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In an episode of The Sopranos, Tony sat down to watch James Cagney in The Public Enemy, and his guys were forever quoting Al Pacino in Godfather III. We know from other films that gangsters love to see themselves on the screen. In a sense, that’s what the film is about: two bodies in a dance or in a tug of war that will eventually end in mud. For a moment, they float, just like in the movies. She and Dillinger talk in a crowded, high-ceiling restaurant, but all the noise around them drops neatly away. The same could be said for Dillinger and his sweetheart Billie, a beautiful young woman, played by Marion Cotillard, whose sexy aura is only enhanced by a willingness to hitch her wagon to this gangster’s Ford Deluxe. Rarely, but inevitably, the twain shall meet. Depp is bank robber John Dillinger, on the lam, and Bale is FBI agent Melvin Purvis, on the hunt. They’re acting, they’re doing it well, and I only wish they’d been able to share the screen instead of stewing and smirking in two counter-posed worlds. Depp isn’t impersonating any skunks or rock stars, and Bale isn’t shouting needlessly or speaking in an unusually low register. It stars two of Hollywood’s strong leading men, actors of diametrically opposed styles, and they both take the job seriously. There’s more to the film than its technical details. Public Enemies is shot and edited in a stable, classical style so that in those instances when the picture zips up a woman’s bare leg, or seeks purchase on the floor of a crowded club, or whips and zooms at a moment of discovery, it tells us that something important has happened: the modern world has seeped into an old story, or vice-versa. Unlike some of his peers, Mann resists the temptations and holds such features in reserve, bringing them out like machine guns concealed under a wool topcoat. And the most obvious and tempting trait of the technology is that, compared to the Panavision boat anchors that guys have been lugging for decades, these cameras are light as feathers.

Even in low light, the camera sees both sides in detail. Several times Mann halves the screen with a close-up on one side and distant action on the other.

Details of faces are exposed when the heavy make-up on the cheeks and foreheads of the film’s famous actors might be better hidden.īut another trait of these newfangled cameras is a remarkable field of vision. Pale green leaves lose their edges against a light blue sky. Under the harsh gaze of reasonably advanced digital video, a man’s white collar in a dark room and the hi-beams of the car that he later drives into the night both exceed their boundaries, like a drop of bleach on black construction paper. The light in this film is very often TV-ugly. Confidential and The Quick and the Dead surely knows his way around sepia tones-then using video is a strange and bold aesthetic choice.

#Johnny depp public enemies mustache how to#

It’s an odd choice for Mann and his cinematographer, Dante Spinotti, but if one assumes that they know how to create beautiful images when they want to-and the guy who shot L.A. It was shot on grotesque, cheap-looking video. It’s more entertaining, more thought provoking, and were it shot on film I bet it’d be more acclaimed.īut it wasn’t shot on film. Studio/Run Time: Universal Pictures, 140 mins.Ģ0th Century gangsters through a 21st Century lensĮarly reviewers are shrugging their shoulders at the new Michael Mann, Johnny Depp, Christian Bale film, Public Enemies, but it’s miles better than Terminator Salvation or any other gun-blazing film you could pick at random from the first half of the summer crop. Starring: Johnny Depp, Christian Bale, Marion Cotillard Writers: Ronan Bennett and Michael Mann & Ann Biderman