American Psycho

Every time I watch American Psycho (2000) I wonder why Christian Bale doesn’t do more comedies because he is so funny in this film as Patrick Bateman, a pathologically narcissistic Wall Street Yuppie that may or may not be a serial killer. Whether he’s pontificating about the best moisturizers for his skin or shimmying with reckless abandon to “Hip to Be Square” by Huey Lewis and the News, Bale looks like he’s having a blast playing up the more ridiculous aspects of his character which is in sharp contrast to some of the more depraved acts he indulges in during the course of the film.

Based on the controversial 1991 novel of the same name by Brett Easton Ellis, American Psycho was considered unfilmable because of the long, detailed passages devoted to Bateman’s ruminations on the music of Whitney Houston and Phil Collins, punctuated by extremely graphic descriptions of sadistic violence inflicted on women. Anybody taking on this project would have to find a way to translate it in an interesting way without completely turning off audiences while also appeasing the MPAA.

For almost ten years filmmakers like David Cronenberg and Oliver Stone took a crack at adapting the book into a film while actors like Johnny Depp and Leonardo DiCaprio expressed interest in playing Bateman. In the end, Mary Harron, director of the critical darling, I Shot Andy Warhol (1996), and Bale got the film made. The end result predictably divided critics and underperformed at the box office, but considering the subject matter this is hardly surprising. American Psycho went on to enjoy a second life on home video where it developed a cult following. It’s been ten years since the film’s initial release and so a retrospective look is in order.

We meet Patrick Bateman (Christian Bale) having dinner with three of his friends and a few things come immediately to mind – they all dress and look alike with expensive suits and slicked-back hair (a la Gordon Gekko or Pat Riley – take your pick), and none of them are paying much attention to what the others are saying because of most of it is white noise anyway. For example, one of them (Bill Sage) returns to the table and informs no one in particular that the restaurant doesn’t have a good bathroom to do cocaine in while another (Josh Lucas) makes an anti-Semitic remark about one of their contemporaries. It’s an amusing exchange that sets the film’s satiric tone right from the get-go. Their meaningless conversation and habit of misidentifying their co-workers in the restaurant gives us an indication of how ridiculous they are.

The first indication we get of Bateman’s pathological state of mind is in the next scene where his drink tickets at a nightclub are rejected, forcing him to pay cash. When the bartender turns her back, he calls her a bitch and says he’s liked to stab her to death but when she turns around he’s all smiles. I would argue that American Psycho is a brilliant, pitch black satire on par with Stanley Kubrick’s adaptation of A Clockwork Orange (1971), another book which, incidentally, was considered unfilmable back in the day. Mary Harron adopts the same clinical detachment, which makes sense considering the subject matter.

Consider the way in which she takes us through Bateman’s apartment, the camera gliding elegantly through his tasteful, if not slightly Spartan living space. As his voiceover takes us through his daily routine down to the most exact detail, we see Christian Bale’s incredibly fit body doing all kinds of stretches, in the shower and getting ready for work. While Bateman peels a facial mask off his expressionless face, his voiceover tells us, “There is an idea of a Patrick Bateman. Some kind of an abstraction but there is no real me, only an entity, something illusory. And then I can hide my cold gaze and you can shake my hand and feel flesh gripping yours and may be you can even sense our lifestyles are probably comparable. I simply am not there.” This passage is the key, I think, to unlocking the enigma that is Bateman. He spends most of his day putting on an act, a performance for others and behaving the way he thinks they want him to because his real self is almost non-existent. Or, worse, he is a sick serial killer that enjoys torturing and killing women. The key to understanding Bateman is that he’s performing all the time because he’s afraid of being caught in the act and possible revealing his true self.

Bale does an incredible job of portraying a man coming apart at the seams. The actor demonstrates a real capacity for comedy, in some scenes he’s a truly frightening figure and in others, he’s clearly not well – all sweaty and panicky. Bale has to convey an impressive spectrum of emotions in this film. It is also the little asides and whimsical facial expressions that make Bale’s performance so much fun to watch, like when he tells his secretary Jean (Chloe Sevigny) to wear a different outfit and when she asks him why, responds with a condescending smirk, “C’mon, you’re prettier than that.” Bateman often comes across as a vain idiot and a lot of the film’s humor comes from the contrast between how he views himself and how we view him. After all, his image of himself is taken from fashion magazines like GQ. He’s an empty shell with no soul. As he tells us at one point, “I have all the characteristics of a human being: flesh, blood, skin, hair; but not a single, clear, identifiable emotion except for greed and disgust.” These confessional voiceovers give us insight into the kind of person Bateman is.

I love the jarring musical edit from refined classical music that plays over footage of Bateman getting ready for work to the bouncy strains of “Walking on Sunshine” by Katrina and the Waves blasting over the soundtrack as it takes us to the next scene – Bateman’s office. In a nice touch that tells us a bit more about him, we never actually see Bateman do any work at his office. He’s either watching television or doodling. In addition, he and his cronies don’t listen to each other. For example, Bateman informs via voiceover that he’s annoyed that his fiancée Evelyn (Reese Witherspoon) is rattling on about getting married while he’s trying to listen to the new Robert Palmer album. He is also indifferent to the fact that she is having an affair with Timothy Bryce (Justin Theroux), the only interesting person he knows, because he’s having an affair with her closest friend, Courtney (Samantha Mathis).

All Bateman wants to do is fit in and this means eating at all the trendy restaurants and having the perfectly designed business card. To this end, he tells his dinner companions that the world has to solve problems like Apartheid, stop terrorism and end world hunger while promoting civil rights, not because he believes in these things but because it’s what he assumes people expect him to say. He rattles off these causes like he’s reciting a prepared speech and Bale delivers it with just the right amount of faux-sincerity. He also employs this tone when Bateman orders dinner for Courtney later on, making sure to add comments from reviews he’s read (pointing out that the peanut butter soup was described as, “a playful, but mysterious little dish.”) in that same fake-sincere tone.

Courtney is so zonked out of her head on prescription drugs that she thinks they are eating at Dorsia, the most prestigious restaurant in New York City that everyone in the film aspires to get reservations for. Bateman and his buddies are so self-absorbed that they misidentify each other much as Paul Allen (Jared Leto) does with Bateman. And why not? They all dress, act and look the same. They live to compete against each other, like who can get a reservation at the trendiest restaurant or who has the best-looking business card. In a hilarious scene, Bateman and several of his co-workers compare their cards, each one topping the last much to his dismay as Allen’s ends up being superior to everyone else’s (and he got a reservation at Dorsia!).

The first murder we see is quick and brutal as Bateman kills a homeless man and his dog in a fairly matter-of-fact fashion. The sudden brutality is shocking as is the tonal shift from satire in the previous scene to the out-and-out cruelty of this one. On the other hand, Paul Allen’s murder is played for laughs because he is just as empty and superficial as Bateman and so he dies while Bateman critiques the Huey Lewis and the News album, Fore (“Their undisputed masterpiece,” he enthuses.) while playing “Hip to Be Square.” Bale is amazing in this scene as he goes from gleefully pontificating about music to brutally murdering Allen with an axe.

It is scenes like this that beg the question, is any of this really happening? With the exception of the homeless man, the murders are filmed in such an over-the-top fashion, either satirically, like Allen’s, or in an unrealistically brutal way, like the prostitute he kills with a chainsaw. Not to mention, no one notices Bateman dragging a garment bag with Allen’s body as it leaves a bloody trail from the elevator to a waiting car outside his apartment. Bateman covers his tracks like something out of a clichéd crime thriller complete with appropriately suspenseful music. He is even investigated by Donald Kimball (Willem Dafoe), a dogged private investigator who is unfailingly polite if not persistent as he attempts to piece together the timeline of Allen’s disappearance. His exchanges with Bateman are funny as the young executive offers all kinds of useless information and we wonder if Kimball knows that Bateman killed him. Is he just messing with Bateman? The only indication we get that this is all part of his imagination is his confessional voiceovers but let’s not forget he’s hardly the most reliable narrator.

Bateman’s critiques of popular music are definitely some of the funniest parts of the film. For example, he says of Genesis, “their lyrics are as positive, affirmative as anything I’ve heard in rock,” and later of Phil Collins’ solo career: “seems to be more commercial and therefore more satisfying in a narrower way.” It doesn’t hurt that he’s saying all this while directing two prostitutes in a sex video. While having sex with both of them, Bateman looks at himself in a mirror, occasionally flexing. He’s more interested in himself than them and this showy narcissism is hilarious. It’s interesting to note that in the one scene where his heterosexuality is called into question – a co-worker mistakes his trying to strangle him as a sexual advance – he panics and is repulsed, making a hasty exit with a lame excuse (“I have to return some video tapes.”). It’s a scene that speaks volumes about his character.

I also find it interesting that the one woman Bateman spares is his secretary Jean. He invites her over to his place with the intention of killing her. He even goes so far as to aim a nail gun at the back of her head but a phone call from Evelyn interrupts him, ruining the mood and even embarrassing him. Bateman tells Jean to go, warning her that he can’t control himself. She interprets it as getting hurt in a relationship but he’s referring to his bloodlust. I think that Bateman actually cares about her enough to let her go, resisting the urge to kill her. However, as the film progresses, his homicidal impulses worsen as he loses his grip on reality. Harron depicts this visually with increasingly outlandish scenes, like a bloodied, deranged, naked Bateman chasing a prostitute down a hallway with a chainsaw. It defies logic and common sense, which, I think, is the point because this is all taking place in Bateman’s fevered imagination – a place where he can murder all kinds of women and get away with it or get into a major shoot-out with the police and kill any witnesses in what amounts to a paranoid nightmare.

When Bret Easton Ellis’ American Psycho came out in 1991, its mix of detailed grotesque violence and razor-sharp satire of 1980s materialism scandalized the literary world. Feminists and critics were outraged. The National Organization of Women organized a public protest over the novel. Original publishers Simon & Schuster dropped the book three months before its scheduled publication when the company’s employees objected vehemently to it. Random House eventually picked it up and the controversy that surrounded the book helped propel it to best-seller status. In 1992, filmmaker Stuart Gordon gave producer Edward R. Pressman a copy of the book and he was so impressed by it that he acquired the rights to the film version. Pressman said that Gordon wanted to make “a real X-rated version, black and white, very hard-core and very true to the novel,” and Johnny Depp expressed an interest in playing Bateman. However, the producer wanted to make his film more commercially viable and Ellis also did not think that Gordon was right the person for the job.

Once David Cronenberg became attached, Ellis wrote a draft only to be told that there shouldn’t be any scenes set in restaurants or nightclubs because they were considered static and boring. Cronenberg also told Ellis that he didn’t want to film any of the violence depicted in the book. Incredibly, the director wanted the script to be 65-70 pages long because it took him two minutes to shoot a page instead of the standard one-minute-a-page. At the time, Ellis was bored with his novel and diverged greatly from it in his draft, inventing a few scenes and adding an elaborate musical sequence at the end that set at the top of the World Trade Center and was to be scored to “Daybreak” by Barry Manilow. Pressman was not thrilled with Ellis’s script and described it as being “completely pornographic.” His draft was rewritten by Norman Snider who had worked with Cronenberg previously on Dead Ringers (1988). However, at some point, Cronenberg left the project and Pressman was looking for another director again.

Pressman saw I Shot Andy Warhol and met with Mary Harron in 1996. He liked her take on the material which see saw as a social satire. She first read the book in 1991 after being intrigued by all the controversy surrounding it. She felt that Ellis’ book was “seriously misunderstood,” that it was intended to be a “critique of male misogyny,” and those that attacked it didn’t seem to understand that it was a “satire on Wall Street, and on these young Turks.” Once she got the directing job, she sought out a co-screenwriter that would share her view of American Psycho as a feminist film and a satire. Christine Vachon, who had produced I Shot Andy Warhol, recommended Guinevere Turner, who had co-written and starred in the independent lesbian romance Go Fish (1994). Turner had even attended the same Vermont university as Ellis had and admired his success as a writer. Harron and Turner were drawn to the book because of its “skewed and critical look at male behavior, macho behavior, that we’d never seen before.” She sent Christian Bale the script and he read it without having checked out the source novel. He was surprised to find it quite funny to read and was drawn to the role because it was the opposite of anything he’d done before. When he agreed to do the film, friends and family close to him said he was committing career suicide but this only made him want to do the film even more if only to prove them wrong.

Bale met Ellis at a restaurant to get his approval for the role. He showed up in character which the writer found “seriously unnerving” because he was in a place with “someone pretending to be this monster that I created.” To prepare for the role, he read Ellis’ book, which he found informative. He also worked out extensively for the film, doing weight training and boxing, and became “fascinated with talking about the body, and diet, and the gym. It made me very judgmental of other people’s bodies as well.” In the last six weeks leading up to filming, his trainer increased the actor’s training to “three hours a day of absolute exhaustion and really boring food.” Early on, he and Harron talked a lot over the phone about Bateman and, according to the director, “how he was looking at the world like somebody from another planet, watching what people did and trying to work out the right way to behave.” Then, one day, Bale called her and said that he had been watching Tom Cruise on David Letterman’s late night talk show and was taken with the actor’s “very intense friendliness with nothing behind the eyes.” He decided to incorporate that into his portrayal of Bateman.

Harron cast Bale but Lions Gate wanted Leonardo DiCaprio, hot from the massive success of Titanic (1997). A studio executive sent him a copy of the script and a $20 million offer. He expressed an interest and suggested directors like Danny Boyle and Martin Scorsese, both of whom he wanted to work with (and eventually did) – all unbeknownst to Harron at the time. Lions Gate wanted a bigger movie star, one that would appeal to the international market. Harron fought with the studio and remembered, “they would’ve taken almost anybody over Christian.” Lions Gate announced DiCaprio’s involvement at the 1998 Cannes Film Festival. Harron and Bale were stunned and understandably upset. Pressman urged her to meet with DiCaprio but she remained loyal to Bale and refused. She didn’t approve of his casting and was fired along with Bale only to be replaced by Oliver Stone. When he came on board, the filmmaker began preparations to rewrite Harron’s script. According to Pressman, Stone went for a more psychological approach.

However, DiCaprio and Stone couldn’t agree on the direction for the film to take and the actor left the project in August 1998 due to scheduling conflicts but negotiations had fallen apart after a reading with the actor and potential co-stars Cameron Diaz and James Woods. DiCaprio went on to make The Beach (2000) with Boyle. Stone quickly followed suit and left the project prompting the studio to bring back Harron and Bale but with the stipulation that the budget would not exceed $10 million and she would cast recognizable actors in the supporting roles. During this time, Harron and Bale kept a low profile. She was convinced that DiCaprio would never do the film due to its controversial nature. Bale was still committed to the film and passed on projects for nine months because he also felt that DiCaprio would leave the film. If Harron had gone with DiCaprio it would have dramatically increased the film’s budget and she would have lost any kind of creative control over the project. She said, “Leonardo wasn’t remotely right [for the part]. There’s something very boyish about him. He’s not credible as one of these tough Wall Street guys.” Also, she didn’t want to deal with his large teenage fan base baggage at the time.

Principal photography began in March 1999 in Toronto. The production was met with protest from an activist group called Concerned Canadians Against Violence in Entertainment. They were upset that a film was being made of Ellis’s book, reportedly a copy had been found in the home notorious serial killer Paul Bernardo who, only five years prior, had committed several gruesome murders. Anti-violence groups were upset that the film was allowed to use federal and provincial tax credits because it was shot mostly in Toronto and attempted to keep the city from issuing a permit that would allow the production to make a film there. Local newspaper the Toronto Sun ran an article linking Bernardo with Ellis’ novel the day that Harron and her team were going to do a technical survey of their main filming location – an office building that would stand in for the place where Bateman worked. The bank that owned the building refused permission for them to shoot there after street protests against the film were threatened and they were faced with potential bad publicity. The rest of the city’s financial institutions followed suit and the production had to shoot the Bateman office scenes on a soundstage. Over the next two weeks, the filmmakers scrambled to preserve the rest of their locations because some of the owners began having second thoughts. The production even hired extra security in anticipation of trouble on the first day of filming but no protestors should up – for that day or for the entire seven-week shoot.

The buzz surrounding American Psycho reached a fever pitch at the Sundance Film Festival where tickets for its screening were being scalped for as much as $200. Roger Ebert gave the film three out of four stars and praised Christian Bale's performance as being "heroic in the way he allows the character to leap joyfully into despicability; there is no instinct for self-preservation here, and that is one mark of a good actor.” The New York Times called it a "mean and lean horror comedy classic.” Rolling Stone magazine’s Peter Travers wrote, “whenever Harron digs beneath the glitzy surface in search of feelings that haven't been desensitized, the horrific and hilarious American Psycho can still strike a raw nerve.” Entertainment Weekly gave the film an “A-" rating and Owen Gleiberman wrote, “"Yet Harron, if anything, is an even more devious provocateur than Ellis was. By treating the book as raw material for an exuberantly perverse exercise in '80s nostalgia, she recasts the go-go years as a template for the casually brainwashing-consumer/fashion/image culture that emerged from them. She has made a movie that is really a parable of today.” Time magazine’s Richard Corliss wrote, “Harron and co-screenwriter Guinevere Turner do understand the book, and they want their film to be understood as a period comedy of manners.”

However, the Los Angeles Times’ Kenneth Turan wrote, The difficult truth is that the more viewers can model themselves after protagonist Bateman, the more they can distance themselves from the human reality of the slick violence that fills the screen and take it all as some kind of a cool joke, the more they are likely to enjoy this stillborn, pointless piece of work.” Newsweek magazine’s David Ansen wrote, “"But after an hour of dissecting the '80s culture of materialism, narcissism and greed, the movie begins to repeat itself. It becomes more grisly and surreal, but not more interesting.” In his review for the Village Voice, J. Hoberman said of Christian Bale’s performance: "If anything, Bale is too knowing. He eagerly works within the constraints of the quotation marks Harron puts around his performance.” The New York Observer’s Andrew Sarris wrote, "The best scenes in the film involve the kind of status-seeking jokes that would make a very funny short subject. But over a feature-length film, there is only so much hollowness this viewer can endure before starting to yawn and look at his watch. Curiously, the material has even lost its power to shock and outrage.”

Ellis said of the film at the time, “it’s much better than how I would have done it, so I can’t complain too much.” He found her vision much more faithful to the novel than his script which was much more surreal. Bateman tries to warn people of his increasingly homicidal behavior, culminating with a desperate confession to his lawyer’s answering machine but he’s either ignored or it’s treated as a joke. Bateman sums it up best in the final voiceover monologue as he remains unrepentant and will continue to kill. He ends his speech (and the film) with this zinger, “this confession has meant nothing.” It’s a final line worthy of Kubrick and the equally powerful final line that ends Eyes Wide Shut (1999). American Psycho is a darkly comic satire on ‘80s materialism, a horror film that skewers the misogynistic behavior of superficial Yuppie businessman. Mary Harron wisely doesn’t try to do a faithful adaptation of Ellis’ novel, but instead captures the spirit of it and the end result is one of the best films of the 2000s.

SOURCES

Bernard, Jami. “In the Mind of a Psycho.” Daily News. January 25, 2000.

Brooks, Libby. “The Method in My Madness.” The Guardian. April 6, 2000.

Buchanan, Kyle. “Bret Easton Ellis on American Psycho, Christian Bale and His Problem with Women Directors.” Movieline. May 18, 2010.

Ebner, Mark. “Killer’s Kicks.” Salon.com. January 26, 2000.

Fierman, Daniel. “Psyched Out.” Entertainment Weekly. September 11, 1998.

Gopalan, Nisha. “American Psycho: The Story Behind the Film.” The Guardian. March 24, 2000.

Harron, Mary. “The Risky Territory of American Psycho.” The New York Times. April 9, 2000.

Howell, Peter. “Making a Murderous Movie.” Toronto Star. January 23, 2000.

Kehr, Dave. “The Path to a Psycho.” The New York Times. February 25, 2000.

Saunders, Doug. “Psycho Therapy.” Globe and Mail. April 14, 2000.

Stone, Jay. “Becoming An American Psycho.” Ottawa Citizen. April 7, 2000.

Waxman, Sharon. “Queasy Does It.” Washington Post. April 9, 2000.

Weber, Bruce. “Digging Out the Humor in a Serial Killer’s Tale.” The New York Times. April 4, 1999.

Westow, Hillary. “Christian Bale’s Inspiration for American Psycho: Tom Cruise.” Black Books. October 19, 2009.

Christopher Nolan Blogothon: Batman Begins

BLOGGER'S NOTE: This post is part of the Christopher Nolan Blogothon over at the Things That Don't Suck blog.

The fact that it took eight years for a new Batman film to be released illustrates how freaked out the studio was over the commercial and critical failure of Batman and Robin (1997). Warner Brothers gave the franchise a much needed rest while they quietly looked for someone to reboot it. At first, it looked like Darren Aronofsky and Frank Miller might be the ones to do it but the studio didn’t like their vision of the character. Then came screenwriter David S. Goyer and then up-and-coming director Christopher Nolan who decided to return the Dark Knight back to his roots. They wanted to explore what motivated Bruce Wayne to dress up like a giant bat and wage war on the criminals of Gotham City. By all accounts, their effort, fittingly entitled Batman Begins (2005), was a resounding success. The critics loved it and audiences flocked to the theaters to see it. So, what did they do right?


The casting. While anyone can disappear into the bat suit and look scary it’s playing Bruce Wayne that is the real challenge. To date, only Michael Keaton has pulled it off because he brought a complexity and a refreshing unpredictability to the role. Christian Bale, who has proven that he’s got considerable acting chops with an impressive resume, perfectly captures the essence of the tortured billionaire. Also gone are the obvious casting of marquee names like Jim Carrey and Arnold Schwarzenegger in favor of reliable character actors like Gary Oldman, Cillian Murphy and Rutger Hauer. They bring sincerity and just the right amount of believability to their roles. The only weak bit of casting is Katie Holmes as Rachel Dawes, Bruce’s childhood friend. She’s just not believable as a tough prosecutor who works for the District Attorney. Holmes is also too lightweight of an actress and is unable to bring the gravitas needed for the role.

The story. Goyer and Nolan remain true to the spirit of Batman’s origins as depicted by Bob Kane and Bill Finger, right down to how Bruce’s parents are killed and how this torments him throughout his life. Their death will provide the motivation for what he will become and the filmmakers never lose sight of this. They understand that it is Bruce’s single-minded obsession with fighting crime and keeping the darkness at bay is what motivates him to become Batman and Bale embodies his character’s inner turmoil perfectly. The first half of the film is devoted to Bruce’s transformation into Batman and the last half sees him defend Gotham City against a plot to poison the city with a deadly psychotropic drug. And for good measure, they also throw in the threat of local mobsters and the wild card bad guy known as the Scarecrow (Cillian Murphy). The screenplay is smart and well-written, hitting all the right emotional notes and thankfully keeping the cheesy one-liners down to a minimum.

Perhaps the most fascinating aspect of Batman Begins is the League of Shdows, a secret society that trains Bruce and gives him the physical skills to fight crime. However, their overtly fascist philosophy repulses Bruce who believes that he can’t be completely ruthless when it comes to fighting criminals. Compassion is what separates him from them. It’s a key point in showing that amidst the darkness lies a spark of idealism in Bruce. He truly believes that Gotham can be saved from the criminals that wish to corrupt it from within.

The tone. The campiness of the Joel Schumacher films is gone, replaced by a darker, brooding vibe. Nolan brings an art house sensibility to a big budget superhero film which gives it more substance. He treats the source material with the respect that it deserves. Even more interestingly, he incorporates elements from the horror film genre. Early on, when Bruce Wayne as a young boy accidentally discovers what will become the Batcave, Nolan imagines the entrance as dark and foreboding, decorated with dangerous, jagged rocks. Then, many bats come flying right at the frightened Bruce. Meanwhile, the Scarecrow uses a hallucingenetic drug to induce nightmarish visions in his victims.

One of the reasons Batman Begins works so well is the choices Nolan makes, like sticking close to Batman’s origins in the comic book and filling in the gaps that the comics had created. Nolan and Goyer worked closely with D.C. Comics, picking and choosing aspects from various issues during Batman’s long run. For example, Nolan’s depiction of James Gordon (Gary Oldman) was influenced by Frank Miller’s Batman: Year One. Like in that comic, we meet Gordon early in his career as an honest police sergeant surrounded by corruption. Gary Oldman even looks quite similar to the way David Mazzucchelli draws him in Year One. Also, gang boss Carmine Falcone (Tom Wilkinson) is taken from this comic. Batman Begins’ primary villain is Ra’s al Ghul (Ken Watanabe) and his League of Assassins (League of Shadows in the film) is the creation of writer Denny O’Neil and artist Neal Adams. They returned Batman to his darker, grittier roots in the 1970s.

One of the main themes of Batman Begins is the power of fear. Bruce must overcome his before he can truly understand its nature and then bask in the fear of others. He learns to embrace the darkness and understand the nature of evil so that he will be better equipped to fight it. After the campy Joel Schumacher era, it is nice to see Batman return his roots. Nolan’s film even manages to surpasses Tim Burton’s first one. While Burton certainly got the look of Batman’s world and even understood the character’s tortured psyche, he injected moments of silliness that took one out of the film (i.e. the Joker shooting down Batman’s plane with a handgun?!). Nolan does not make this same mistake and created an excellent comic book adaptation that deserves to be ranked alongside other superior examples of the genre. What’s even more incredible is that he went on to top this film with the much superior sequel, The Dark Knight (2008).

For a more in-depth analysis of this film, check out Peter Sanderson's fascinating, exhaustive essay over at Comics in Context.

Michael Mann Week: Public Enemies

Public Enemies marks Michael Mann’s fourth foray into American history with The Last of the Mohicans (1992), The Insider (1999) and Ali (2001) being his previous efforts. The director got his start making documentaries and always been interested in achieving absolute authenticity in the depiction of the professions that his protagonists practice, be it safecracking in Thief (1981) or serial killer profiling in Manhunter (1986). Born and raised in Chicago, it is easy to see what drew Mann to the story of John Dillinger, a famous bank robber during the 1930s. He and his crew were the best of the best at the time and so, he certainly fits the kind of protagonist Mann is drawn to.

Public Enemies begins in 1933 during the golden age of bank robbery and Mann wastes no time getting into it as he opens the film with an exciting escape from an Ohio prison orchestrated by Dillinger (Johnny Depp) and his crew. Soon after, we meet FBI agent Melvin Purvis (Christian Bale) in action as he takes down Pretty Boy Floyd (Channing Tatum) with a hunting rifle from an impressive distance. In no time at all, Mann has established the film’s protagonist and antagonist. They are smart, super efficient men of action that are single-minded in their respective goals.

Unable to get funding and criticized by his superiors, FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover (Billy Crudup) needs high-profile busts and enlists Purvis to find and stop the country’s Public Enemy No. 1 – John Dillinger. The more notorious he becomes the more this angers not just the FBI but also the Chicago mob because his actions put extra heat on them. There is a nice scene where he meets with a mob representative who basically tells him that he is a dying breed. The money he makes knocking over one bank, they make in one day through illegal gambling.

Mann demonstrates that he is a master at orchestrating action sequences. They are cleanly photographed and edited so that there is no confusion. You can always tell what is going on and who everyone is instead of the kamikaze, headache-inducing editing and slapdash camerawork in films by the likes of Michael Bay and McG. The shoot-out at Dillinger’s hide-out in Little Bohemia is the film’s show-stopping action sequence much like the bank heist in Heat (1995) and the nightclub shoot-out in Collateral (2004). It is powerfully executed and full of tension and excitement as well as an impressive display of firepower with the deafening blasts of tommy guns and shotguns.

Public Enemies reunites Mann with key collaborators, chief among them cinematographer Dante Spinotti who has shot his most memorable films (including Manhunter, The Last of the Mohicans, Heat, and The Insider). Mann has come under considerable criticism for deciding to shoot his last two films with digital cameras and even more so with Public Enemies because it is a period film and audiences are used to seeing them done on traditional film stock. However, this new film looks great with crisp, clear images, especially at night where there is an impressive depth of field. Certain scenes have a graininess to them inherent with digital cameras but, in this case, it gives a tangible, gritty texture that works. There are some truly beautiful shots in this film, like one in which a car carrying Dillinger and his crew hurtle down a road surrounded by a vast forest of trees that tower over them.

Mann is also reunited with composer Elliot Goldenthal who worked on Heat. Since The Last of the Mohicans (1992), Mann has relied on soundtracks comprised mostly of disparate tracks from various sources. Being a period piece, obviously Public Enemies really doesn’t lend itself to that kind of a soundtrack and Goldenthal expertly augments the drama that unfolds in various scenes, creating one of the best scores in a Mann film to date.

The attention to period detail is fantastic with classic trains, cars, and classic gangster iconography like tommy guns, fedoras and trenchcoats permeating the film. Mann really immerses us in the time period but not in a way that calls undo attention to itself. It’s just there in the background of every scene with vintage period architecture. Ever the perfectionist, Mann shot on location, often at the actual locations that Dillinger and his gang frequented. Whether you are consciously aware of this or not, the film just oozes authenticity.

Dillinger certainly enjoys the fruits of his labor but is always planning his next job. He follows his own personal code: he doesn’t kill unless absolutely necessary and doesn’t think about the future, living only in the present because he could easily end up in jail or dead. He is also very conscious of how he’s perceived by the public, enjoying the notoriety his exploits create. Depp portrays him as a very confident guy who is always in control. There is often this mischievous glint in his eye like he’s in on a private joke. Depp plays Dillinger with a lot of charm, like when he addresses the media while being booked in an Indiana jail. He knows how to work the crowd and the charismatic actor is excellent in this scene. However, Public Enemies is not afraid to point out that Dillinger is no hero. The man has no problem with killing someone if they get in his way but the film goes to great lengths to point out that he did so only when there was no other option. Dillinger was clearly a man who didn’t believe in wasting time, much like Frank, the safecracker in Thief. Depp inhabits the role with his customary dedication, adopting a specific voice, accent and effortless delivery of period lingo that sounds natural and genuine.

Christian Bale is quite good as the very determined Purvis. While Mann doesn’t create the balance of cop vs. robber as he did in Heat, Bale is in the film more that I had anticipated. Like other law enforcement figures in Mann’s films, Purvis uses state-of-the-art technology, for the time, to track Dillinger and his crew. As determined as Purvis is, Mann allows some humanity to seep in, like when he stops the brutal interrogation of Dillinger’s girlfriend Billie Frechette (Marion Cotillard) and personally helps her get cleaned up. It is this small moment that adds a welcome layer to his character.

There are all kinds of parallels between Public Enemies and Heat. In both films we are meant to sympathize with the bank robber. Also, the two leads only meet face-to-face in one scene. There is a climactic gun-battle where both sides take on significant casualties that alter the conclusion of the story. And, like McCauley in Heat, there is an inevitability to Dillinger’s life; that he will run out of time and luck; that Purvis and the FBI will close the net around him. That being said, Public Enemies not a carbon copy of Heat. Personality-wise, Dillinger and McCauley are very different people with the former being a risk-taker and the latter being overtly cautious. The same goes for the lawmen. Purvis is not the larger-than-life extrovert that Hanna is, but rather a no-nonsense man who gets the job done and that’s it. There’s even a loose cannon in the form of Baby Face Nelson (Stephen Graham) who is to Public Enemies like Waingro was to Heat. A psychopath that the bank robbers initially ally themselves with but end up cutting loose when he proves to be too unstable. Structurally, both films couldn’t be different as Mann continues to experiment with narrative structure in a fascinating way. This isn’t your typical, cookie-cutter A to B to C plotting, which may frustrate some (see Ali or Miami Vice) but if you the patience and can get into it, watching Public Enemies is a very rewarding experience.

Public Enemies certainly held my attention for its entire, lengthy running time and is an incredible achievement – easily the best period gangster film since Miller’s Crossing (1990). I’m not sure where I would rank it among Mann’s films as I’ve only seen it once and really need to give it some time to sink in but it is a very welcome antidote to the glut of mindless action films that are being released this summer.