Public Enemies – HBO First Look

I hadn’t seen this until it ran after True Blood last night. Happy to find somebody else has already youtubed it, saving me the trouble.

Currently standing with a score of 70 on RT, we’re keeping our eyes peeled all day for any reviews that might tip that average up or down. [EDIT: Thanks to Alison Flynn for spotting David Denby’s New Yorker review]

Michael Mann‚Äôs ‚ÄúPublic Enemies‚Äù is a ravishing dream of violent gangster life in the thirties‚Äînot a tough, funny, and, finally, tragic dream like ‚ÄúBonnie and Clyde‚Äù but a flowing, velvety fantasia of the crime wave that mesmerized the nation early in the decade… It‚Äôs the American poetry of crime. Throughout the movie, blazing tommy guns emit little spearheads of flame, just as in a comic book. Men get their skulls bashed with gun butts, and get thrown out of cars, but, despite all the violence, the movie is aesthetically shaped and slightly distanced by the pictorial verve of gangland effrontery‚Äîthe public aggression that Mann makes inseparable from high style… As a piece of direction, ‚ÄúPublic Enemies‚Äù is often breathtakingly fast, but it‚Äôs always lucid.

The high-definition digital images are crisply focussed, and much of the movie (in contrast to the usual shock-and-awe thunder of action films) is on the quiet side. Billie Holiday‚Äôs plaintive tones show up on the soundtrack, a touch of melancholy high civilization amid the mayhem. Some of the dialogue is spoken sotto voce‚Äîin a darkened restaurant, say, or the back of a car, where suave hoods lean toward each other, exchanging confidences. Like Barry Levinson‚Äôs ‚ÄúBugsy,‚Äù the picture happily exploits what movies can do to create a sinful nexus between criminality and elegance… There‚Äôs almost an unspoken compact between director and audience in a movie like this, a compact of pleasure in everything looking so good. Twenty-five years ago, in ‚ÄúMiami Vice,‚Äù Michael Mann brought visual glamour to television; he‚Äôs still an incomparable maker of svelte, flawlessly integrated images.

Part II of the HBO First Look after the cut.