Book vs. Movie: Public Enemies
By Russ Bickerstaff
July 8, 2009
BoxOfficeProphets.com
And in this corner: the Movie. A 112-year-old kid born in France to a guy named Lumiere and raised primarily in Hollywood by his uncle Charlie "the Tramp" Chaplin. This young upstart has quickly made a huge impact on society, rapidly becoming the most financially lucrative form of storytelling in the modern world.
Both square off in the ring again as Box Office Prophets presents another round of Book vs. Film.
Public Enemies
Author Bryan Burrough had been interested in the early days of J. Edgar Hoover's FBI. When he started looking into it, he found that there were very few books dedicated to an objective, journalistic look at the Bureau's origins. Books had been written on various criminals that had been targeted by a fledgling FBI, but nothing focusing on the Bureau itself. Digging a little further, he found out that there were a number of documents from the dawn of the FBI that had been declassified in the ‘80s. No book had been written on the subject since. Burrough decided to write the first ever book to take a comprehensive, chronological look at both the early days of the FBI and the first men that it had targeted in the first ever war on crime - Public Enemies. Years later, the book has become a critical and financial success, prompting a big-budget film adaptation directed by Michael Mann that has been released this month. How does the first historical gangster film of the 21st century compare with the book it's based on?
The Book
Bryan Burrough set out not only to outline the major events involved in the birth of the FBI and its first targets, he also wanted to tell a comprehensive story of the period with details that often get overlooked. In fewer than 600 pages, we see a chronological account of events running from June 8, 1933 through January 20, 1935. In it, we see a desk-bound bureaucrat named J. Edgar Hoover who struggles to establish a national law enforcement organization. He's hiring fresh-faced kids right out of law school who have absolutely no background in law enforcement whatsoever. A neat, professional environment is rigidly enforced complete with dress code. When a hail of gunfire massacred a group of lawmen in Kansas City on June 17th, the group that was to become the FBI was galvanized. Hoover declared war on crime. The Bureau started hiring experienced lawmen from Texas — cowboys who would help the inexperienced kids manage some of the first successes of what was to become the FBI we know today.
All of this background about the FBI is terribly interesting, impressively detailed and on the whole, very, very well written. Burrough writes non-fiction with the aesthetic of a best-selling novelist. The action of the book, all of which has been painstakingly researched and sited, comes across in both clear, journalistic factual detail AND the somewhat acrobatic pseudo-poetry of hardboiled action fiction.
The bulk of the interpersonal detail in the book rests squarely on the lives of the criminals the FBI was chasing after. From the Barker-Karpis gang to John Dillinger to Machine Gun Kelly to Bonnie and Clyde to Baby Face Nelson, Burrough has done a great deal of research into the personal lives of some of the 1930s' most notorious criminals. Where dialogue is sited, it had specifically been related by credible sources or, in some cases, FBI transcripts from actual telephone dialogues between the criminals and their associates. Rather than focus on each criminal individually, Burrough delivers the story chronologically in clear, crisp narrative prose. As a result, the narrative jumps around a bit. We're in Texas with Bonnie and Clyde, Then we're in Wisconsin with Dillinger, then we're vacationing in Reno with Barker-Karpis...and the detailed accounts of actual bank robberies get a bit repetitious, but this is a thoroughly enjoyable excursion into an era when bank robbers could be heroes perilously conscious of their own public images.
The repetition of the bank robberies and hideouts and stakeouts can sort of blur together after a while, but these moments are excused by some of the less-explored angles on the lives of these people. Of particular note here is the support personnel. A seedy lawyer used a female warden's pride against her in manipulating her to keep a captured Dillinger in a jail in Indiana that he would be able to escape from as opposed to a maximum security facility that would've probably taken him straight to his execution. Then there was the black market plastic surgeon who was highly paid to do identity-altering facelifts and fingerprint removals. The fingerprint operations sounded particularly grizzly — involving drugs taken to numb pain, a knife and a pencil-sharpening-like operation to flake away telltale distinguishing features in the fingers. Dillinger's obsession with plastic surgery was particularly fascinating. He spent a lot of money getting his face altered. So happy was he with the effect that he became confident and regularly went out in public to baseball games and movies and such. These relatively uncovered angles lend Public Enemies a fascinating perspective on the people involved in the birth of a very influential government agency.
The Movie
Chicago-born Michael Mann (Collateral, Miami Vice) has elected to focus two hours of film exclusively on the Dillinger that had been portrayed in Burrough's book. This makes sense, as Bonnie and Clyde had already been covered in great depth in a highly successful film some years ago and none of the rest of the FBI's first targets had the kind of legendary status that Dillinger enjoyed. Theoretically, if this one was hugely successful, Mann could go back and do sequels focusing on each of the other criminals explored in Burrough's book, but it seems unlikely.
The story begins as Dillinger (Johnny Depp) has been taken into custody. He's about to escape. Mann is focusing on the final days of Dillinger in some pretty vivid detail. Chasing him down is Christian Bale in the role of Melvin Purvis, the agent Hoover (Billy Crudup) has put in charge of tracking him down.
To his credit, Mann doesn't go out of his way to tell the viewer what's going on in any given scene. This is something of a relief, as overly expository dialogue can make any historical film feel inauthentic. The problem with this approach is the fact that Mann's script includes scenes that lose their intensity out of context. At one point, Purvis informs an office full of agents that they will be receiving armaments that sound like they belong on a battlefield and offers any of them the opportunity to resign and avoid the danger ahead. The intensity of the scene doesn't come across in the film because it's never really revealed that these people have no substantial law-enforcement background. They started college looking to become lawyers - and when Purvis' desire to work with experienced Texas lawmen is covered a bit in the film, but it's never really explained why. Where Mann has included some of these details from the book, they get lost in the overall picture.
When framing the story, Mann focuses more time on Dillinger than the Bureau and the movie suffers a bit as a result. While much of the film strives to be as journalistic as the book, Mann's film is a romance at heart. We see Dillinger falling in love with the French-Menominee woman Billie Frechette (Marion Cotillard) which was, at best, a minor supporting detail in the overall picture of the man. The film not only focuses on romance, but is an inherently romantic look at the life of a ‘30s bank robber. Some of this comes across beautifully. Depp moodily portrays moments in the life of a man in a troubling occupation. It's all very stylish, and looks distinctly unlike any other big budget film to make it into wide release over the course of the past decade or so. A lot of this has a lot to do with the fact that so many of the exterior shots were filmed on location in Wisconsin. Rarely host to camera crews, the unique appearance of vintage buildings and country back roads found in that specific area of the Midwest rarely gets seen in a medium that is so completely infatuated with New York and LA. Okay, so I happen to LIVE in Wisconsin and am probably a bit biased here, but many key moments in the life of Dillinger DID happen in the state and it's nice to see the film be faithful to that much of Dillinger's life.
Perhaps the biggest opportunity Mann missed here was an opportunity to show the man's unrealistic belief in the redemptive power of identity-altering plastic surgery. Looking over this aspect of the man's life, which was arguably the real thing that got him in the end, amounts to something of a fragmented image that ends up being little better than a stylish update of the 1930s gangster films - fun and romantic when it could've been so much more.
The Verdict
While the book can be boring and repetitious in places, it does so in the interest of showing a complete, reasonably comprehensive look at the events in question. The details of the subject matter that are often overlooked are given startling space to breathe that make the repetition of bank robbery after bank robbery seem relatively unimportant. The book's prose style delivers even the repetition with a careful hand. Mann's film adaptation of the Dillinger portions of the novel lacks the details that make the book such an idiosynchratic masterpiece, but it's a stylish update on the standard ‘30s gangster film that could attain solid success at the box office this summer. Had the film possessed the kind of vision that the novel did in taking a skewed perspective on the offbeat avenues of the subject matter, it may have run the risk of being a financial failure, but it could've also been just offbeat enough to serve as fascinating counterprogramming and one of the biggest successes at the box office this year. Instead, we get a solid, profitable film that mixes action and romance in the ‘30s.