Film Sweat: Ain’t That A Mann
RECOMMENDED: You don’t necessarily think “period piece” when you think of director Michael Mann — who’s better known for making period pieces (like Miami Vice or Heat) which concern the period he’s in — but with Public Enemies, he’s made a movie about crime and punishment and the popular imagination in the first half of the 20th Century that stands as tall as The Untouchables (though probably not as tall as, say, Bonnie & Clyde). Johnny Depp, of course, plays John Dillinger, tailed by FBI agent Melvin Purvis (played by Christian Bale), in a time when the entire country’s imagination seems to have fallen in love with the outlaw/bank-robber myth. But with Purvis being tagged as both the bank-robber-catcher-du-jour and the future of the then-fledgling FBI, Public Enemies is just as much a portrait of the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s earliest days as it is one of John Dillinger and the bank-robber/outlaw lifestyle in the 1930s. And it’s here that special kudos have to go out to Billy Crudup, who plays the most subtly creepy J. Edgar Hoover we’ve ever seen. In fact, Crudup’s metamorphosis is so complete that we had to look up who the hell it was that was playing Hoover. Crudup’s performance isn’t the only great one in Public Enemies, though — the movie is loaded with them, from Depp, whose long-lost light Kansas drawl and sense of style seems tailor-made for Dillinger, to Bale, who’s surprisingly good at playing a deeply worried lawman, to Marion Cotillard, as Dillinger’s true love Billie. (Kudos to whoever did the hair and make-up and costumes for Cotillard in particular.) Hell, even Stephen Dorff is good in this movie as one of Dillinger’s lackeys. This is, without a doubt, the best movie in the theaters right now, and should be seen in one. Do not delay.
ALSO NEW IN THEATERS:Ice Age: Dawn Of The Dinosaurs, some by-the-numbers, celebrity-voiced (does it even matter which ones anymore), Pixar-lite crap that’ll make you and your kids dumber for having watched it; The Girl From Monaco, a lighthearted French sex farce that played well at the Philadelphia Cinefest earlier this year; and Moon, starring Sam Rockwell as a government contractor in the not-too-distant future, stranded and going mad, alone on the moon.
