Michael Mann and Johnny Depp Make Public Enemies

By Steven Rybin

The recently ended WGA strike in Hollywood has prevented several new projects from getting off the ground, and several previously announced productions involving film director Michael Mann and actor Johnny Depp have been put on hold, perhaps indefinitely. Several planned Mann projects, including a film with Tom Cruise at Columbia, which Mann would only agree to direct if he could rewrite the script (which couldn’t be done during the strike) and a previously announced project with Depp based on the life of the spy Alexander Litvinenko, were shelved. It is the cancellation of those plans which has allowed Mann and Depp to plan their new collaboration. According to Variety, the project, an adaptation of the 2004 Brian Burroughs book Public Enemies: America’s Greatest Crime Wave and the Birth of the F.B.I., 1933-34, is partially based on the life of gangster John Dillinger and set during 1930s Depression-era America. Mann has made plans to film his own adapted screenplay of the novel with production set to begin in March of 2008.  The film is primarily set in Chicago, an environment Mann knows well; he was born there, and his film 1981 Thief was set in the city.

This is not the first time Mann has announced plans to shoot a film set in the 1930s: an earlier project, announced in the Spring of 2007, was to cast Leonardo DiCaprio in a film noir set in the 30s. That film – announced well before the WGA strike began – never got off the ground because Hollywood studios were unwilling to give Mann the large amount of money the production required (rumored at well over $100 million) in the light of the relative commercial disappointment and budget overruns of his 2006 film Miami Vice. Public Enemies, in many ways, seems a more natural follow-up, given Mann’s own filmography, which provides some explanation as to why the director might be attracted to material involving a dramatization of the FBI.: the federal agency is often a presence in the director’s crime movies, and rarely a sympathetic one. In the 1986 film Manhunter, Mann’s protagonist, Will Graham (William Petersen) is enlisted by the government to help catch a serial killer, an experience which very nearly destroys his relationship with his family, and in the recent film adaptation of the television series Miami Vice, the cavalier law enforcement of Sonny Crockett (Colin Farrell) and Ricardo Tubbs (Jamie Foxx) is placed in stark contrast to the ineffectual pencil-pushing methods of the bureau. And although Christian Bale has been signed to play FBI agent Melvin Purvis in Public Enemies, it is quite doubtful that the remainder of the (as of now unannounced) actors who will play the other federal agents in the film could carry quite as much on-screen charisma as a gangster played by Johnny Depp, making it likely that viewers’ sympathies will be directed as much towards Dillinger as the authorities chasing him.

Such skewed direction of sympathies, of course, is nothing new for the gangster genre, which has long banked on the likelihood of audiences becoming fascinated with dapper criminality. That Mann’s filmography remains rewarding despite what some would consider familiar crime-film clichés indicates where the strength of his cinema lies; as I have argued elsewhere, the value of Mann’s work largely derives from the way in which he and several very talented collaborators build upon the canvas of the familiar genre conventions with a rich, suggestive film style. But it is not only the conventions of the crime drama that Mann is working within and through: the star personas of his leads, per usual, would also seem to inform his casting. Depp is a veteran of performances casting him as an anti-hero: think of Captain Jack Sparrow in the Pirates of the Caribbean series, or the more recent Sweeney Todd. And Christian Bale (an exceptional actor who usually finds himself in films that cannot match his talent) seems a perfect choice to play a Mann FBI agent, given that many of his characters struggle with personal demons and character flaws despite finding themselves on the side of the law (think Batman Begins, Rescue Dawn, and the more recent remake 3:10 to Yuma). Genre and star persona, then, as in previous films such as Collateral, Miami Vice, and Heat, will be putty in the hands of Mann, who has quietly (relative to the more heralded careers of auteurs such as Martin Scorsese and Clint Eastwood) built up one of the strongest oeuvres of any American director since the decline of New Hollywood cinema in the late 1970s.

Steven Rybin teaches in the School of Interdisciplinary Arts at Ohio University and is the author of  The Cinema of Michael Mann (Lexington Books).

Comments

[Hills]

Just a trivia tidbit…I look forward to this movie, as it might give me a little more insight into the time period my grandfather (Police Chief of Chicago Heights Police Department 1931-1938) lived through. I know my grandfather had dealings with Capone. Capone’s mother supposedly lived in Chicago Heights and my grandfather told Capone he could come into Chicago Heights to visit her if there was no trouble. In fact story is that when my grandfather was killed (recorded as an “accidental shooting” Capone notified my grandmother that “his men did not do it, but they would get who did”. This movie will be a sort of “connection” to my grandfather’s time period and history, as I never knew him and my father was 11 when Chief Winchell Hills was killed. Best of luck!