Book Was Brilliant, Movie a Dud

Rating: 4/10 (3 January 2010)

I'm probably a little different than most of the people who saw this movie in that I read the book upon which it was based. You really have to read it in order to understand the opportunity that Michael Mann squandered.
Bryan Burrough's "Public Enemies" was a brilliant book -- the first time I've really seen anyone tie together the full story of the "crime wave" of 1932-34, and the massive national manhunt for the "public enemies" that created the modern FBI. Judging by the notes in the back, it seems there might have been one other author who attempted the same task back in the sixties (and wound up inspiring the film "Bonnie and Clyde") but Burrough had the benefit of internal FBI files. Comparing them against the newspaper accounts of the time, and weaving in the recollections of the few survivors (notably Alvin Karpis), Burrough seemed to put together the full story for the first time.
It is dramatically different than the story that is generally known. Let's just say that J. Edgar Hoover and his G-men were waaaay out of their depth at first -- but over the course of about a year and a half they learned from their mistakes and established a somewhat competent national police force that could track fugitives across state lines, and respond quickly and fairly effectively when suspects were sighted.
It's a dramatic story of bank robberies, kidnappings, gunfights, car chases and police corruption, involving a cast of characters we know mainly by legend today -- Dillinger, Bonnie and Clyde, the Karpis-Barker Gang, Pretty Boy Floyd, Machine Gun Kelly, Baby Face Nelson, and a supporting cast of hundreds.
The author apparently got started on this work as a miniseries for HBO, and then sorta lost his way or something -- the Internet is a little unclear on this -- and then he finally decided to write a book instead. We're all the better for it. Read the book. It's terrific.
And then somehow it landed in the hands of Michael Mann, who had to figure out how to turn the sprawling story into a two-hour movie. How did he do it? He didn't bother.
The movie is a travesty of the real story, every bit as distorted and inaccurate as all the other movies and books that Burrough set out to challenge. We see it in the opening minutes, when Pretty Boy Floyd is gunned down, and then we see Dillinger happily roaming the countryside with his tommygun. Floyd was gunned down months after Dillinger.
And if you know that fact, you know that much of what follows has been made up. Fact is, the movie has only a nodding resemblance to the truth of that Midwestern crime wave. It makes Melvin Purvis the hero, while the book makes him out to be incompetent. It restages the "Little Bohemia" siege in a way that fails to convey the far more interesting story of what really happened. Dillinger has his brains blown out at the Biograph but somehow manages to offer some poignant dying words. So on and so forth.
Now, I understand that a filmmaker has the "right" to take a little license with his source material. I understand that he can't tell an epic story in two hours, and he probably has to dispense with some of it. He also has to find a hero somewhere in it all. In an enormous story like this one, he has to find its spine, twist and reshape it and make it cinematic. All those points I grant.
I'll also admit that Mann is a stylish filmmaker, and all his flamboyance is in evidence here.
But my gosh -- there was a terrific story here, and neither Mann nor his screenwriters managed to see it. If there had to be a "hero," it might have been Hoover himself, whose frank, blunt and somewhat self-serving words (from his internal memos) might have offered a subversive commentary on the whole affair. There's more to it than that, but trust me, the story is dramatic.
Instead, what we got in this movie was yet another rehash of the Dillinger story, every bit as distorted and inaccurate and just plain wrong as every other Dillinger movie. Really, if you're going to tackle a story that's been done before, you ought to do something new. There just wasn't much point. Mann had the opportunity to break new ground and tell a story that has never been done before. He blew it.
Let's hope that someday someone makes that HBO miniseries.