extravaganza of closeups

Rating: 7/10 (4 July 2009)

For fans of extreme facial close-ups, this is the great movie of 2009. Not only is the camera cheek-to-cheek with Johnny Depp, Marion Cotillard, Christian Bale and the rest of the sterling cast, it's downright microscopic, revealing a vast landscape of zits, pores, peach fuzz and capillaries. This kind of cinematography gives the film a persuasive intimacy that locks us into the drama from the earliest scenes (the film opens with a closeup of a tight formation of shackled prisoners in classic black-and-white striped uniforms marching across a prison yard). Depp is a good choice to play the dapper gangster John Dillinger. It's not that others couldn't have done equally well in their own way, but there is something about his nonconformist offscreen persona that underpins the role. Christian Bale as FBI agent Melvin Purvis matches him scene for scene in a performance of seemingly effortless brilliance. Marion Cotillard reinforces her reputation as a convincing, versatile actress as Dillinger's girlfriend; she plays "wounded-soulful" very well. And a plumped Billy Crudup is properly officious as the young J. Edgar Hoover.
The film shifts from Dillinger and his gang to Purvis and his gang, taking breaks occasionally to indulge in protracted shoot-outs between the two which get rather tiresome after a while, particularly because they tend to confuse the viewer. In one nocturnal scene, an ambush takes place at a motel in a wooded area. The parking lot around the motel is pitch black, but the surrounding forest into which a significant chase sequence occurs, is conveniently bathed in what can only be described as the very generous light of a full moon.
Costumes, interiors and autos are all convincing. The soundtrack is okay, but in its languor tends to add to the slowness of the film's pace. The underscoring is half Flatt-and-Scruggs style banjo licks (was Michael Mann trying to pay homage to the 1967 film classic Bonnie and Clyde, which also dealt with Depression-era gangsters to the tune of strumming banjos?) and anachronistic recordings with a jazz-swing sound that date more from the later 30's and 40's than from the film's actual time period (1933-34). Recordings by Billie Holiday dominate. In truth, Holiday was not making these recordings at the time; they are from a much later period. More authentic are the use of "The Last Round-up," an actual hit song from precisely that period, and, if this movie is to be believed, one of Dillinger's favorite pop songs and Al Bowlly's crooning of "Close Your Eyes" in a bar scene as one of the Dillinger gang's molls agrees to set Dillinger up for the kill. Diana Krall as a nightclub singer exhaling "Bye, Bye Blackbird" as if it's 1945 is far advanced musically beyond what people in fancy Chicago show places would have heard in Dillinger's day. Somehow Mann didn't trust the music of the period to complement the action as he conceived it. I wonder why. Oh well, he's the director and it's his film.
To sum up – very good on character, visuals and script. The pacing is a bit too formal and wearying. Too many overlong machine gun battles. Beautiful ending. Musical choices could have been better.