Public Enemies Hits an Optic Nerve

To hear the digital-age aesthetes tell it, you’d think the ugly “look” of Public Enemies, Michael Mann’s latest, was a flat-out accident. They imagine Mann and Dante Spinotti (his cinematographer for decades) slumping down in their chairs at a screening in Los Angeles, covering their faces with their coats, exchanging panicky whispers: “Why is it so grainy? Dante? Why is it so shaky?” Despite the very near-at-hand explanation of Public Enemies as a computer-age analogy to the muffled and very ugly gangster films of Hollywood’s “golden age”, the film still provokes cries of unforgivable optic incompetence. Armond White called the look “horrendous… unnaturally ripe colors, exteriors overbright and the interiors over-dark.”

As more movies are shot with digital cameras, there is increasing concern over hiding the foibles that mark the process as something noticeably different from shooting film. Bright light and fast, shaky movement, both served up in abundance in Mann’s film, seem to expose the video-ness of an image and in this way, a purist could argue, “take an audience out of the scene.”

Let’s pretend this argument could not be totally torpedoed in six words (The Kinks and Shoot the Piano Player) and take it on its own terms: video-ness is ugly and unprofessional; outside of an art house or museum, no one wants to see that kind of thing. My response will take the form of an anecdote about Natalie Wood.

Natalie Wood was paralyzed with self-consciousness by a protruding bone and scar she had on her wrist from an injury she sustained on the set of Rebel Without a Cause while shooting a scene in which a bridge collapses beneath her, which, incredibly, was filmed by collapsing a bridge that Natalie Wood was standing on. The cue for this collapse, apparently, came early and forced young Natalie to cling to the bridge in real-life terror, breaking her wrist in the process. Throughout her life, she covered her deformity with bracelets and long sleeve shirts or, in a final pinch, a wristwatch she refused ever to take off. Then came the day when Wood was to perform the pivotal scene in Elia Kazan’s Splendor in the Grass, in which she pitches a wild fit in a bathtub. A conflict arose between the opposing facts that people don’t wear long-sleeve shirts or wristwatches in bathtubs and Wood’s paralyzing self-consciousness about her deformity. Luckily, we can agree, she performed the scene bare-wristed.

So I’m saying that Mann’s willful disregard for the video-ness of his images, his lack of shame, finally, in them looking that way, is tripping a neurosis no different from Natalie Wood’s. Digital-age image makers want films to wear wristwatches and bracelets until unacceptable deformities like “peaking whites” can be avoided. But any lover of movies knows that the eccentricities of a medium can be turned into advantages by a confident artist. And the day will come, and it will be sooner than later, when mainstream filmmakers exploit the limits of hi-definition video in the service of their story and no one will bat an eye.

But Mann’s arguably distracting and pretentious style is not what’s finally wrong with his film, the real problems are much more banal. The clash of good and evil men, equally confident, talented and sure of their own reasons that seemed so epic when I was a teenager watching Heat, seems less epic in this year’s model. One’s tempted to point to performances but I happen to think that Depp and Bale could stand toe to toe with the glorious Italians any day of the week. I think the final irony here is that, despite the cries of incompetence, Public Enemies confirms Michael Mann to be not a thinker, but a stylist. What always seemed like a philosophy: Men in action in an indifferent universe vs. morality, love, law and the redeeming power of hard work toward any aim (See Tom Cruise’s Vincent in Collateral), is revealed as merely an aesthetic: men in action. Public Enemies is exciting for how it looks, how it seems, very rarely for what it says, for what its thinking. The very best scenes are wordless: Dillinger, in a quasi-dream, wanders the offices of the FBI department committed to solely to the capture of him and his gang. Too notorious, too much of a myth by this point, he goes unrecognized by the officers. On the walls, glaring sunlight distorts the image. -Micah Bloomberg

Director: Michael Mann
Writer: Ronan Bennett and Michael Mann