As America mourned the death of the world's most famous child molester this Independence Day weekend, we went to the movies (or "the show," as we say in Chicago) to see the new Johnny Depp movie. Depp channeled the King of Pop for his role as Willy Wonka. This new movie, appropriately called Public Enemies, is about neither The Gloved One nor Dick Cheney. Rather, it is the story of the last days of the Golden Age of Bank Robbers—Pretty Boy Floyd, Babyface Nelson and John Dillinger. Johnny Depp is John Dillinger. Call him J2D2.I have a great interest in movies about gangsters, Chicago and gangsters in Chicago. This film is a mish-mosh, a crazy quilt, a pastiche, if you will, of scenes from the last 35 years of Chicago crime movies, from The Sting and The Blues Brothers to The Merry Gentleman and The Dark Knight. Public Enemies borrows cliches from these and others.
Christian Bale (Batman) returns to Chicago (the setting of Gotham), this time as Melvin Purvis, a half-hearted FBI agent who pursues Johnny. Batman isn't as gung-ho as J. Edgar Hoover (played by Billy Crudup) wants his GMen to be. Christian is a real gentleman, much like Kevin Kostner as Eliot Ness in The Untouchables. Batman carries Marion Cotillard to the ladies room (just like that scene of Richard Gere and Debra Winger in An Officer and a Gentleman).
Nor is Christian Purvis as dogged as Tommy Lee Jones who pursued Indiana Jones through the South Side and Near North Side of Chicago in The Fugitive. Frank Nitti shows up, which confused me because I was sure Eliot Kostner had tossed him off the roof of the old public library (now the Cultural Center).
This movie is a period piece, full of Buicks and DeSotos with running boards, candlestick telephone sets, fedoras and news reels. But O, Brother Where Art Thou was better at setting the mood of the Great Depression. The soundtrack has scratchy Billie Holiday songs, which put me in mind of scratchy Edith Piaf songs in Edith. In that movie, Cotillard played the title role. Here, she's Dillinger's half-French, half-American Indian moll, Billie Frechette. She does a great job hiding her French accent. Thankfully, her voice coach did not school her in a Wisconsin accent. Billie pulls a trick out of The Blues Brothers, sending the cops to a false address on Addison Street when a dirty Chicago cop demands to know where J2D2 is hiding. Similarly, the Blues Bros. sent the cops to Addison and Clark, which is the location of Wrigley Field.
Dillinger must have been a charismatic figure, but we see few examples of that in this movie. There is an impromptu press conference where he regales the reporters before he is locked up in an Indiana jail. That scene recalls Robert "Al Capone" De Niro in The Untouchables. Lili Taylor (JoJo the waitress in Mystic Pizza) is the jailer, made up to look like Frau Farbissina from the Austin Powers series. Dillinger breaks out of jail with a gun he carved from a block of wood, but the movie doesn't divulge that little interesting fact. Dillinger had some sort of weird homing instinct because he returned to the Midwest after every big score. He should have done like the early Woody Allen comedy about another bank robber: Take The Money And Run.
Depp is surprisingly flat. We get no sense of Dillinger's charisma, personality or likes/dislikes. There's no flamboyance, à la Pirates of the Caribbean (John does fondle his pocketwatch with the cameo of Billie, like Jack Sparrow fondles the compass). We see no sensitivity, à la Benny and Joon. As my wife said, "Anyone could have played this role." George Clooney, where are thou?
In the end, J2D2 is sitting in the Biograph Theater on Lincoln Avenue, thinly disguised in sunglasses and a Clark Gable moustache, watching Gable star in Manhattan Melodrama. Dillinger is gunned down after leaving the show, in what is suggested as a mob hit. Dillinger was bad for (illegitimate) business because the federal government was passing laws about the commission of interstate crimes. There is an interesting scene in a wire room (à la The Sting), where Nitti tells Dillinger that the real money from now on is in wire fraud. Robbing banks is nickel-and-dime stuff.
We were expecting Fourth of July fireworks, but as it turns out, Public Enemies is a dud.
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