that rat-a-tat-tat of Tommy guns, molls and dapper hoods, but never with this level of immersion. Whatever James Cameron’s Avatar may resemble in cinema’s ‘big shake-up’ later this year, this less self-aggrandising film, shot entirely on an ultra-high resolution digital format, marks a new cinematic language. Then, Mann, who both directs and rewrote novelist Ronan Bennett’s screenplay based upon Bryan Burrough’s vibrant history, is having no truck with the weary tropes of gangster movies, biopics, period pieces or, for that matter, the basic principles of what we know as films. Although contrary to standard operating procedure, our hero - at least, our antihero - appears to be breaking into prison. Indeed, after barely a caption, we’re tossed headlong into a prison break. Rich and complicated lives, moral grey areas and man-sized subject-matter, all located in a down-to-the-plug-sockets recreation of 1933? Surely there’s been a rupture in the time-space continuum? Who ordered this? We were all relaxed, gormlessly sucking up the latest maelstrom of CG, when something quite brilliant turns up. Within seconds of Michael Mann’s latest crime drama, there comes the chilling realisation that, goddamn it, we have got to use our brain. Great Scott, what’s this? We’re slap-bang in the middle of the summer season - humankind battling for survival against robots the size of fairground rides, buildings crashing around us like piecrust, rom-coms, bromances, Will Ferrell and Spock - and all of a sudden somebody is treating us like an adult.
0 kommentar(er)
