Michael Mann’s Public Enemies takes the most famous bank robber in American history and refuses to make him a legend. Johnny Depp plays John Dillinger as a working criminal with a fur coat and a fast car, not a folk hero. The film premiered in Chicago on June 19, 2009, and Universal released it on July 1. It runs 140 minutes. It wants to be a crime drama about systems — Hoover’s, Purvis’s, the Outfit’s — and mostly it is.
Trailer, via Universal Pictures.
A Biopic Built From Bryan Burrough’s Book
Public Enemies adapts Bryan Burrough’s 2004 nonfiction book, Public Enemies: America’s Greatest Crime Wave and the Birth of the FBI, 1933–34. Mann wrote the screenplay with Ronan Bennett and Ann Biderman. Burrough had first meant to make a television miniseries about the Depression-era crime wave, then chose a book instead. That origin shows. The film keeps cutting away from Depp to procedure: fingerprint catalogs, tapped telephone lines, agents learning to fight interstate crime.
The tagline is “America’s most wanted,” and the film treats that phrase as an administrative problem. Hoover, played by Billy Crudup, needs a face for the Bureau. Dillinger supplies it.
Depp Plays Dillinger as a Man of the People
Depp described Dillinger as “that era’s rock and roll star.” He also called him a “man of the people” with “a Robin Hood edge.” Those are Depp’s words, and the performance follows them. Dillinger buys Billie Frechette a fur coat at a restaurant. She falls for him after he tells her who he is. Marion Cotillard plays Frechette as the one person in the film who sees Dillinger without the file attached.
Depp found no recording of Dillinger’s own voice, but he found recordings of Dillinger’s father. Hearing them, he did the math: Dillinger was raised a farm boy in southern Indiana, and Depp was born and raised in Owensboro, Kentucky, about 70 miles away. “I knew how he moved. I knew how he talked,” Depp said. The film’s best scenes are just Depp walking and talking.
Christian Bale’s Purvis Is Not a Fanatic
Christian Bale did not know who Melvin Purvis was before the film. He spent time with Purvis’s son Alston and met other family and friends. Purvis died in 1960. Bale said he “never viewed Purvis as having a real personal zeal for taking down Dillinger,” and that Purvis understood why the public treated Dillinger as almost a hero. Bale thought Purvis’s driving motivation was something else — the source cuts off there, so the film’s Purvis stays a professional doing a job.
That reading matters. Public Enemies has no shouting antagonist. Purvis asks Hoover for experienced agents, and Charles Winstead (Stephen Lang) arrives with a military background. The pursuit becomes a bureaucracy learning its trade.
The Cast Around the Two Leads
The supporting bench is deep and specific. Jason Clarke plays “Red” Hamilton. Stephen Dorff plays Homer Van Meter. David Wenham plays Harry “Pete” Pierpont. Giovanni Ribisi plays Alvin Karpis. Rory Cochrane plays Agent Carter Baum. Stephen Graham plays Baby Face Nelson. John Ortiz plays Phil D’Andrea. John Michael Bolger plays Martin Zarkovich.
Mann shot some scenes on location where the events occurred. The film is not entirely historically accurate, and the source says so plainly. That is a fair trade for texture, but it is not a license to call this history.
The Plot Moves Through Jails and Hotels
In 1933, Dillinger infiltrates Indiana State Penitentiary and breaks his crew out. His mentor Walter Dietrich is shot and killed in the firefight. The gang changes clothes, eats at a nearby farm, and drives to a safe house on Chicago’s east side. After killing Charles Floyd, Purvis is promoted by Hoover to lead the hunt.
The set pieces are procedural and plain. Purvis leads a failed ambush at a hotel, and an FBI agent is killed by Baby Face Nelson, who escapes with Tommy Carroll. Police in Tucson, Arizona, arrest Dillinger and his gang after a fire breaks out in their Hotel Congress; the source does not describe how the case against them ended. Dillinger is extradited to Indiana, where Sheriff Lillian Holley locks him in the Lake County Jail in Crown Point. He escapes using a fake gun. He cannot see Frechette, who is under tight police surveillance.
Frank Nitti’s associates refuse to help, because the FBI has been prosecuting interstate crime and Nitti’s bookmaking racket is exposed. That severs Dillinger from the Chicago Outfit. Carroll goads a desperate Dillinger into robbing $800,000 from a bank in Sioux Falls with Baby Face Nelson. Both Dillinger and Carroll are shot and have to leave.
The Hard Numbers
- Title: Public Enemies (2009)
- Director: Michael Mann
- Writers: Ann Biderman, Ronan Bennett, Michael Mann
- Runtime: 140 minutes
- Genres: Crime, History, Drama
- Premiere: Chicago, June 19, 2009
- Release: July 1, 2009, Universal Pictures
- Budget: $80–100 million
- Worldwide gross: $214.1 million
- Metacritic: 70/100
- Score: 7.0/10
How Public Enemies Compares to Its Source Book
| Bryan Burrough’s book (2004) | Michael Mann’s film (2009) | |
|---|---|---|
| Form | Nonfiction history | Biographical crime drama |
| Scope | The Depression-era crime wave and the birth of the FBI, 1933–34 | Dillinger’s final years and Purvis’s pursuit |
| Origin | Burrough first planned a TV miniseries, then wrote a book | Mann developed the project from Burrough’s book |
| Accuracy | Reported history | Not entirely historically accurate, per the source |
The book is about a wave. The film is about two men and the machine between them. That is a narrowing, and it costs the film some of Burrough’s scale.
Where the Film Earns Its 7.0
Public Enemies is a good film with a cold center. The cast is the reason to watch it. Depp and Bale never share a scene that crackles the way a duel should; the film keeps them apart, and the distance is deliberate but not always dramatic. Cotillard gets the few warm scenes, and she makes them count.
The location shooting and the period detail do real work. The film looks like 1933 without begging for admiration. What it lacks is a pulse in the middle. The middle stretch — the ambush, the Tucson arrest, the Crown Point escape — is a run of well-staged events that do not build. Each one resets. The source does not say how the legal matters it describes were resolved, so the film’s own account of them stands unresolved.
That is also the film’s argument. Dillinger escapes, robs, escapes again, and the Bureau learns a little more each time. Hoover gets his Public Enemy Number One. Purvis gets his methods. The country gets a story.
The film’s biggest miss is that it never quite decides whether Dillinger’s charm was real or a performance that the public bought. Depp plays it as real. Bale plays Purvis as a man who suspects it was both. Mann leaves the question open, and openness is not the same as depth.
Still, this is a serious, well-made crime film with a strong cast and a clear idea: the FBI was built, in part, to catch one man. The book did that idea better. The film does it well enough.
Score: 7.0 of 10.
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