June
29
Public Enemies: Can Depp Save Mann's HD Biopic?
Universal is counting on one thing to open Michael Mann's Public Enemies: Johnny Depp. According to The Ulmer Scale, he's the second most popular movie star in the world, after Will Smith. That's based on his hugely successful roles as broadly comedic, over-the-top Captain Jack Sparrow in the Pirates of the Caribbean movies. But while Sweeney Todd wouldn't have done as well without him, Depp can only move the needle so far.
Being a movie star means giving the audience what they want, most of the time. Even that doesn't seem to be working this summer, as movies starring Will Ferrell, Eddie Murphy and Christian Bale have stumbled at the b.o. While this may give the studios more leverage in reducing movie star salaries going forward, it doesn't solve the problem that Universal is facing right now--and studio co-chairman Marc Shmuger is circling in this revealing LAT story about the waning power of stardom. Do audiences want Depp as a fairly realistic, non-fantasy version of Depression-era bank robber John Dillinger?
Advance tracking for Public Enemies, which opens July 1, indicates that Depp has some star allure. But early reviews reveal that the movie is not populist fare. (Here's Variety and Time.) It's Mann's take on a familiar saga: outlaws on the lam, running out of time, relentlessly pursued by the Feds. Mann populates the movie with compelling actors, from Depp to Christian Bale as FBI-man Melvin Purvis, Billy Crudup as J. Edgar Hoover, Stephen Lang as a Texas Ranger and incomparable Oscar-winning French actress Marion Cotillard as Dillinger's beloved gun moll. She warms up the movie, thankfully, as the one person he cares about. While fitfully engaging, the movie is often flat as a pancake, no matter how hard Elliot Goldenthal's jazz-inflected score works to pump things up. Only in the last half hour, as Dillinger fights for his life as the Feds turn his one-time allies against him, does the movie tighten into a taut and riveting drama.
Mann has always been a modern filmmaker working at the forward edge of technology and style. His biggest misstep here is the same as the Wachowskis with Speed Racer. His pursuit of what interests him formally may leave audiences behind. He wanted to immerse us in the period, he told me, by shooting the picture in high-definition video. The Sony F23 allowed him to manipulate color in the camera, cinematographer Dante Spinotti told ICG Magazine. "You can't come back," he said. "In other words, we were not recording in a safe, comfortable way." Mann confessed to playing with a digital intermediate quite a bit, and was color-correcting up to the last minute before last week's LAFF premiere.
HD is clear, harsh, honest. It works fine in a contemporary setting like Collateral or Miami Vice. (Somehow, David Fincher, who attended the Public Enemies premiere last week, made period HD work in The Curious Case of Benjamin Button and Zodiac.) But when moviegoers watch a period film, no matter how authentically recreated, they aren't expecting it to look like this. There's something jarring about the way Public Enemies shoves us into the past. While Steven Soderbergh alienated folks by shooting The Good German using old-studio techniques, the way Mann shot Public Enemies calls attention to its modernity. (UPDATE: SpoutBlog's Karina Longworth also addresses the film's production values.)
Here are takeouts in the NYT and The Guardian. Depp does Letterman, and Universal provides a featurette:
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"Even that doesn't seem to be working this summer, as movies starring Will Ferrell, Eddie Murphy and Christian Bale have stumbled at the b.o. "
The other common theme of those failures? It was obvious from all advertisements and trailers that all of these films were bad, bad, bad without a "Transformers"-like spectacle to carry them past the point of financial failure.
I just find the notion of Schmuger's theory of dwindling star power to be absurd and nothing more than a lazy excuse for bad business decisions. A terrible movie with a tired, dumb premise that has no audience is going to fail whether they have a big star attached or not.
"Land of the Lost" was a lampooning of a television series that was a tertiary interest of 30-somethings when they were children. "Imagine That" was a tired family fantasy-comedy that's been done to death with a comedic star that hasn't drawn a good dime at the box office in almost fifteen years. "Terminator: Salvation" came limping out of a third installment that audiences fled from in droves and was marketed behind a star whose notorious temper has made him wholly unlikable and unsympathetic. It's not that these films couldn't find an audience, it's that the audience saw them and went running in the other direction.
"Public Enemies" will not make "Pirates" money, but it'll carry itself much better and quite a bit further with Depp than without.
Posted by: Kevin Marshall | June 29, 2009 at 10:44 AM
I actually think Public Enemies is Mann's best film since Heat. Way better than the Most Mverrated Film of Decade Collateral and Miami Vice which is a flat out disaster.
But the HD photography SUCKS! Washed out skies, blotchy pallid skin tones which makes everyone looks like they have jaundice and the annoying artifacting effect which gives images that smeary, jerky quality during low light and nighttime scenes. Mann used to make some of the most incredibly visual films around like Thief and Heat. Now is his misguided attempt to be oh so cutting edge and radical his films look like crap. (And I admit I'm an old school guy I LOVE film) I don't agree that he's trying to "shove us into the past". just the opposite, he's pushing us away from it
Posted by: Sergio | June 29, 2009 at 02:26 PM
I saw an early cut of Public Enemies in February and the aspect of the film I really enjoyed, other than the great story, was the sharp clear images on the screen. I think it's a matter of personal preference. To discount a film becasue you don't like HD vs. other film is ridiculous in my opinion. In addition, what also makes this film fascinating is the true(for the most part) story of the fledgling FBI's beginnings in the US. I don't know what some critics expected, but as a somewhat sophisticated movie-goer, this film beats anything I've seen so far this year. It spurred me to read the book it was based on, Public Enemies, and learn about a time in history we will never see again.
Posted by: CalGal | June 29, 2009 at 07:14 PM
Sharp article as always, Anne, analyzing where the art might be headed and talking directly to the artists involved.
Your summary of PUBLIC ENEMIES sounds a lot like HEAT, which took 2 1/2 hours to warm up. It is now regarded as a classic, if not a masterpiece.
I don't think Michael Mann walks on water and this flick might be just as flat as you say, but I don't think Mann cares if NBC Universal's stock goes one way or another. He's making movies for people to marvel over 50 years from now.
Posted by: Joe Valdez | June 29, 2009 at 07:33 PM
We'll see how the movie does, but things are so tough for sophisticated films for adults that I want them to work. I'm scared that if this doesn't, it will send studios running away from taking more chances like this. This movie may be a tweener. Too expensive for a serious art film, and not accessible enough for a mainstream entertainment.
Michael Mann is a gifted film director who has managed to convince studios to let him make some wonderful movies with high budgets. Some deliver, some don't. No, I don't think he cares. But he should, because he may not be able to continue doing so. The movie I want to see him make more than anything is For Whom the Bell Tolls, but he would have to cut his price and do it at a reasonable level and so far that hasn't happened.
Posted by: Anne Thompson | June 29, 2009 at 08:30 PM
I believe Mann is creating this look specifically to give a sort of live/video/reality feeling to his film. I think he is trying to make it feel contemporary rather than like a period drama.
Judging from the trailers, the problem with the feeling of the visuals in the film has little or nothing to do with it being HD. This is not an HD vs Film debate, this is a shooting to look like video vs shooting to look like a conventional 24frame movie debate. Since Collateral Mann has been employing an 'open shutter (aka 1/24th, aka 360 degree)' look in his HD films by choice. While a film camera cannot do this (I'll spare the explanation) one does not need to shoot in this way with an HD camera either unless they want to. In other words, if Mann wanted to he could shoot with the same cameras he used in a style much more like Fincher and his film would appear visually to feel like a coventional movie (just as Fincher has done).
Posted by: J Payne | June 30, 2009 at 01:51 PM
I have no problem with shooting digital. But something about the way this movie looks drew attention to itself. I was looking at skin tone, and the hard digital quality of the images. Is this a question of my being too sophisticated--so I noticed--or not sophisticated enough? I do want a movie to draw me in, as opposed to making me wonder why a certain image looks strange to me.
In this case the look was distancing, not inviting. I am curious to see how it looks in 35 mm.
Posted by: anne Thompson | June 30, 2009 at 02:30 PM
I completely agree with you and I believe it has very little to do with viewer sophistication. Other responses seemed to imply that this had to do with digital vs. film. My stance is that the 'off' look and feel of the film is due to purposeful conscious choices by Mann and co.
I personally feel the technique easily pulls viewers out of the film whether or not they know why. This is why I disagree with the creative choices made about the look of this film as well as Miami vice.
Posted by: J Payne | June 30, 2009 at 05:13 PM
Why haven't I seen mention of Warren Oates in the Milius film? Oates even looked like Dillinger. I have not seen Mann's film but doubt that Depp can match Oates.
Posted by: Don Hyde | June 30, 2009 at 09:04 PM