Thieves Like Us

Rating: Null/10 (28 September 2009)

"Success is dangerous. One begins to copy oneself, and to copy oneself is more dangerous than to copy others. It leads to sterility." - Picasso
Perhaps burnt by the hostility directed toward 2006's "Miami Vice", director Michael Mann strips 2009's "Public Enemies" down to its bare essentials. The film initially seems to be another "Heat", another "The Assassination of Jesse James By The Coward Robert Ford", but eventually it becomes apparent that Mann's chief concerns are action and mood; a series of thriller set pieces drenched in rich HD atmosphere.
The film's big themes – the worship of celebrity, the romance of mob life, the growing power of the FBI and the uneasy relationship between personal rights and national security – are touched upon only fleetingly, Mann more interested in the sound of gunfire, decor, poses, the cut of his cast's clothes and the colour of skylines.
As expected, the film has several great sequences. A midnight gun fight, a botched police raid, a trip to a theatre, two exciting prison escapes and an eerie sequence in which gang leader John Dillinger (played by Johnny Depp) visits an empty police station, all help to keep we the audience engaged. But other than such sequences, the film is strangely thin, and its central romance so derivative as to be intrusive. Elsewhere Mann's signature - characters who possess an existential longing for escape - seems trite, his climax is ruined by poor CGI blood, and his anti-hero's tragic tale is so conventional as to be comical.
Still, it's interesting to watch as Mann's style evolves further into a sort of minimalist functionality. Mann's crime films have always adhered to genre clichés, sticking fairly close to conventions. Aesthetically, however, his films have become far more bizarre. He's begun gutting his films of as much back-story, subplots, dialogue, introductions and prehistory as possible. The busy multi-strand epics of "Heat", "The Insider" and "Ali" have also been slowly phased out, jettisoned in favour for something ethereal.
His films have always had a unique atmosphere – strong night time photography, extreme focal lengths, cool musical tracks, off-centred compositions, elliptical editing – that's why he's so popular. But in removing comfortable plot beats and embracing a sort of muted minimalism, Mann is pushing toward something far more liquid. He essentially now directs big-budget, art-house movies, the poetics of a Kar Wai Wong or Wim Wenders applied to mainstream action blockbusters.
The problem with Mann, however, is that his delicious style is occasionally used in the service of rather ordinary stories. A stupid tale poetically told will always amount to stupid poetry. And as "Public Enemies" shows, Mann perhaps doesn't know where to go next, applying his new style to material and themes that he and others have fully explored.
Consider one scene late in "Public Enemies". John Dillinger visits a theatre to watch "Manhattan Melodrama", a 1930s gangster picture which stars Clark Gable. Like Mann's "Public Enemies" and "Heat", "Manhattan Melodrama" revolves around two strong characters on opposing sides of the law. But whilst "Melodrama" makes it clear that the actions of its criminals are abhorrent (just punishment was a requirement of the Production Code at the time), Mann's films treat their criminals with melancholic brush-strokes. We're not asked to condemn Johnny Depp in "Public Enemies" or DeNiro in "Heat", merely to shake our heads with the sad realisation that "a life of lawlessness" and a "life of normalcy" do not mix. In both films it is then the intrusion of the domestic, the regular, the family, the woman, that dooms the criminal, and not crime itself. Both lives are incompatible, and the greed of the gangster is ultimately his greed in wanting to have a piece of both worlds.
And aren't all of Mann's films (with the exception of "The Keep") about the incompatibility of professionalism (be it criminal or otherwise) and family (be it relationships or some moral, social responsibility). In "Ali", a boxer strives to be the "best boxer in the world", a desire which clashes with his domestic and personal life. Likewise Pacino and Deniro in "Heat", Crowe in "The Insider" and Caan in "Thief". What makes "Manhunter" and "Miami Vice" his most interesting films is that, in a sense, they represent opposing sides to Mann's thematic concerns. William Petersen in "Manhunter" achieves some measure of happiness by cutting himself away from his professional job, living out that "happy life on the beach" that literally every other Michael Mann leading man wishes for (an existential longing that goes back to the very first film noirs). "Miami Vice", in contrast, finds its characters in a state of total numbness, lost in a world in which human connection seems impossible and in which everyone is a creature of transience and a tool of functional anonymity.
So ultimately, what Mann does great is this: he marries the kind of existential masculinity of Melville to the way Antonioni's characters feel eternally uncomfortable in the places they inhabit. Couple that with a desire to copy the aesthetics of the sensualists (Malick, Lynch, Wai Wong etc), and you have one sexy film-maker. The question is where next can he go.
7.9/10 – It's hard to take such a familiar tale seriously, especially after directors like Altman so thoroughly autopsied them. Makes a good companion piece to "Dillinger" (1945), "Thieves Like Us" and "The Public Enemy" (1931).