Karina on SpoutBlog

Virtually since the production of Michael Mann’s Public Enemies was announced, various parties have expressed concern that the video fetishism of Collateral and Miami Vice would make a less than appropriate presentation format for a glammy gangster piece set in the 1930s. If *only* Public Enemies looked more like Miami Vice — if only Mann had brought back cinematographer Dion Beebe for a third consecutive collaboration/experiment in pushing the limits of what high quality digital video can do. Lensed by The Insider cinematographer Dante Spinotti, Public Enemies is a drab looking film, its shaky-cam aesthetic coming off as less considered — and far less explicable — than that of any number of indie dramas employing similar run-and-gun techniques on a millionth of this film’s budget. Add in a wildly uneven performance style, an unnecessarily attenuated running time and a sound mix that’s problematically muddy even after evidently excessive after-the-fact dubbing, and the result is a severely miscalculated marriage of style to subject. I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: Public Enemies is essentially a really expensive mumblecore film with ADR and guns — and the M-word comparison is not merited solely by its conspicuous form. It’s also a film in which the world of work and general era-appropriate social consciousness is conquered by an emphasis on love. And that, in the end, may be the only thing Public Enemies does right.

Johnny Depp plays John Dillinger, the Robin Hood of Depression America, on the lam from a fledgling FBI led from a desk by J. Edgar Hoover (an unrecognizable Billy Crudup) and on the ground by Agent Melvin Purvis (Christian Bale, on growling Batman autopilot). Dillinger meets a girl named Billie (Marion Cotillard) in a Chicago nightclub and decides, on the spot, that she’s going to be his girl; she resists a bit but he’s kind of a bully, and she kind of likes it, so soon they’re having epic, virtually abstract sex. Then there’s a bunch of shooting and running around — half the time, I couldn’t figure out what was going on, partially because I could barely see it, partially because I could scarcely understand the dialogue, much of it mumbled and/or drowned in score — but eventually Billie ends up in jail. She won’t snitch on “my man Johnny.”  Spoiler alert: Batman finds him anyway.

Depp interprets Dillinger as a nattily-dressed gentleman murderer/celebrity thief with a fraction of the winking zeal he brought to the Pirates of the Caribbean franchise. If those films stand as examples of how rote genre exercises are sometimes the best vehicles for balls-to-the-wall star power, Public Enemies has the inverse problem: the style and structure of the film mutes its megastar, reducing him to an image mostly devoid of personality. This is not necessarily an unexpected direction for Mann: Miami Vice, though arguably more inspired by the music video-as-emotional-placeholder ethos of the original TV series, featured two lead performances that worked on a purely visual level … in large part because Colin Farrell and Gong Li were both tasked with linguistic challenges that they could not meet. Casting women who cannot speak English intelligibly seems to be a growing trademark of Michael Mann films: in Enemies, Cotillard tries out a handful of accents, none of them convincing for an American coat check girl circa 1933. Increasingly, Mann seems to be making movies that might be better off silent.
As far as I could tell, Public Enemies tells us that there’s a Depression going on in two ways: with very occasional visual reminders, such as an image of a hobo slumped in front of a palatial bank that Dillinger is about to rob, and with a title on the screen. Otherwise, this is pure 1930s movie escapism, which would be fine if Spinotti’s camera was up to the task of capturing the contrast between the glitzy dance halls where Dillinger plays and the scrappy climes in which he hides. Instead, both poles are flattened out, and whatever tension could conceivably be milked from a story with a long-proscribed ending collapses in kind.
But there is one area in which Public Enemies nods to the gangster movies of old that does succeed. The gangster myth, especially as manifested in the 1930s flicks that reinforced the fame of someone like Dillinger in his own time, only works if the gangster and his lifestyle are linked to love and desire. Being sexy is not something that Johnny Depp has to work at; this is something that just requires Johnny Depp to show up. Though Cotillard is not convincing as a US Citizen, she would have to work much harder than she does to be unconvincing as a woman in love with Johnny Depp. The romance between Dillinger and Billie does what gangster romances are supposed to do: it humanizes the criminal and demonizes the cops and the feds who are trying to keep the lovers apart. The best moments in Public Enemies — a brutally violent interrogation scene in which Billie is humiliated in virtually every way short of rape, a scene where Dillinger takes a casual walk through the office of the men who are trying to jail him — have a kind of surreal quality, in which the boy and girl, embolded by a passion that’s making them crazy, are driven to test what they can get away with. It’s because of these moments that Public Enemies can’t be called a complete failure, or even a must-avoid. It’s not a bad film, it’s just badly made.

This piece was originally published in March during the AFI Dallas Film Festival. The Hurt Locker opens in select theaters today.

When I was finishing my BFA in the Film Department at the San Francisco Art Institute in the early 00s, Kathryn Bigelow was the school’s most famous filmmaker alum, despite the fact that she matriculated at SFAI as a painter (she studied filmmaking as a graduate student at Columbia after a stint in the Independent Study program at the Whitney Museum). The work of the woman who made Point Break and Strange Days wasn’t exactly part of the curriculum of the then fine art-focused (sometimes to a fault) Film program at SFAI, where Hollywood film was rarely considered worthy of scrutiny; those who did readily embrace her success as part of the school’s pedigree often named glass ceiling smashing as Bigelow’s greatest achievement — as if to say, “Yes, she makes mainly action and genre blockbusters with big name stars, but she’s a woman, so that makes her subversive.” The argument that Bigelow’s work is somehow subversive just because she has a vagina is not only ludicrous, but unnecessary, being that her films are actually subversive. Marked by moral ambiguity, insistently complicating easy distinctions between good and evil, using Bigelow’s patented point-of-view camera to implicate the viewer in the dark worlds and questionable choices of her subjects, her films literally subvert the viewer’s expectations dictated by genre.

And yet the “good for a girl” backhanded praise continues to dog her. At the Q & A after a screening of The Hurt Locker at AFI Dallas, moderator Gary Cogill commented that his favorite book about the Iraq war was written by a woman (The Long Road Home by Martha Raddatz) and then asked Bigelow a question that essentially amounted to, “Isn’t weird that The Hurt Locker is so good, since you’re a girl?” Bigelow deflected the question, but the issue came up again when an audience member who introduced herself as a member of Women in Film gushed that it’s “almost miraculous” that Bigelow has “embedded” herself in the making of “big boys movies.” This is when I decided it was time to leave; as i made my way out, I heard Bigelow respond that he choice of material is chiefly “instinctual” and not motivated by a desire to step where she supposedly doesn’t belong by virtue of chromosomal difference.

That the conversation surrounding Bigelow’s work seems to consistently get stuck in the mud of gender politics is all the more tragic in the case of The Hurt Locker, a film of such complex construction and complicated values that it should be able to sustain much deeper inquiry than what it feels like for a girl. If anything, it’s a film that bears the mark of a painter, full of deceptively beautiful imagery masking multiple layers of meaning.

The story of a three-man IED dismantling crew’s final month in rotation in Baghdad circa 2004, Locker is less a linear story than a character study threaded with increasingly hard-to-bear tension and punctuated, with no predictable rhythm, by bursts of violence and fire. The explosions in the film carry an unusual beauty, one which inspires its own tangle of questions. Since its Toronto premiere, there’s been much talk that The Hurt Locker is the first apolitical Iraq film; at the Q & A, Cogill praised it for “not trying to beat us to death with message”, to which writer Mark Boal responded, “Fact is, when you’re standing over a bomb, you might know about geo-global politics or the price of oil, but you’re not thinking about it.” But the audience may not be able to abandon such thoughts so easily, and Bigelow plays with this. She’s not afraid to fetishize lethal, politically motivated explosions, to invite us to take visual and even emotional pleasure in a screen filling with fire in a way that no film about this conflict has dared.

There’s a likely reason for other auteurs’ reticence: as a media event, 9/11 made the taking of pleasure in cinematic imagery of politically motivated destruction a tricky business. Shooting digitally with multiple cameras with virtually verite immediacy, Bigelow even seemingly reappropriates the “techniques” that mark the news network’s image blankets of disasters like 9/11: zooms, devastating slow motion, the jerk of a hand held camera finding its unexpected subject. Bigelow’s confidence that the audience is psychologically ready to enjoy imagery of bombs detonating in the context of our real life fight taken under the pretense of preventing another terrorist attack *is* a political statement, if not an ideological one. Its characters may not be thinking about politics within the space of their work, but The Hurt Locker is nothing if not a work of political engagement.

October Country, Donal Mosher and Michael Palmieri’s debut documentary feature describing a year in the lives of four generations of Moshers living in a depressed upstate New York suburb, is a rare work of impressionistic nonfiction. Its patchwork of visual detail often reminded me of the photographs of Gregory Crewdson (whose work you might have seen on the cover of this Yo La Tengo album, or this Six Feet Under campaign). Crewdson’s work usually imbues suburban and domestic scenes with the aura of the supernatural; nothing actually horrific is visible in the frame, but the presence of something is always implied, out of frame, in the air. With their arresting images of smoked-clogged rooms and American flags convulsing in the wind, Mosher and Palmieri demonstrate a similar knack for lighting and framing the mundane to spin it towards the surreal, suggesting an invisible but not imperceptible force altering the proceedings. The style fits because the Moshers are essentially living a ghost story, with each member so haunted by past decisions that’ve lost control of the future.

The basics of the Mosher family story are largely outlined by Dottie, wife of PTSD-suffering veteran Don and mother of Donna. A survivor of a number of abusive relationships, Donna has two daughters: teenage Daneal, who is trying to protect her baby daughter Ruby from her own abusive ex-husband; and preteen Desi, whose father is in prison. Clearly, the women show a weakness, across generations, for shitty, shifty men — or, as Daneal puts it, “self-centered abusive motherfuckers with bad attitudes who think they’re better than everyone else.” As in Samantha Buck’s 21 Below, this seems to partially be a symptom of the community — there doesn’t seem to be a wealth of better options in Mohawk Valley for romantic and sexual partners — but the Mosher women are also very consciously trapped in rituals of learned behavior. Each woman speaks to the family curse. As Dottie laments, “Young girls today think it’s going to be different. They can’t comprehend the fact that you’ve been there, you’ve done that, and you don’t want that happening to them.” But all the while, she’s getting suckered by her charismatic criminal of a foster son. In this family, women take a leap of trust, and then they get hurt; rinse, repeat. The other female role model is Don’s sister, a Wiccan outcast who hangs out at the cemetery because, as she puts it, “Some of my best friends are ghosts.” This could be October Country’s tagline.

It shouldn’t be a surprise that Halloween is a big deal in this house, and in fact, teh film spans a year from one edition of the holiday to the next. It’s through the first Halloween scene, when Desi spreads out her candy and her older sister (cradling her own infant) and grandmother partake that it becomes gut-twistingly apparent that the women in this family, even if forced to “grow up to fast”, age without fully maturing. As Daneal puts it later, as a mea culpa, “I’m still a kid, too. You can’t play mommie if you’re not grown up yet.”

A classical lower-middle-class lack of options is the setting and the defining limitation of the Mosher women’s lifestyle, but it’s not the only factor shaping the hopelessness of the lives. October Country speaks to the power of family as a determining characteristic, as a co-dependent force from which it takes a motivating desperation to escape. As a movie about the struggle to break the cycle, it makes sense that it could only be told with the perspective of a member of the family who did manage to leave the fold and live a life unscripted by circumstance and local ritual. Donal Mosher never appears on screen in October Country, to the apparent frustration of some viewers. I think the filmmakers make their presence felt, through their visual choices, the intimacy of the footage, and in what appears to be an isolated case of intervention.

Early in the film, Desi, often left to amuse herself with TV and video games in the absence of her single mom, watches footage just recorded by the filmmakers at a family gathering. Desi responds to footage as though it’s an ordinary home movie, which in a way it is, but this scene is also a kind of microcosm of October Country’s thesis query. A portrait of a family of women very consciously stuck in a cycle of self-limiting (if not self-destructive) behavior, the film and the family within it have their fingers crossed that Desi will be the first female Mosher to learn from the family’s mistakes. Maybe it could be as simple as literally watching it.

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October Country won the US Feature grand prize at SilverDocs this week; it screens in competition at LAFF tonight.