Christian and Johnny Play Dress-Up
What is it with the bad-guy biopics? And why do audiences keep eating them up? Michael Mann’s Public Enemies is a clear-cut example of the direction Hollywood has been going for the last couple decades in terms of framing traditional antagonists as protagonists. You’ve seen this technique before in films which are able to pull it off (i.e. Catch Me If You Can) and films which fail miserably (American Gangster, Blow).
Shot on something resembling a Flip Video, Public Enemies looks like it might fare well aside films produced for a high-school film festival. And how many screenwriters did it take to produce a flat-lining, anti-climactic mess of a script? Three?! That’s right. One to write the thing, another to try and fix it, and the third to help absorb all of the blame that went into writing it in the first place. How did such a script get optioned? The script operates in a cyclic formula: Dillinger robs a bank, gets arrested, escapes prison, and robs more banks. If you haven’t seen the movie, the previous sentence is an abbreviated (and more efficient) version of the events that unfold.
Couple that with a plot that’s thinner than blood and you’ve got a picture that just doesn’t get the picture! Then there’s the usually reliable and articulate Roger Ebert taking a senility pill before attending a screening of Public Enemies, gloating about how the film “wisely declines to explain” John Dillinger. Like the rest of us, Ebert must’ve been searching for something that wasn’t there. Maybe he is getting paid by Universal Studios after all? Though to his credit, he does admit at the end of his review that there’s no way he could consider it a “great film.”
Then we have the naysayers to consider. “But it was a true story! He really robbed banks!” These are the “truthies,” the ones who give the biopic more credit than deserved simply because “it’s a true story.” Let’s be clear about one thing: THERE IS NO SUCH THING AS A TRUE STORY. In movies and in real life. Even less in movies. Every character, historical setting, or major event is fictionalized some way or another. “True story” is merely a filmmaker’s excuse to kick the stale crumbs under the couch in an effort to make you overvalue a poorly told story. Public Enemies lives by this.
Carmen Wexler is a Senior Writer for The Film Crusade.
