Public Enemies

To be honest, I was in the mood for a comedy. I had been camping in my apartment for a week with only an air mattress and a too-short bar stool for furniture, and I had one DVD for my DVD player. The multiplex across the street had all the new comedies, but they all started at the wrong time, so we ended up seeing Public Enemies. And I'm really glad.

I love Johnny Depp. I have honestly never seen him in a bad role, and some of his performances are in my top five overall -- and that puts him in the same league as Laurence Olivier and Cary Grant. He was particularly good in this part, not because John Dillinger matches Depp's own bad-boy image, but because the actor was so understated in his portrayal. I found myself not thinking about Johnny Depp as John Dillinger but about John Dillinger himself.

I do not know how accurate this depiction is of the infamous bank robber or of his nemesis, Agent Purvis, but from the beginning I knew which one I would be rooting for. And you don't root for him because he's so charming. You root for him because he lives by a code, and over time, the police lose sight of theirs.

Odysseus of Greek myth, when viewed objectively, did not have a lot of character. He held himself in higher esteem than anyone else, and he took needless risks with his own life and the lives of his men. He betrayed his wife with more than one woman, and he was content to leave her languishing while he continued on his adventures. When he finally gets his vengeance on the suitors, he traps them like rats and kills everyone, regardless of their crimes against him. Yet he is considered a hero.

John Dillinger, as portrayed in Public Enemies, has a big ego, but he cares about his men, and he will do anything for the woman he loves. He also knows his enemies, and he punishes only them. He was a criminal. He does kill people, including police officers who were simply doing their jobs, but he makes every effort to minimize the risk to everyone, including police. In the end, he is betrayed not by strangers, suitors intent on plundering what he had, but by friends who want to protect what they have themselves. He is just an obstacle to be overcome, both by the FBI, who are supposed to be about taking care of the public, and by his fellow criminals, with whom the FBI are in bed.

After reading excerpts from Dr. Philip Zimbardo's book The Lucifer Effect, I was struck by how effectively that concept is conveyed in this film. The idea of the Lucifer Effect is that any person, when put in a position of absolute power and authority over someone else who is powerless, can become -- for want of a better word -- evil. There is also the concept, from James Gilligan's book On Violence, that all violence comes from shame and our desire to avoid that emotion. When one of the agents, who is doing a particularly lackluster job of monitoring Billie Frechette, manages to lose her, he is shamed. Then he gets the opportunity to interrogate her, and he is brutal. He forces her to soil herself, beats her with his hand and whatever else he can reach, and he has to be forcefully restrained by one of the agents from Texas so he won't potentially kill her in his rage. The lead agent in the case, Purvis, also loses sight of his mission and he ends up killing an innocent woman who has the bad luck to be leaving a lodge just as the federal agents are moving in.

The camera work in the film matches the subject matter. It is intimate, jarring, and intense. The director focuses in on Purvis's hands, on Depp's face as it's smashed into the concrete. This is a huge, noisy, violent film but it draws in the viewer as if he were a part of the action. The message seems to be that you cannot judge people by a landscape drawn in broad strokes. If you can get close and see the way people are with each other, you can really understand that bad guys aren't all bad and good guys aren't all good.