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July 2 - July 8, 2009
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Going like gangbusters
by Dave Taylor
Whatever works for Woody
by Michael Phillips
 Going like gangbusters
by Dave Taylor
From the first scene, the visual style of Public Enemies is set, and it’s gorgeous. Director Michael Mann and cinematographer Dante Spinotti give the film its sepia palette and a gritty, sporadically neo-realistic feel. Some scenes were stand-outs as beautiful examples of the art of filmmaking, and coupled with a terrific musical score that featured period jazz, I think Public Enemies is one of the best produced films so far this year.
The two leads in the film, Johnny Depp and Christian Bale, are two of the most popular leading men in Hollywood. This has its pros and cons, of course: since they are such recognizable faces it can be hard for us as the audience to see the role they’re playing, rather than them as a character in the story. To his credit, Depp does splendidly in his role as Public Enemy #1 John Dillinger.
Christian Bale doesn’t do much at all with his role as FBI agent Melvin Purvis, however, but that’s partially because of a weak script.
At 2 hours and 20 minutes, it’s also a marathon of gun fights, all too infrequently punctuated with quieter scenes where they plan heists, or when Depp woos the lovely Billie Frechette (played by Marion Cotillard).
The film that I had in my mind when I watched Public Enemies was the gritty but entertaining The Untouchables, directed by Brian De Palma and starring Kevin Costner and Sean Connery as FBI agents out to break the mob’s stranglehold on Chicago, with Robert De Niro as Al Capone. Hopefully you’ve seen it, because it’s a great example of how to intertwine the back-stories of the characters with the action sequences. By the end of The Untouchables we have a sense of the motivation behind both the good guys and the crime capo, Al Capone. In Public Enemies we never get any back-story at all.
The role that was least developed in Public Enemies was Melvin Purvis, special agent in charge of the Chicago field office of the brand-new Federal Bureau of Investigation. We never meet any sort of family, never witness him explaining why he’s in the Bureau to a fellow agent, and never care much about him at all. Frankly, Bale is a fairly stoic actor, which works well in some roles (he was very good in The Dark Knight) but not so good in other films where we never get a peek behind the mask.
Without an understanding of the protagonist, we’re left sympathizing with the bad guy, John Dillinger, who is portrayed in this film as the cliché gentleman thief. Twice we see him taking off his overcoat and draping it around a woman (one a hostage!), and once while robbing a bank he finds that a bank customer has dumped his money on the counter. “You can keep that money, sir. I’m here to take the bank’s money, not yours.”
That’s the basic setup of the film: Dillinger as the gentleman thief, Purvis as the stoic FBI agent. Other characters play parts, including Pretty Boy Floyd (played by Channing Tatum), J. Edgar Hoover (played colorlessly by Billy Cruddup), and, briefly, Baby Face Nelson (played by Stephen Graham), and of course Dillinger’s love interest Billie Frechette, but none of them end up particularly important to the story.
A huge difference between The Untouchables and Public Enemies is that in the former, the cops and criminals are both portrayed as smart and dangerous. In the latter, however, FBI agents are frequently shown as fools and dangerous simply because they’re stupid, while the criminals seem to live a somewhat charmed life, able to enjoy public places without any risk or fear.
I’m a big Depp fan, love the era and jazz, but the film is too long, and for all the terrific cinematography, there’s at least one shoot-out scene that’s bewildering in its “flashing gun muzzle” style that should have been cut down significantly.
I expect that Public Enemies will do very well at the box office and be another hit for Johnny Depp. It’s a good film, it’s enjoyable and it’s lovely to look at and listen to. In a year or two, however, it’ll be “that film Depp did between Pirates and Alice [in Wonderland]” and “that film Bale made between superhero roles.”
Dave Taylor has been watching movies for as long as he can remember and sees at least 500 films a year. You can find his longer, more detailed reviews at www.DaveOnFilm.com or follow his movie updates on Twitter as @FilmBuzz.
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 Whatever works for Woody
by Michael Phillips
How big a bastard can Woody Allen build a screenplay around and still generate a modicum of audience goodwill? The answer: not this big. Coming off last year’s Vicky Cristina Barcelona, the freshest Allen film in more than a decade, Whatever Works plays like a hoary old Broadway stage comedy yanked, reluctantly, into the present.
It comes by its retro hoariness honestly. Around the time he co-starred in director Martin Ritt’s The Front (1976) with Zero Mostel, Allen cooked up Whatever Works with Mostel in mind for the lead role, that of a titanically misanthropic quantum physicist. His worldview is tempered by a relationship with a much, much younger Southern runaway, lost in New York City, land of mopes and dreams.
Mostel might’ve made this ranting foghorn of a character memorable, but Whatever Works has made it to the screen with the more modestly talented Larry David, best known for Curb Your Enthusiasm. He plays, or rather yells, the role of Boris Yellnikoff, a freelance chess tutor and full-time kvetch who calls everyone “moron” and “idiot.” Boris takes in the sarcasm-averse ditzoid Melody, played by Evan Rachel Wood. The movie, like Boris, condescends like mad toward this Mississippi bombshell-belle, as Boris does a Pygmalion number on her, teaching her the joys of the knish and other delicacies.
She’s acting in an entirely different comic universe, but stage-trained Patricia Clarkson does what she can as Melody’s mother, come to fetch her daughter and, as it turns out, to meet the object of her daughter’s wholly implausible affections. Lower Manhattan and environs have an instantaneous effect on this fundamentalist right-winger, a symbol of all the “family values morons” and “gun morons” derided by Boris. In an eye-blink, Clarkson’s character turns into sexually voracious bohemian.
Whatever Works begins with Groucho Marx’s rendition of “Hello, I Must Be Going” from Animal Crackers, heard underneath the opening credits with the iconic Woody Allen typeface. Even if you’re a huge fan of Groucho and that song, even if you’re a huge fan of Woody Allen’s best stuff, the second Groucho begins the tune you cannot help feeling a weariness settle over the enterprise, because Allen has been here before. And the movie hasn’t even started yet.
It wasn’t simply a change of scenery that brought something different to Vicky Cristina Barcelona and to the best of Allen’s London-set films, Match Point. Those scripts worked familiar themes of chance and fate and luck, but Allen seemed more engaged and on his game. Whatever Works is more like Oh, Whatever. The detail work is practically nonexistent. As usual, Allen acknowledges no cultural middle ground between the soulless noise symbolized by a rock band called Anal Sphincter and the grace and class captured by the soundtrack’s signature theme, “If I Could Be With You (One Hour Tonight).” I agree, it is a lovely standard. But in this picture, it’s Boris who’s the sphincter.
—MCT
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