Bye bye, Blackbird

Upon hearing that Michael Mann was in the process of filming Bryan Burroughs work, “Americas greatest criminals wave and the birth of the FBI, 1933-43” I began to envision the birth of yet another revamped Miami Vice, just rewound eighty years or so to the great depression bankrobber era of the twenties and thirties.

I was quickly proven wrong. Public Enemies is Michael Mann at his mature best. No one can portray a manhunt quite the way Mann does. That much became obvious with Heat and later on in Collateral. To name but two. Heedful of aesthetics, precise camera timing and hard-as-nails dialogue, Mann can put together a modern noir and give the american antihero a heart and face like few directors before him.

However, what left the most lasting impression after having watched Public Enemies is that Mann has succeeded in portraying John Dillinger as a sort of premodern romantic gangster; while almost completely draining the spectacular firefights and carchases out of any… spectacularity. They’re certainly beautifully filmed, but they drip of tragedy from the very beginning to the very end. We know Dillinger and his gang are doomed from scene one. There are no happy endings.

Given Manns talent, it would have been very easy to portray Dillinger as a sort of joker went criminal mastermind and leave it at that (or add the standard plottwisting antics of overhyped hacks like Joel Coen). Mann goes further. He takes away all of the joy and gloating out of watching longcoated men double-wield Tommyguns out of black, polished cars (the critics called this movie, “cold”, without understanding what they were watching). He doesn’t celebrate the gangster, thus both managing to instill a number of sides of human nature we seldom see in Hollywood type crooks and simultaneously subtly underplay the popularity wielded by Dillinger, even prior to his being shot down by FBI agents.

A number of directors have tried to pull this off before, including Coen; “Millers Crossing” and Sam Mendes pathetic rendition of a very well written graphic novel, “Road to Perdition”. It would be Mann, however, who would finally succeed. And he did it on the unlikely theme that if America turned Dillinger into a rock star myth (the way that historyless and myth-starved America is so very prone to) – Mann turned him back into a human.

And that may well be because Michael Mann is so much more of an artist-auteur than he is film director. And John Dillinger, for his part, was far more a modern day PR-man than he was criminal (oh yes).

The ending of the film would deserve a chapter of its own, given both the excellent buildup and Manns decision to switch to 35mm film. The way in which Mann explores the closing minutes of Dillingers life, as the latter examines and comes to terms with his own life through art (he watches Manhattan Melodrama, a film at that time already loosely based on Dillingers story) – and then finalises it as it ends, petering out on the sidewalk outside of the theatre, should be revered for its precise cultural commentary. Again, only an arist can put it so succintly.

“Pack up all my care and woe,
Here I go,
Singing low,
Bye bye blackbird,
Where somebody waits for me,
Sugar’s sweet, so is she,
Bye bye
Blackbird!”