Season of the Witch

A recent College Humor video humorously posited the life of Nicolas Cage's agent, a man forced to contend with his client's perennial inability to say "no" to any project in order to keep himself in castles and pyramids. But that sketch, of course, was lighthearted and broad, building the man's outsized grief at being saddled with Cage's willingness to do everything and dilute his brand until the pain reached a frenzy. I like to imagine Cage's agent as a man who expresses his sorrow in the opposite fashion, silently nodding with resignation as his client agrees to be in the latest piece of crap, hanging up the phone and reaching for a home blood pressure kit to test his heart.

He must have had to put a nitroglycerin tablet under his tongue when Cage signed onto Season of the Witch, a film that all but begs comparisons to Monty Python and the Holy Grail despite its straight face. As with that legendary comedy, Season moves largely in a series of vignettes vaguely resembling a plot, but where that played into the Pythons' sketch comedy genius, Season merely moves as if caught in the death rattle of the Black Plague, leaking pustules of narrative drying and caking around swollen nodes of plagiarized fantasy tropes. The plague features prominently in Dominic Sena's film, and I found myself in the unexpected position of feeling sorry for a pandemic disease.

Opening with a scene with only the slightest bearing on the rest of the film, Season of the Witch establishes its style -- for want of a better term -- instantly, carving out its identity with disorienting edits, a slew of references to other (and better) movies and an adherence to historical accuracy that could charitably be described as laughable. Three women accused of witchcraft receive the farcical trial afforded to heretical suspects before being chucked off a bridge with ropes around their necks before their corpses are lowered into the river below, hydroponically planting the corpses in such a way that one simply must expect something bad to happen soon (does that then make this the Spring of the Witch?). A priest wishes to read an incantation to ensure the accused witches stay dead, but a knight says that a hanging and drowning were sufficient. In the interest of honesty, I should say I found this a fair and logical assessment. But of course, they should have let that monk read from his blinged-out book, and soon a drowned woman comes back long enough to wreak a bit of havoc before heading...to some other damn movie, apparently.

But don't think about that, 'cause here comes a Crusade montage. Thousands of miles away, Behmen (Nicolas Cage) and Felson (Ron Perlman), two knights in service to the Church, gleefully hack their way through Saracens and other enemies of God. Whatever statement Sena might have wanted to make about the hypocrisy of religious purity -- and Lord does he want to make that point -- gets swallowed up in the fun he has clumsily staggering through this montage, broken up briefly by a "wait, what?" shot of the two knights reveling in the most minimalistic medieval tavern ever set up on an empty stage before returning immediately to more shots of God's warrior tearing through the Middle East and Southeastern Europe. Unhelpful title cards provide no sense of logical progression -- they seem to go into the Middle East, return to Europe to fight dissident Christians and then back to Smyrna for a bit of Turkish delight.

But then, after years of killing, Behmen accidentally stabs a woman whose protracted death gasp stuns the man into suddenly giving up his ways and returning to England with Felson, only to immediately be recruited once more by a monk who believes the outbreak of bubonic plague in the knights' absence can be attributed to a young woman who has "confessed" to being a witch. A monk, Debelzaq (seriously?), charges the deserters with helping deliver her to trial in some mysterious monastery, the location of which he barely knows. "I serve the Church no more," Behmen intones with solemn finality, about five minutes before he willingly serves the Church again.

And there, after 20 minutes of largely unconnected, gaudy visuals, ends the plot. The rest of Season of the Witch gets by on weak jump scares, poorly choreographed suspense sequences and dialogue so stale you could store it for food on the long journey to the New World, which of course wouldn't be discovered for another century after the timeline of this film but why should I be held to an accurate, linear account of history when no one involved with the film was? Out of context, some lines attain a terrific comedy: one of the women at the beginning about to be hanged pleads innocence for her ointments. "It was just pig fat," she shrieks with wild eyes. "It wasn't witchcraft!" In one scene, Felson undercuts Behmen's religious rants by saying "Keep your souls. I just want a chicken." Behind him is an untended, well-fed dairy cow that could provide drink and meat in much larger quantities. In context, the lines pile up in collisions of exposition, a crisscrossing web of dialogue as self-defeating as the contradictory plots and themes that dialogue attempts to elucidate.

Nothing in this movie fits together, as if someone attempted to complete a single puzzle with the pieces from five or six separate boxes. The only chemistry that exists between Cage and Perlman must be drawn from the juxtaposition of their faces, Cage's giant forehead playing off Perlman's massive, sloping jawline (Perlman's head is so huge that he can make medium shots into de facto close-ups). Perlman, the only decent aspect of the film, brings his one-man, don't-give-a-damn swagger from Hellboy to the role, making him mesmerizing despite his clunky dialogue (nothing but references to food and sex) but solitary, while Nicolas Cage has the look in his eye of a gold digger lying there and thinking of the Lambourgini that's coming his way once the old bastard dies. A veritable "who's that?" fills out the rest of the cast, some of whom are getting their first major international exposure in a manner they will no doubt attempt to hide in the coming years. Oh, but Christopher Lee shows up for a cameo as a dying cardinal with the world's worst zit, inspiring the question, "Is Christopher Lee running out of money?" God damn it, David Cameron, I don't care how bad the economy is; give this man his proper pension. When FDR installed Social Security as a means of protecting the dignity of the elderly, this has to be what he had in mind.

What the hell even happens in this movie? How can a plot so linear and derivative yet so incomprehensible? Everything exists as a storyboarded sequence, though that would imply that enough planning went into the movie that even a connected series of suspense and action scenes might have arisen from pre-production. Season of the Witch moves through so many Tolkien ripoffs that one setpiece impressively manages to plagiarize Minas Tirith and Helm's Deep in one go. They wade around a bit in a forest, engaging in one of the dullest rickety bridge segments I have ever seen, and there is in fact competition for so narrow a scenario. Sena's camera moves with all the precision of a North Korean nuke, though it makes me just as wary: no spatial continuity exists between random close-ups and medium shots that make up all action shots. Even establishing shots don't help, and most long shots appear to move away from the action as if the DP was trying to slink out of the project as surreptitiously as possible. Poor Claire Foy, in her big-screen debut, is forced to oscillate so rapidly between shivering innocent and manipulative, sinister harpy that one could use her performance as a fan.

So jumbled and meaningless is the film that whatever points Sena and writer Bragi F. Schut (who undoubtedly uses the middle initial to distinguish himself among the other Bragi Schuts) might have made are instantly canceled out by a plot contrivance that occurs typically minutes later. Behmen has seen the evil of the Church and both he and another knight (Ulrich Thomsen) know that religious leaders use witch trials to eradicate dissidents and those who don't fit neatly into the Church's vision of the ideal society. Oh, but wait, there actually are witches and demons so some of these hanging/drowning/inexplicably necessary incantations are clearly justified. Ergo, a few holy men might be full of hot air, but the Church itself is founded on a true basis of supernatural connection and some of the most grisly executions in human history are warranted. Likewise, someone finally has the sense to point out the protagonist cannot atone for years of atrocity by saving one pretty girl, but then that's exactly how how Behmen redeems himself.

That's what makes the film's smug tone all the more infuriating. It actually thinks itself clever, gracelessly speaking aloud its perceived subversion before showing another picture entirely. But everyone involved clearly thought they were making something intelligent until the focused looks begin to slack off about halfway through and Cage starts letting his hair do the acting. Sena even had the audacity to cite The Seventh Seal, one of the landmarks of film history, as a key inspiration. One can almost imagine the haughty son of a bitch lounging in an interview, casually taking a pull from a long cigarette and unironically saying, "Well, I felt a certain intuitive bond with witchcraft, because I'm in the business of making magic."

Season of the Witch has that cheap blue-gray glaze that directors like to use to instill a sense of chilly foreboding and despair, but I didn't need color suggestion for this film to make me sad. Compared to the host of oneiric films last year that incorporated dreams and highly subjective filmmaking into corkscrewing narratives, the third-person distance of Season of the Witch should make the movie far more linear, yet the lazy abandon of continuity and thematic development made the film so hard to follow that those series of useless title cards upfront become even more offensive in their inefficiency. We are spared even the glorious overreaction of Nicolas Cage's weirdness, and I feared that the accused witch at the beginning got that pig fat for her ointments by draining that glistening ham that is an unleashed Cage. Too dully self-confident and plodding to work as unintentional humor, Season of the Witch denied me even the thrill of a Nic Cage stinker. I'm giving the film one star, and that's solely for the brief flash of unintentional humor that had me rolling: a freeze-frame on Cage's face that looks as if someone snapped a drunken self-portrait at a Renaissance Fair-themed frat party. It's magnificent: the shot is supposed to move the audience, and I had tears in my eyes, all right.

Gangs of New York

Gangs of New York is the epic, self-destructive companion piece to Who Shot Liberty Valance. It posits that one need not have traveled out west to find romantic lawlessness, and that one could not find the answers to a more productive society back east. It is also proof that Martin Scorsese can make masterful work no matter the circumstances. Gangs of New York is his most artistically compromised picture, trimmed down even at its 167-minute length from a reported five-hour cut and commercialized in a futile attempt to make the film into some sort of hit. Yet it remains his most personal, above perhaps his erstwhile passion project, The Last Temptation of Christ, the ultimate paean to Marty's beloved hometown and an exorcism of his hangups.

The impositions placed upon the film by Miramax hindered this vision, yet perhaps they fueled the more bombastic visual choices that serve Scorsese's deconstruction of his career. Besides, the marketing of the film provides for a misdirection Scorsese attempts with the film itself, goading the audience into identifying Amsterdam, the underdog character who enjoys a romance and narrates the picture, played by an actor still known for being a teenage heartthrob (Leonardo DiCaprio), as the protagonist. He is not.

The real crux of the story, and the personification of the choices made by the film's director, is William Cutting (Daniel Day-Lewis). He symbolizes the dying New York, at once Liberty Valance and Tom Doniphon. He's a bigot and a ruthless killer, but he has a sense of honor. So do many villains, of course, but Gangs of New York is about the transition in New York's history, not from anomie into civilization but the loss of the "nobility" of violence. Bill is not the symbol standing in the way of progress; he is the last of a dying breed.

Day-Lewis' performance here has been eclipsed by his work in There Will Be Blood, and Daniel Plainview is indeed a testament to the actor's ability to captivate an audience even with a character diametrically opposed to identification or empathy. Yet William Cutting has an emotional complexity that runs deeper even than Day-Lewis' earlier Christy Brown. When he kills the father of DiCaprio's character, Priest Vallon (Liam Neeson), in a street battle at the start, Cutting refuses to allow any of his gang, the Natives, to spoil the body. "He'll cross over whole," Bill declares, despite his vicious hatred of the Irish Catholicism Vallon represents. For Bill, why he's fighting someone is less important than how those enemies conduct themselves. In a quietly piercing scene, Bill confides in the adult Amsterdam, whom Bill accepts without learning his true identity. Draped in an American flag, Bill condenses his power, the power of anyone who holds it, into fear and the ability to manipulate it. He tells the boy about Vallon, what a great man he was; in one skirmish, Amsterdam's father got the best of ol' Bill and nearly killed him, sparing his foe's life only to force him to live with the shame. Bill notes that he cut out one of his own eyes because he could not look at Vallon.

Like the film, Bill is visually outlandish, absurd even. He routinely sports a red coat as if in a Nicholas Ray period piece, complete with pants that manage to be even longer than Day-Lewis' lanky frame can allow. It's the sort of get-up that sticks out even in a period picture: here is a man who doesn't need to care what others think. It's funny, then, that Bill should reflect Scorsese's aesthetic, given the issues he suffered, even as a universally acknowledge master, at Miramax's hand.

Scorsese's direction is without question the loosest in his oeuvre, or at the very least since Mean Streets threw the director far ahead of the minor accomplishments of his first two features. The opening gang fight, set to anachronistic music and even edited as if a submission to MTV, sets the tone for the film's structure as it draws a line in the sand separating those willing to play along in Marty's meticulously recreated sandbox from those expecting a more conventional movie. Yet Scorsese's direction tests the patience even of the loyal: scenes jut about as if someone unleashed a wild chimp into Thelma Schoonmaker's editing suite and the director simply trusted that his longtime collaborator knew what she was doing when he got the results back. Sudden transitions, awkward breaks, unnecessary cutaways in the middle of an action for a reaction shot or something else to break the scene: all of these issues exist in the film, the result of both the trimming and whatever held Scorsese and Schoonmaker's fancy.

Yet this seeming clumsiness allows the director to break entirely from the tropes that bind the genre. Scorsese worked within them for his superb The Age of Innocence but gave the characters an emotional resonance so many of these pictures chase but never obtain. Gangs, however, belongs firmly with his gangster pictures. Indeed, he casts all of the characters, be they actual gang members, policemen, whores or politicians, as gangsters. The women seduce and take from the men, who take from others to cover their losses, before giving their cut to corrupt coppers and bosses like Bill, who use the money to pocket politicians. It's far too tangled a web to be called a "vicious cycle."

Scorsese films these characters with the same passion he afforded to his earlier films, the ones that mixed character with aesthetic to make everything more visceral, more felt. He lost himself in the jumble of The Departed, but here Marty manages to convey the states of mind of both lead characters. He charts both Amsterdam's rash bravery and the loathing he feels for himself and his self-doubt as well as Bill's sadness at the "rising of the tide" that will wash away everything Bill values. The two characters (and moods) play off each other, Bill's nobility and paternal treatment of Amsterdam compounds the boy's feelings of guilt for not avenging his father, and when Amsterdam finally does make his move, in a craven attempt to get the jump on the Butcher, Bill's feelings toward the changing world are confirmed: Amsterdam is not an evil man, and certainly not a villain in the same way that Bill isn't, but he represents the shift of gangsterism from something done out in the open with a set of rules to a world governed by backstabbing, literal and figurative.

Because Scorsese somehow taps into two mindsets at once through his disjointed style, everything is magnified. The sets, painstakingly crafted in Rome, are massive and establishing -- it's a telling contrast of convictions that George Lucas, upon visiting his old friend during production, remarked, "Sets like that can be done with computers now." Like the sets, the jargon is so accurate that even the characters seem to have no idea what the idioms mean and need many translated. The story is Shakespearean, and Monk McGinn (Brendan Gleeson), a big Irish mercenary who once fought for Vallon, even says so when he sees Amsterdam save Bill from assassination. Later, Amsterdam kills the crooked cop Jack (John C. Reilly, the best of the supporting cast) in a scene that recalls Hamlet stabbing Polonius through the arras. Too, the curtain that Jack yanks down in his death throes reveals a comically outsized cross, at once a reminder of the guilt that drives Amsterdam to avenge his father and Scorsese's pointed jab at himself for redirecting the Catholicism in his films squarely on the guilt that he's still exploring in this film.

The film's amplified visuals reach their apex with the climax, a thunderous vision of the Draft Riots that grows so huge that even an elephant roams the street at one point. Gangs of New York, which halted post-production for a time in the wake of the 9/11 attacks, is about not fighting wars that are not yours to fight. Amsterdam spins his wheels for most of the film because his subconscious recognizes that Bill's conflict with the Vallons ended with his father's death, yet he presses on because he feels the need for vengeance. Many of the Irish immigrants who arrive in America are the first to be conscripted in the new draft, and Scorsese overlaps a scene of a batch of soldiers being shipped off on one of the same boats that brings home a hold full of coffins with every docking with an Irish ballad that mourns the state of the immigrants, forced to flee starvation only to find themselves forced into someone else's war. Ironically, the one war worth fighting, the war to preserve the union, is met with indifference, then aggression from the New Yorkers who see themselves as their own entity. Thus, the greatest city in the Union is reduced to what might look no different than a bombed Confederate city, to be rebuilt as a part of the Union through the same backhanded procedures that returned the South to the fold. Scorsese isn't asking us to keep quiet and accept violence against us, but he also asks that we stop and think before fighting, and as such Gangs of New York becomes not only a companion to John Ford but Bruce Springsteen, specifically his own post-9/11 triumph, The Rising.

In the slaughter and smoky haze of the riots, Amsterdam and Bill settle their score. This is the last chance Bill will have to die "a true American," and he takes it, killed honorably by Amsterdam rather than face the world he sees on the horizon, even through the massive cloud kicked up by the shelling. Note that, at the end of the film, Bill, not Amsterdam, rests in the grave next to Vallon's, and as Scorsese suddenly jumps through history to the present (well, just before it, as he leaves the World Trade Center intact), we see time forgetting the men who helped shape the city, and the fact that the movie is about those who created and not destroyed is why the Towers remain. "The appearance of the law must be upheld," Boss Tweed (Jim Broadbent) told Bill early in the film, "especially when it's being broken." That dishonesty stuck in Bill's craw, and he later tells Tweed, "You can build your filthy world without me." Thus, he wouldn't feel so bad about being covered up by the vines, forgotten by the world he laid the foundation for -- as the tagline reminds us, "America was born in the streets -- and we shouldn't pity him either, not simply because of his violent acts but because obscurity is far nobler than cheap veneration.

Second Thoughts: Public Enemies

[Edited: 7/21/2012]

The majority of mainstream critical opinion largely matched my initial reaction to Michael Mann's Public Enemies -- that it was an overlong, undercooked mash-up of the epic detail and design of Heat with the digital realism of Collateral and Miami Vice. Some reviews, however, have already flagged it as a modern masterpiece. Spirited, well-written defenses can be found all over the Web, with some of my particular favorites located at Kevin J. Olson's Hugo Stiglitz Makes Movies and Doniphon's The Long Voyage Home. They, among others, argue that the disjointed minimalism of Public Enemies works to its benefit, not detriment, that the seemingly underdeveloped characters remain largely two-dimensional in our perception because Mann is using them to undermine the more romantic notions of the gangster genre.

Upon a second viewing, and after revisiting a number of Mann's other films and especially Miami Vice, I can appreciate and, to an extent, accept that argument. Public Enemies strikes me as the gangster equivalent of Jarhead: an attempt to demystify the allure of gangster violence the way Jarhead sought to deny the belief (stated within the film) that all war films inherently celebrate conflict due to their visceral content. It's a bold gambit, and a risky one, as Mendes' film went so far in the other direction that it perversely fulfilled its mission statement by being simply boring, a charge leveled at Mann's latest by its detractors.


Public Enemies opens in true Mann fashion, with only the sparest dialogue over shots of gangster John Dillinger (Johnny Depp) arriving at prison and hastily edited visual cues that reveal how he's already organized his escape with his incarcerated gang. The escape, as it must, goes awry, Dillinger's perfect plan foiled by the predictable influence of unpredictability. One of the gang loses his cool and beats a guard, resulting in the shooting of another guard and the subsequent alerting of the rest of the prison. As the crew makes a break for the getaway car, tower guards shoot and kill Walter, the only gang member Dillinger displayed any personal connection toward during the breakout, and Mann lingers on Dillinger as he watches the life fade from his friend's eyes and, at last, releases the man's hand as the car speeds away.

This moment references the protracted deaths in Miami Vice, which all seemed to drag out because of the digital video and the way it captured movement (bodies fell more slowly, it appeared), yet Mann ends with moment with curt finality, the body suddenly halting after being dragged along by the car. Dillinger pulls a gun as he closes the door and presses it to the throat of the man who botched the escape, before throwing him from the car and leaving his limp body on the side of the road as suddenly as he'd just seen his friend die. This immediate perversion of the romanticism of the previous death, combined with the look on Depp's face -- his eyes are as lifeless as the ones he stared into -- shows the real Dillinger under all the Robin Hood myths. Here is a man who compartmentalized emotion and dissipated it instantaneously, a man who would kill without a moment's hesitation.

This abrupt, immediate dissection of a mythos is then applied to FBI agent Melvin Purvis (Christian Bale), whom we meet chasing Pretty Boy Floyd (Channing Tatum) through a field before dispatching him with a well-aimed rifle shot. Purvis has the same brooding look on his face as he watches Floyd bleed out, and he too steels himself from it, dumping whatever he felt just as quickly as it entered into his mind. I found the film soulless when I saw it in the theater, and I still think that's true; what I missed, perhaps in the thrill of finally seeing a Mann film on the big screen, is that it's because its lead characters have no souls.

The casting of the two leads reflects upon Mann's cheek. Depp, one of the most vivid, complexly cartoonish actors in the biz, plays his role entirely straight; his eyes have conveyed rakishness and danger before -- the Pirates of the Caribbean films come to mind -- but never with such cold intensity, not even when he played the tortured barber out for revenge in Sweeney Todd. He looks like a caged animal in Public Enemies, always looking for a way out even when things aren't so bad. Dillinger enjoyed a massive cult of personality during his robbery spree, sparked by his Robin Hood-esque refusal to take the money of customers, only the bank's. Mann, however, sees him as nothing more than a pathological criminal, driven to rob as if a biological need and willing to kill anyone who might threaten his safety.


Bale, coming off a string of blockbusters that were turning him into the growling, tough-guy hero of the new generation, plays a character every bit as blindly committed to simple-minded, borderline fascistic notions of justice and the law. Purvis stands up for J. Edgar Hoover (a deliciously campy Billy Crudup, who appears to be channeling all of Hoover's fetishes and kinks through his clipped, high-pitched whine) and meticulously follows the book on catching felons even though it's still being written. He believes in a code of ethics in his work, yet he displays a remarkable ability to dash that code in a moment's notice to catch a suspect. Dillinger naturally attracts our attention, with both the benefit of owning more screen time and of the seductive nature of crime in general, but Purvis is the true Mann protagonist: a man who violates his strict moral code despite placing utmost importance upon it. Bale here is Batman and John Connor used to ironic purpose to highlight the dubious ethics of lawmen given liberties to pursue criminals without oversight, an implicit political statement that Mann never forces onto the narrative.

The closest we get to character exposition from either comes from a romantically terse exchange between Dillinger and Billie Frechette (Marion Cotillard), a coat-check girl who catches the robber's eye. When he punches out a customer and invites her to come with him, the two engage in that pat nonsense of "I don't even know you!" that comes with such whisk-you-off-your-feet moments, but Dillinger manages to sum up his life in a burst of dialogue that might be the first truly romantic thing he's ever said in his life: "I was raised on a farm in Moooresville, Indiana. My mama ran out on us when I was three, my daddy beat the hell out of me cause he didn't know no better way to raise me. I like baseball, movies, good clothes, fast cars, whiskey and you... what else you need to know?"

It's an attitude that pervades the picture as a whole: Mann is less concerned with what motivates these characters than how their actions define them, and that brief speech manages to be oddly charming while working as a sly dig at all the movies who take two hours to explain a criminal's behavior as the product of a bad childhood and greed. We're never given a reason for Dillinger robbing banks, nor even moments that show him taking pleasure in a large haul; yet the clinical way he runs his robberies, the way he lets the customers keep the money they have on them to build his mythos and to win over the hearts of ordinary citizens who might protect him simply in numbers, and his curt behavior in everyday situations reveal a calculating psychopath who knows how to manipulate things to his advantage. Likewise, Purvis, also clinical, betrays his code of conduct because he wants to succeed at his job, and if Dillinger will kill anyone to save his own skin, Purvis will cut any ethical corner to track down a criminal.


Yet each man has his limits. Dillinger, icy and murderous as he may be, clearly cares for Billie, and obviously not for any boost in social status either. He loves her so dearly that he even listens to her life story, and Mann places the sound of Billie recounting her childhood over shots of the two making love, signifying that allowing someone to delve into their past -- something Dillinger doesn't believe in -- is an act of spiritual unification and adoration every bit as physically romantic as sex. Purvis also displays his humanity with Billie; when the feds capture her and one agent beats her for information, until Purvis can no longer sit by and acquiesce to the loss of his morality and stops the torture.

Mann's films typically feature a confrontation of sorts between the "hero" and "villain" (that line is usually blurred) -- Miami Vice sitting at one extreme, where the entire film is about interactions between cops and criminals before the final battle, and at the other is The Insider, which derives much of its tension by assailing Jeffrey Wigand with unseen forces -- and Dillinger and Purvis do have a conversation about 50 minutes into the film, as Dillinger sits in a cell awaiting transfer after the cops catch a lucky break. The two establish an instant kinship with each other: neither derives much pleasure from his line of work -- only the more psychotic members of each side, such as Baby Face Nelson (Stephen Graham), express any delight -- and they share an unspoken bond when Dillinger brings up death and the way you can see life drift from the eyes. The diner scene in Heat revealed basic truths of Neil McCauley and Vincent Hanna and how they related to each other, and this scene works in the same fashion: Dillinger cuts to the heart of their differences by noting that Purvis likes to take criminals down from a distance, picking them off with a rifle shot after a plan comes together and the bad guys are outnumbered, while John is in the middle of a fracas, planning as he goes. They're both empty-hearted killers, but Purvis attempts to distance himself from this self-understanding.

The proximity of this confrontation to the similar pre-showdown battle of wits in Heat reflects the manner in which Public Enemies serves as a stylistic and thematic mélange of the director's filmography. It contains the same highly detailed crime procedural found in Heat, the minimalism of Thief, the grainy romanticism of digital forays Collateral and Miami Vice, the faithful period recreation of The Last of the Mohicans and the unorthodox biopic structuring of Ali. It builds to an overload of Mann's various styles, and, frankly, it doesn't always work. Surprisingly, the picture looks sharper on Blu-Ray, the shifting digital and film shots not clashing so violently as they did in the theater; however, I still find myself wanting to take in this world and being constantly denied.

But if Public Enemies serves as a grab-bag of Mann's corpus, it also is perhaps the one film in his catalog that most concerns the cinema or, more accurately, the effect of the cinema. The people who endured the Great Depression, as many do now in our current financial predicament, escaped to the theater for respite. Furthermore, this was the age before television, when people received news either on the radio or as newsreels that preceded features at the movies (when Dillinger is transferred by plane, Mann shows reporters waiting at the end of the runway and even provides a POV shot of one of their cameras filming the landing). Ergo, criminals like Dillinger could easily appear larger than life, as normal citizens only ever saw them on screens bigger than themselves. Many supporters -- myself included -- of Oliver Stone's Natural Born Killers cite the film as "ahead of its time," yet we see here that the public's love affair with violent criminals stretches back decades, perhaps further -- when cops drive Dillinger to jail, citizens line the streets to wave ecstatically at him. One of the key scenes of the movie, in which Dillinger heads to the local theater, which displays his mugshot on the screen before the movie and asks the audience to look around for the criminals "among you." It's obviously a typical PSA, written out by the Feds and delivered to theaters to announce to their patrons, and the scene works less as a moment of suspense and more as a perverse sort of wish fulfillment for Dillinger, who gets to see himself on the big screen before the movie comes on; in a way, he got top billing. Of course, Dillinger dies just outside the Biograph Theater, after seeing Manhattan Melodrama, during which he clearly envisions himself as Clark Gable (whose character was, ironically, modeled after the gangster).


That brief romanticizing of Dillinger through cinema, while ultimately revealed to be hollow, informs some other scenes, most specifically the one where he strolls into an FBI office and walks around in the room dedicate to his case without being caught. The sheer effrontery of his actions betray a man who, for all his cold danger, is starting to buy into his own myth. There are even a few shots that utilize the same golden hue as the Godfather films, and for the same purpose: such shots establish the legend of the character even as Mann gently subverts it with the terrible truth of that character. Mann fills the screen with death, but he never exploits it, instead using it as a drawn-out yet blunt method of breaking down the allure of the criminal life. Those shots of Purvis and Dillinger watching men die at the start telegraph this, as does the end of the astonishing Little Bohemia shootout -- how great is it to actually see the smoke from gunfire fill a room in a realistic fashion? -- a sudden caesura that replaces the bursts of Thompson and BAR fire with a shot of a gangster's final, ragged breath, visible in the cold, floating in the air like a soul leaving the body.

Yet Mann clearly has the same dalliance with the romanticism of crime that Dillinger has, and he devotes a brief but telling couple of scenes to the changing face of crime in America. The betting pool controlled by the Mafia, who eliminate competition and establish a single betting operation for the entire country, represents the death of individual crime, even among organizations like the mob. Dillinger is a dying breed, his charisma derived in part because he was so unapologetically a criminal where later gangsters always tried to pass themselves off as "legitimate." He doesn't have a waste management front or a friend in Congress; he's just got a Tommy gun and a collection of contacts he met in prison.

The name of the film is Public Enemies, yet the ad campaign only featured Depp and Bale: in the film, the FBI receives more scrutiny and scorn than Dillinger. Purvis is just as dangerous as Public Enemy Number One, just as loose with his morals and just as willing to take extreme measures to get what he wants. This is not Mann's indictment of police so much as a snapshot of a time when criminals and cops were identifiable, when cops didn't need to go undercover and criminals didn't need to hide behind loopholes: Purvis hints that the line between the two is about to blur, his showy, fashionable dress and distanced behavior edging near our perception of a mob boss. Hoover, whom Mann reminds us never served in any field capacity in apprehending criminals, introduces draconian tactics to fighting crime that greatly infringed upon rights and liberties, calling into question the worth of a police force that also strong-armed the innocent. Perhaps, then, Mann suggests that the de-mystification of crime also affected those on the side of the law.

As it happened with Miami Vice, I find my opinion significantly altered, but I am not prepared to call Public Enemies the rousing success the way I would Mann's previous feature. As his other digital/film combos, he wants to place us into the action without gimmickry and to let us experience emotions as they come. But Public Enemies is about two characters who don't know how to process emotions normally, Dillinger because he spent his formative years in prison for a grocery shoplifting that didn't warrant the punishment, Purvis because he's so thirsty for glory he's set aside his humanity. This creates a dissonance between Mann's intentions and the nature of the characters that sometimes works and sometimes doesn't, leading to occasional lulls. Nevertheless, I understand now what Mann was trying to do, and, like Miami Vice, I can confidently say that I'll be revisiting it for years.

Public Enemies

There may be no major Hollywood director as underrated as Michael Mann. Only Martin Scorsese can claim to capture America's seedy underworld better, and even the master lacks Mann's attention to detail. He's far from a "style over substance" director, though; masterpieces like Heat and The Insider take the time to examine their characters outside the superb action sequences. Sadly, that character examination is sorely lacking in his new film, Public Enemies, in which his characters are so calculatingly shot that they might as well be a part of the beautiful backgrounds.

Maybe that's the point: too many films destroy our mythic figures by applying cheap psychology to them, and Mann is trying to spare us yet more talk of abusive fathers or warped moral codes. Such explanations are hinted at, but they're delivered through lines that mock such conventions, as if the movie buff Dillinger is as sick of them as we are. Yet a film with a known outcome needs some sort of revisionist analysis to justify its existence, especially one clocking in at two and a half hours.

As a result, Johnny Depp and Christian Bale – two of the most brilliantly off-kilter actors in the business – never get to sink their teeth into their roles, those of infamous gangster John Dillinger and FBI agent Melvin Pruvis, respectively. These men, as with the cop and robber in “Heat,” are perfect foils for one another: Dillinger robs banks because he cannot accept authority, while Purvis is trying to prove the usefulness of the FBI, which is still in its infancy in the ‘30s. Both spend a great deal of time staring into the dying eyes of fallen comrades, only furthering their resolve.

However, Mann spends so much time playing up both sides as heroic archetypes that neither ever becomes interesting. Heat worked because both the cop and the robber were trapped, tragic victims of their own pride and world view. Pacino and De Niro's characters were perfect foils because they saw in each other a kindred spirit, the only person who could fully understand their turmoil. There is no equivalent to the diner scene in Public Enemies, nor is there even a successful juxtaposition between the two: we merely see the Robin Hood-esque robber and the agent who is no less heroic for taking him down.

Dillinger and Purvis duke it out in a Depression-era America painstakingly researched and perfectly recreated that it would look as real as anything you’d see on your own street corner even without the documentary-like direction. But that camera work, combined with the sharp detail of digital cameras, makes the film feel more like a technical exercise than a visceral crime epic.

Nevertheless, Mann has a gift for pacing, and Public Enemies zips along despite its padded length, which lapses into a loop of planning-robbery-aftermath. Its action scenes, the best of which being the shootout at the Little Bohemia Lodge, jump out of nowhere and, true to heists and crackdowns, are over as soon as they begin. The little details of Dillinger's heists, from letting the customers keep their money to tying hosting to the getaway car to discourage any gunfire, give these scenes a sense of visceral realism. True to form, Mann makes the gunfire loud and the muzzle flashes blinding -- be sure to bring some aspirin with you, just in case.

If only the actors had something to do, they might have filled the gap between these brief but overpowering shooting matches. Marion Cotillard, in her first role since her Oscar win for La Vie en Rose, is completely flat as Dillinger’s main squeeze, and Billy Crudup brings nothing more to the role of J. Edgar Hoover than a bad accent. Mann has an under-appreciated knack for getting great performances from his actors, be they master craftsmen like Al Pacino and Daniel Day-Lewis or more star-oriented players like Tom Cruise and Will Smith (who genuinely earned his Oscar nomination in the otherwise unremarkable Ali). Only Stephen Graham’s manic portrayal of Baby Face Nelson breaks free of the cage that holds everyone else; Dillinger lives the gangster life for the media that turn him into a sensation, but Nelson is just plain crazy, and Graham pulls it off beautifully.

I don't want to suggest that the film is boring, mind you; the shootouts only continue to prove that Mann is the finest action director working today. But what's with the shaky-cam? The reason why the battle in Heat remains one of the great cinematic gunfights is the simple fact that you can tell what's going on. In an age where action editing consists of forcing a first-person perspective on the audience to the point that we can no longer make out all the vast special effects, I was looking forward to Michael Mann showing the kids how to do it right. These scenes vacillate between the artful camera work that defined his old action sequences with the hands-on digital approach that informed recent work like the brilliant Collateral and the misfire Miami Vice, and they left me wanting more even as I was absorbed in the moment.

In the end, “Public Enemies” is a technically resplendent film that never shifts out of first gear until its chief action sequence, only to shift down again as soon as it’s over. Mann always was too fond of his scripts, which sometimes paid off (Heat) and sometimes derailed what might have been a decent flick (Miami Vice); this most definitely fits the latter. Well, assuming this film has a point at all, because I've yet to figure out why Mann made it at all. As it is, it’s certainly worth your money as a popcorn flick, but too much of this film, right down to its title, is uncharacteristically and tragically generic.