What’s really disturbing about this film was that it stars Johnny Depp and Christian Bale, and I didn’t realise either of them were in it until the end credits. That’s how badly it was shot. But is the problem with the film, or me? A fellow film buff, who told me this was the best film he’d seen in years, almost had a seizure when I told him my thoughts on it; and if he’s reading this paragraph, he’s probably thrown himself off a bridge and will be spinning in his grave for the next hundred years. Somehow I missed out on all the promotion and information on ‘Public Enemies,’ which nowadays can be such an important part of the experience, so I went into it mostly unprepared. The other guy says you need to understand the director (a Mr. Michael Mann) and his motivations to properly ‘get’ the film; all I knew is that the hero would rob some banks, then be shot at a trip to the theatre.
The sequences in the theatre were quite good; at the very least, the scenes and their setup were an amusing reflection of us, sitting watching a gangster film like Dillinger’s last night (I’d like to think there was some deliberate playing on this.) And, as I am going to give the film some stars, I should mention that it got quite good towards the end. I loved the scene where Dillinger went into the office entirely devoted to tracking and pursuing him; it was brilliantly executed and shot, and almost saved the film. I really hope this happened in real life, and if not, perhaps a few more fictional events wouldn’t have gone amiss. The final scenes were all excellent, actually; if they’d come about an hour earlier, or been preceded by anything half-decent, I might have left the theatre impressed.
Depp had some moments of brilliant charisma throughout the film, as you’d expect, and there were times when you could see why the ‘gal’ and his cronies liked him so much. The scene where he first meets her, the scene where Depp faces up to Bale in prison; great. But this was about five minutes of footage – even with the good quarter of an hour towards the end, we are left with TWO HOURS of meaningless, emotionless dross. There was no sense of an overarching narrative, characters came and went unannounced and unmissed, and no motivation was ever suggested for any of them. None of them, even Bale’s almost-entirely-decent human being, endangered a sliver of respect or compassion from me, and I felt every one of the 140 minutes. That is a serious chunk of my life, and frankly, I’d like Mann, Depp, and Bale to give it me back.
FILM REVIEW: 'PUBLIC ENEMIES' / 'COCO BEFORE CHANEL'
(10th October 2009)
This week I saw two films in as many days – within twenty-four hours of each other, in fact. This is not exactly conducive to thinking about them on their own terms, so I’ve decided to break every rule of reviewing (already!) and review them together. Or at least, as two half-reviews. As it happens, though, I’m not sure either film had enough content to merit a full review, so this has worked out quite nicely.
First up, ‘Public Enemies,’ and Thursday night. We open on a prison in Indiana. Some fellas go inside, one of them gets a gun, but then someone hits a guard and they all break out; all very exciting, but as you can tell, it didn’t stir me at all. There wasn’t a shred of characterisation in this sequence, it was paced with all the finesse of a live episode of Big Brother, and there was an incredibly irritating use of the ironically named ‘steady cam’ during the first quarter of an hour that made most it a blur, and hurt my eyes. This calmed down a bit as the film went on, but was not a good way to kick things off.
Onto ‘Coco’ now. Truthfully, I can’t beat Phillip French’s concise and all-encompassing review from the Observer, where he summed up the film with the words ‘tasteful, reserved, rather dull.’ What makes this worse is that it didn’t have to be this way; the first twenty minutes of the film were quick, lively, and riveting. As the always adorable Audrey Tautou launched into her first song-and-dance number, I was sat there, in all seriousness, thinking ‘Fantastic! My first five-star review!'
five-star review!’ And then the rot set in. As Coco’s life descended into humdrum and unsatisfactory compromise, so did the film, which I’m sure is not a deliberate directorial decision.
Let me get back to the good stuff. People seem united in their praise of Benoît Poelvoorde, who played a chap called Balsan, and made him constantly fascinating to watch. You started out hating him as a sleazy womaniser, then you came to be really fond of him...then it was back to hate, and then finally tolerance and respect. My judgements and emotions are not easily shifted, so it was a real pleasure to go through all of these transitions. It would be fair to say Poelvoorde and Tautou carried the film, and kept me awake through the 110 minute running time – only slightly more reasonable than ‘Public Enemies.’ The other main bloke was quite good as well, but not so much that I want to look up his name.
The lead character, Miss. Chanel, was quite intriguing, but that was entirely due to Tautou. I feel as if a lot more could have been done with her. The director, Anne Fontaine, seemed a little too keen to stress a particular positive aspect of Chanel’s creative character; there were times when I expected the director to walk on shouting: ‘LOOK, SHE FREED YOU FROM CORSETS, AND THOSE SILLY HATS. LOVE HER!’ It really was all generally very nice, a pleasure to look at, but could have been so much better if they’d packed the latter ninety minutes into twenty, and moved on through the rest of her (apparently far more interesting) life. Audrey Tautou as a Nazi collaborator? Yes please, here’s my £5 again. But I guess the film was never going to be about anything more than it was, to expect otherwise is just stupid; I may as well wish for the robot from ‘Moon’ to have made an appearance. (Now there’s an idea.)
As we approach the closing of the review, I realise I am going to give both of these efforts the same rating. Both films failed in a huge way to hold my interest, but ‘Coco’ had all that good acting, and ‘Enemies’ had its good twenty minutes, as well as some truly fantastic gunfights. I don’t honestly regret going to see either, but I won’t be queuing up for the DVD’s, and sadly, I can’t recommend them to any of you.
As for the review itself, was this a pointless and coincidental juxtaposition? Yes...but it’s not entirely inappropriate. Both films are biographical period pieces, set in the first half of the 20th century, and both are limited by the constraints of what actually happened. But – and if there’s anything I want you to take away from the review, it’s this – that fact is no excuse. It is so easy to take reality and run with it, or arrange events into a stunning and gripping story, and the creators of these two simply didn’t. No-one loves a ‘based on reality’ film more than me, but stories with half the potential and events of these tales have given me hours of pleasure – ‘Public Enemies’ and ‘Coco Before Chanel’ did not. They both receive a gun-toting, hat-sewing, lacklustre two out of five.
