“Public Enemies” too cool for its own good

[Dave Monroe]

July 3rd, 2009 04:56pm
“Public Enemies” too cool for its own good
by Christian Kallen


John Dillinger used to be one of the touchstones of American culture.
A one-man crime wave in the darkest year of the Great Depression, he
robbed and escaped his way into the country’s heart, creating a myth
of the solo gangster that persists to this day. If the Western hero –
Wyatt Earp, Buffalo Bill, the fictitious Ethan  Edwards – gave way in
the last half of the 20th century to the Sopranos and Corleones, it
was Dillinger who led the way.

So hopes are high for Public Enemies, the new film about Dillinger and
his G-man nemesis, Melvin Purvis, starring Johnny Depp and Christian
Bale. The cast alone should sell the movie, these are both interesting
actors who can bring bodies to the box office, and together there’s
promise of real tension: cool vs. heat, expression vs. repression.

So why does it take the audience fully 20 minutes to feel some empathy
for John Dillinger? ...

[...]

Ultimately, though, at well over 2 hours, Public Enemies fails to
carry us into either the myth of Dillinger, or even its own storyline.
Which is too bad, mostly because of the elevated role that John
Dillinger has ably worn for 75 years. As well as the newspaper legends
that grew around him in the 1930s, and the newsreels that created his
first cinematic fame, in the 1970s he seemed to enjoy a revival in pop
culture, even an unlikely appearance in psychedelic literature.

“John Dillinger, at the end, found a few seconds’ strange mercy in the
movie images that hadn’t quite yet faded from his eyeballs—Clark Gable
going off unregenerate to fry in the chair, voices gentle out of the
deathrow steel so long Blackie…” evokes Thomas Pynchon in Gravity’s
Rainbow (1973). And later, “… there was still for the doomed man some
shift of personality in effect—the way you’ve felt for a little while
afterward in the real muscles of your face and voice, that you were
Gable, the ironic eyebrows, the shining, snakelike head…” This is a
scene Mann labors over in the film’s concluding minutes, as if in
attempting to visualize what is best expressed through literature.

[...]

http://inthedark.blogs.pressdemocrat.com/10117/public-enemies-too-cool-for-its-own-good/

Dillinger, John (1903-34)
368-69; American gangster specializing in bank robberies; "As B/4"
436; killed at Biograph Theatre in Chicago, 516; bloody shirt, 741

http://www.thomaspynchon.com/gravitys-rainbow/alpha/d.html
http://gravitys-rainbow.pynchonwiki.com/wiki/index.php?title=D

Pynchon writes: Lyrical and fast-driving, this tale of Dillinger's
last days restores to us with brilliant fidelity a long-unredeemed
part of our true outlaw heritage.

http://www.themodernword.com/Pynchon/pynchon_essays_blurbs.html