Not the public’s enemy

WATCHING THE trailers for Public Enemies, Michael Mann's biopic starring Johnny Depp as bank robber John Dillinger and Christian Bale as FBI agent Melvin Purvis, I anticipated a rollicking film of bank robberies--at a time when banks, budget cuts and the worldwide economic crisis as a whole are robbing the populace blind to the tune of $700 billion and counting.

However, I was sadly disappointed with a film that tried to do too much and focused on all the wrong things. I received more satisfaction from Dillinger's Wikipedia page and the eponymous www.johndillinger.com.

John Dillinger, like many criminals, was born of societal circumstances.

In 1924, at the age of 21, he and a friend robbed a local grocery of $120. For this crime, Dillinger was sentenced to 10 to 20 years in prison--a very harsh sentence for a first-time adult offender and for such a paltry sum. It was during this extended time in prison that he met other criminals and decided to learn skills from them he might not have the opportunity to learn otherwise.

Upon his arrival he stated, "I will be the meanest bastard you ever saw when I get out of here." He was paroled in 1933, in the middle of the Great Depression and, along with the majority of the population, was unable to find work for a prolonged period of time. Befitting his extensive prison curriculum, he returned to robbery as his profession.

During his very short career, he escaped from jail multiple times and robbed nearly a dozen banks for various large sums. But the meaty story Mann consciously avoids is how, despite the press and the FBI's best efforts, Dillinger and his peers and accomplices were a cast of heroes, not enemies. Fanciful urban legends, as well as truthful stories of their humanity and prowess, rose up all around the country about Dillinger, Pretty Boy Floyd, Baby Face Nelson, Ma Barker and others.

During the first bank robbery in the film, we see a brief exchange between a frightened bank teller and Dillinger:

Dillinger: That's your money mister?

Bank Teller: Yes.

Dillinger: We're here for the bank's money, not yours.

For this brand of populism Dillinger was famous. More often than not, for every newspaper story that called him "Public Enemy No. 1" there was a word-of-mouth story that proclaimed him a Robin Hood.

Later in the film, he explains to his accomplices that certain crimes are off-limits, such as kidnapping. He reasons that the public doesn't favor kidnapping, and it's in the public where the gang must hide. Behind his logic is the understanding that many people could probably identify and turn them in, but didn't care to, because the public knew they were never in danger from Dillinger and his gang.

Toward the end of the film, we glimpse Dillinger as hero-for-the-masses when he is being transferred from one jail to another and throngs of people line the streets, not to harangue him as a public menace, but to cheer him as one of their own.

This was the film I would like to have seen and the story that deserved to be told: the story of the class conflict of the '30s and how it gave rise to all manner of struggle, bank robbery included. A more worthwhile film would have shown the dynamic between bandits like Dillinger and the effect it had on masses of Americans who hoped they would never be caught. In this dynamic, Dillinger represented a hope for something better and a way out of the despair of a massive economic crisis.

But this, unfortunately, is only a tiny, almost negligible fraction of the movie itself.

PART OF my dismay with the film, I must admit, was denial of the facts surrounding it. Mann, who also directed Heat, The Insider and Collateral, adapted the story from Bryan Burrough's book, Public Enemies: America's Greatest Crime Wave and the Birth of the FBI, 1933-34, so the base material was never the story of Dillinger himself or his cohorts of the so-called Public Enemy era.

The book is the history of the fledgling FBI and the roots of its expansion in the Depression era. Fair enough, but the movie's audience was sold a bill of goods. None of the advertisements or previews for the film exhorted me to see the magnificent story unfold of how the FBI was built. I can only imagine it's because the production company knew that no one would watch such a movie, let alone pay money for the privilege.

Mann compensates for divergent expectations by using the lives of Dillinger and the others as fuel for the despicable engine of the FBI. We need not know how these men and women became "public enemies" or why the public loved them; we need only know that they committed crimes and must be punished under the law.

We see too much of the short-lived and inexplicable romance between Dillinger and Evelyn "Billie" Frechette, who only serves as the vehicle by which Purvis is able to track and eventually kill his quarry. We see too much of the self-serving and arrogant J. Edgar Hoover.

We learn nothing of why a man like Purvis, who would later kill himself, was drawn to the work he pursued. We learn nothing of what made Dillinger a criminal. We learn nothing about the complex reactions of the public itself to the drama playing out across the country.

One redeeming quality of the film is to expose the brutality of the FBI as nothing new: it carried out physical and psychological torture from its inception. Agents killed innocent bystanders with regularity and impunity, and they routinely violated the civil rights of the people they hunted. However, the way that Mann portrays these images and realities could just as well be lauded by a right-winger watching the film as deplored by a left-winger such as myself.

Certainly, bank robbery is no solution to the problems of the economy or the hardships many working-class people face, but a film like Public Enemies could have served as an important marker about the public's mood and sympathies. Instead, we were given dreck with little heart or plot and nothing to make it relevant today.