Public Enemies

Just viewing the first trailer for Michael Mann's latest does two things. First, it makes you glad that a filmmaker like Mann exists. The second, is that it makes you salivate at the prospect of seeing a new Michael Mann film.

I am an unabashed Mann fan ever since the Miami Vice days. He developed some amazingly original programming for TV including Crime Story and L.A. Takedown. I saw his feature film potential came to fruition beautifully in Manhunter, and he displayed his versatility with The Last of the Mohicans. Then, a little movie called Heat was released in 1995... insert "breakout" cliche here. He has continued to release films that are unmistakably Michael Mann both in his style and in the themes he explores. I think it is his love and command of portraying a metropolis at night that is the signature of Mann. He paints the late hours of cities as just as vibrant as their daytime hours if not more so. He loves to reveal how light and shadow interplay, revealing things about the familiar that one may have not noticed before in the glaring light of the sun. It's no accident that his narratives have thrived in locales that are meccas for sun worshipers; yet, this also plays into his thematic tendencies as a writer.

Public Enemies seems to explore the relationship between Dillinger and Melvin Purvis as well as revealing the gray areas between them. It is obvious that Depp is digging in to his experience being devilish from playing Jack Sparrow and turning that into a cunning charm that made Dillinger a folk hero to many in Depression Era America. Just as John Woo loves to explore the duality of good and evil, I think Mann's consistent and wonderful exploration of the shades overlapping light and dark, and what each reveals about the other has been at the heart of his work. With the dubious reputation a fledgling FBI built during those days under J. Edgar Hoover, the "good guys" will certainly be portrayed with more tarnish and less gleam than the genre generally utilizes.
The other thing you have to appreciate about Mann is his ability to make his characters "larger than life." His characters, even the ones based on real individuals, become less archetype or more mythic. There is just the way he stages scenes, chooses camera angles, and lights his actors that brings back a sense of the old studio days when there was no "small screen" so film characters and their adventures were as large as the screens onto which they were projected. I think this is a rare skill these days when people's horizon are more 4:3 than 16:9. The fact that Mann was able to attract Depp to portray his first "heavy" ever is a testament to the material and the directors ability to bring that material to vivid life free of cookie-cutter simplicity.