362) The Keep (1983)

362) The Keep (1983) Dir: Michael Mann Date Released: December 1983 Date Seen: October 26, 2009 Rating: 3/5

An anomaly in Mann's filmography, as far as I can tell and an intriguing, though extremely campy, one, at that. See my piece for The House Next Door.

197) Public Enemies (2009)

197) Public Enemies (2009) Dir: Michael Mann Date Released: July 2009 Date Seen: June 25th, 2009 Rating: 3.75/5

In thinking about Public Enemies, Michael Mann's character study of John Dillinger, I can't help but admire the accomplished stylist's naive dedication to delineating the legend of the notorious Depression-era bank robber from the man. Mann's recent preoccupation with the verite sheen that DV cameras can give even a period piece strikes gold here, providing a worthy counterpoint to the grandiose self-manufactured fables of Jesse James in The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford. Both it and Public Enemies present their anti-heroes as romantic figures eager to prove their towering stature as the wanted legends the media turned them into. That's where their similarities end. Mann's film insists that a line, no matter how subtle, can be made in showing how Dillinger aspired to be more mythic than human.

The John Dillinger of Public Enemies is both capable of fulfilling the role he makes for himself and well aware of its artificial nature. He immediately impresses us as a man of ruthless action. When breaking out of prison, he walks out with supreme confidence and turns on a dime to return fire to the prison guards once they realize something's up. That introduction is important because for the bulk of the movie, Depp sweet talks his way through encounters rather than using that foregrounding brute force. Similarly, his incessant barrage of charming one-liners is a double-edge sword, something meant to endear us to him but also remind us that the man is performing all the time.

With that in mind, Johnny Depp plays a great Dillinger, transitioning wonderfully from his garbled singing in Tim Burton's Sweeney Todd to mumbled dialogue in this film that betrays his silky small talk. Through his taut body language, he exudes the pensive air of a man that boasts about having done many horrible things but secretly dreads having to do them again. Though Melvin Purvis (a steely Christian Bale), the G-man assigned to capture Dillinger is more of a typical Mann's man--a troubled man-of-action that can identify a little too much with his immoral opposite--Depp's Dillinger brings with it a kind of raggedness that handily undermines his bad boy charms.

At the same time, Mann lends Dillinger a counter-intuitive integrity by omitting the more tawdry bits of his story. You cannot separate the man that broke out of prison with a blacked-up bar of soap from the man famed for his, er, sexual prowess without excising an integral part of Dillinger's character (It was 20 inches long! Preserved in The Smithsonian! Had its own holster?!). 

To keep Dillinger's story simple, crucial details are omitted and/or fudged around, undermining the film's key concept of showing how the "real" Dillinger created the Dillinger we know and love. Insisting that he was so lovesick for his on-again, off-again love interest Billie Frechette (Marion Cotillard) that she was the last thought on his mind is folly. In reality, he died while accompanying Polly Hamilton, his girlfriend of the moment, and  Ana Cumpanas, the mythic "lady in red," to the movies.  Within the film's storytelling framework, Dillinger and Frechette's love interest subplot makes sense and is effective thanks to Cotillard's wildcat act but once its introduced to the harsh air of the outside world, it tarnishes an otherwise exemplary bit of pulp introspection.

195) Manhunter (1986)

195) Manhunter (1986) Dir: Michael Mann Date Released: August 1986 Date Seen: June 25th, 2009 Rating: 3.75/5

The look and feel of frenetic dynamism in writer/director Michael Mann's Manhunter is the key to understanding why it's probably the celebrated American stylist's most striking film. His fastidious attention to visual detail embeds the bulk of the film's meaning in its ever-shifting look. It, like the film's protagonist and villain, are always changing, transforming, "becoming" something but never elaborating at length through heavy-handed dialogue what that something is. Mann's investment in the lurid neon colors and art deco furnishings details shows off his key interest in the film: a psychology of imagistic immediacy. 

There is no overarching visual schema uniting the various scenes in Manhunter, a sign of Mann's dedication to representing investigator Will Graham's  (William Petersen) gradual penetration into the psyche of a killer, played with surprising restraint by Tom Noonan. Like Graham's search, Manhunter unfolds in dribs and drabs, segmented into individual parts that do not cohere into either a sensible aesthetic or even a narrative that ties together all of its loose strands. 

Eventually, even Dr. Hannibal Lecktor (Brian Cox), the infamous intellectual cannibal made famous by Anthony Hopkins, is lost in the shuffle. He, like so many of the film's other carefully synthesized images--the tiger, the mirrors, etc.--are used and then never returned to. They're just disposable bread crumbs on the path to Graham's understanding of how and why the so-called "Tooth Fairy" chooses his victims and hence not worth revisiting.

Mann's need to change from one scene to the next shows that, like Doug Liman after him, he's more interested in individual actions and motions than in any overarching bigger picture. That troublesome but compelling credo is most salient during during Manhunter's more violent scenes, like Graham's encounter with a jogger or his confrontation with the "Tooth Fairy." 

Mann's fixation with slow-motion in the latter is made all the more dreamy by the film's sensory depriving soundtrack which blasts "Inagaddadavida" while Noonan blasts his way through policemen and Petersen hurdles through a wall-sized window. There's nothing to ground it to reality, let alone the next scene, which abruptly brings us back to Graham's happy beachside home with his wife and child. That startling return to normalcy reminds us of the miasma of clues and horrors Graham is forcibly pushing past to get back home. Being a Mann protagonist, he's so busy poring over the details of the case that he only really snaps out of that fog of lurid details when he goes into action.

194) The Jericho Mile (1979)

194) The Jericho Mile (1979) Dir: Michael Mann Date Released (TV): March 1979 Date Seen: June 24th, 2009 Rating: 2.75/5

Perhaps there was something semi-realistic about the slang that the Folsom prison inmates spit out in Michael Mann and co-writer Patrick Nolan's The Jericho Mile in its time but I tend to doubt that their preposterous tough guy lingo just has not aged well. Though it does the film a small amount of justice by enunciating the cliquish nature of prison life, there is absolutely no way to take the film seriously because of its "jive" dialogue. It is not necessarily factually inaccurate to have contemporary prisoners say things like, "Hey, hey, hey! Boogaloo!" but that does not necessarily mean that it's convincing. 

Like many of the little visual details that Mann doggedly zooms in on  to provide the project with a level of authenticity, mostly tattoos and graffiti murals, The Jericho Mile strains like a constipated man praying for diarrhea to show that it understands the plight of its protagonists. How a tacky melodrama about the triumph of the human spirit over his own isolation, one that culminates in the breaking of a stopwatch, can do that is beyond me but apparently "boogaloo" is the nouvelle verite. 

By that token, what's endearing about The Jericho Mile is its painfully naive dedication to canned racial conflicts and pulpy insights into how the prison system really works (Why would anybody trust Brian Dennehy with something as important as arranging conjugal visits? Why, I ask, why?). This is the same kind of pleasure you can get from something like Bad Boys (1983), a prison drama about two feuding teenage jailbirds that makes up for its lack of believability with lots of testosterone-driven soap operatics. The key difference between the two is that The Jericho Mile's big release of tension comes from Mann's early fascination with slow-motion photoraphy, specifically in highlighting Peter Strauss' every bulging vein and rippling muscle. Trashy, silly but secretly hypnotic: now that's a show worth watching.