There are moments in Michael Mann's Public Enemies that take one's breath away. Mann is known for his ferocious closeups—the pores in the skin, the nearly invisible scar by the left eye, the whisper of facial hair on the lead actress' upper lip—but these moments, and there are many, fade in one's memory, trumped by the hyper-reality of cinematographer Dante Spinotti's camera as it "records" moments in the life of John Dillinger, bank robber, murderer, folk hero.

In one particularly compelling sequence, we witness the plane carrying Dillinger back to jail as it lands on a tiny airstrip in a hard-driving rain, the scene illumined by dozens of flash bulbs. With each flash, as men scramble for the best angle, rain-drenched ponchos shedding small rivulets of water, a portion of the scene is seared on our visual memory. Dillinger deplanes, a sardonic grin playing across Johnny Depp's softly beautiful face, giving his character just the right combination of menace and "aw shucks, Ma, what's all the fuss?" The chummy relations between the press, Dillinger's captors, his jailors, his prosecutors, and the notorious criminal himself are on full display. (The newsreel of this event reveals the chumminess with unmistakable clarity. The liberty Mann has taken is to represent these events unfolding in the rain. Rain in the movies is more often menacing than carressing or soothing. No exception here.)

One is stunned—or ought to be—by the loosey-goosey nature of it all as Dillinger leans one arm lazily across the prosecutor's shoulder with a smiling (lady) sheriff flanking him on the other side, declaring that there is no way "Johnny" will escape from her jail. (He does, and she loses her job, as does the prosecutor.) Perhaps, however, we shouldn't be quite so surprised and dismayed. Things have tightened up considerably in the intervening decades, to be sure, especially on the law-enforcement side, yet a symbiotic coziness between (some) wrongdoers and the media ...

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