public enemies: set the camera down and back away slowly

Sometimes I get excited about a movie and walk in the doors without noticing who directed it. This is a dangerous practice and I recommend it only for the strong-hearted. Who knows what dreck might be lurking behind an attractive poster? From the first shots, I ought to have known; the words MICHAEL MANN ought to have whispered themselves into my ear. In retrospect, it feels as if the director were standing in front of me, waving his arms around, shouting, "Don't look at the actors! Look at me instead!"

It's not dreck. It's a good story, and much of it is well-told; by some 50 minutes in, I was fully immersed. Here's the rub: it should not have taken that long. The story was good enough, the actors were good enough, I ought to have been immersed long before, if someone had, for God's sake, hogtied the camerman. Mr. Mann has joined my list of directors to whom I will send a tripod at Christmas with clear, easy-to-read instructions about how to use it. What's with all these ultra-ULTRA-close-up motion shots? Apparently Mann or his DP or his editor or SOME misguided sumbitch thought that was a clever way to introduce us to the characters, by showing us how massive his pores are as a piece of his face glides past the camera. Luckily, that stops after awhile. Maybe Mr. Mann (or his DP or his editor or whatever sumbitch sits at the desk where this particular buck stops) finally got engrossed in the story and in spite of himself just started letting himself tell it. Well done, Mr. Sumbitch. A belated realization, but better late than never.

This is not a film made by a director with vision, but a director with a longing to be visionary. He wants us to walk out of the theatre and say his technique is bold. OK, it's bold, and sometimes it works, but most times it detracts from all the things he did right, which are myriad. The period details, for one; I swear to God he Tardis-ed his cast back to the thirties to film this. The clothes, the cars, the apartments, the planes and motorcycles... details of both wealthy and poor seem right on. There's one scene where J Edgar Hoover (Billy Crudup! hurray) is giving medals to "young crimefighters". Granted, it's just a snippet of a scene, but kids are the hardest folks to displace in time because they haven't yet got the seasoned actor's self-awareness about the personal marks and influences cultural imprinting has left upon them, and these little boys I swear to God seem like they came from my father's generation and never touched an ipod or cruised online porn.

In fact, I wish I had the casting directors (let me check IMDB... Avy Kaufman and Bonnie Timmermann, it says) here right now: hearty handshakes and big sloppy kisses all around. The faces these guys found! Look around the room at the mugs on the Feds, on the Texas ranger guys, on the gangsters... great, classic mugs. On top of that, the pretty boys from my generation (Crudup and Depp specifically, but also Stephen Dorff and others) have reached that halfway-to-ninety point at which life has carved some hardship into the prettiness, or stretched it some with years of dissolute luxuriousness, and they're starting to look interesting instead of perfect. Crudup is spot-on as the fast-talking, obsessed Hoover, and Christian Bale, with the toughest job as the low-key, practical and hard-working Melvin Purvis, pulls it off with his usual adeptness, making the nonsensational crimefighter as interesting to watch as any mobster. My favorite bit might be a phone conversation between Hoover and Purvis, in which Purvis is saying he needs Texas rangers to finish the job right and Hoover keeps snapping, "I can't hear you," and Purvis keeps repeating it, patiently and stubbornly, until Hoover hangs up and the next thing we see are Texas rangers disembarking from a train (led by Stephen Lang in a really wonderful small role. As we left the cinema my boyfriend said, "Do you think he had enough lines that we could give him Best Supporting Actor?" He didn't, and that's too bad).

Mann's an odd fellow; his choices are odd. Some of this is filmed on video, or the film is overtaxed into graininess, and those places seem random. There's a shootout at a resort deep in the woods at night which is hypnotically lit by bursts of machine-gun fire, and that's all gorgeous, but then they run out into the woods and the moon becomes a very bright and very shifting light-source. Things like that don't matter if they work, if you're engrossed in the story and don't notice them. I guess I wouldn't care so much except for this unsettling suspicion that they were deliberate: that instead of making a film about John Dillinger, he's made a film about Michael Mann making a film about John Dillinger, and that kind of feedback loop just makes my head hurt.