Public Enemies – Nuove recensioni USA

Vi avevamo promesso nuovi aggiornamenti, dopo aver discusso le prime impressioni dell’industria:  il tono delle recensioni dei maggiori critici americani è decisamente più positivo.

Kenneth Turan sul Los Angeles Times è entusiata:

Mann, director of “Heat,” “Ali,” “The Insider” and the current “Public Enemies,” is inescapably one of the masters of modern American cinema. He’s a restless soul, a striver, pushing his work toward dramatic intensity and the recapturing and recasting of reality…. Simultaneously an art film and a crime film, Mann’s latest work may not give you a ton to hang on to emotionally, but the beauty and skill of the filmmaking keep you tightly in its grasp.

Anche l’uso del digitale è valorizzato e contestualizzato ed il ritorno di Dante Spinotti alla fotografia è salutato positivamente.

Turan accosta Public Enemies più al fatalismo francese di Melville che all’energica tradizione dei gangster americani degli anni ’30:

There is a formal, almost existential quality about his fatalistic portrayal of the scourge of the Midwest, more “Le Samourai” than “White Heat,” more Alain Delon cool than Cagney hot.
It’s almost as if Depp, who lives in France, and his French costar Marion Cotillard have unconsciously collaborated with Mann to channel the spirit of the classic French gangster director Jean-Pierre Melville into these decidedly American proceedings.

Anche la recensione di Manhola Dargis sul New York Times è molto positiva:

Michael Mann’s Public Enemies is a grave and beautiful work of art. Shot in high-definition digital by a filmmaker who’s helping change the way movies look, it revisits with meticulous detail and convulsions of violence a short, frantic period in the life and bank-robbing times of John Dillinger…. Much of what makes the movie pleasurable is the vigor with which it restages our familiar romance with period criminals, a perennial affair.

Mr. Mann is searching for a new kind of gangster story to fit the times, one that makes room for greater ambivalence, and lawmen and outlaws who are closer to one another in temperament and deed. If he doesn’t fully succeed, it’s because he knows that the gangster’s rakish smile is at once a fiction of cinema and one of its great, irresistible lies.

Infine Roger Ebert che assegna al film tre stellette e mezza:

There is no interest here about John Dillinger’s childhood, his psychology, his sexuality, his famous charm, his Robin Hood legend…    This Johnny Depp performance is something else. For once an actor playing a gangster does not seem to base his performance on movies he has seen. He starts cold. He plays Dillinger as a Fact. My friend Jay Robert Nash says 1930s gangsters copied their styles from the way Hollywood depicted them; screenwriters like Ben Hecht taught them how they spoke. Dillinger was a big movie fan; on the last night of his life, he went to see Clark Gable playing a man a lot like him, but he didn’t learn much. No wisecracks, no lingo. Just military precision and an edge of steel.

Eppure secondo Ebert, Mann ha preferito la cruda realtà storica, rispetto ad ogni abbellimento romantico, tradendo la lezione di Ford:

Mann is fearless with his research. If I mention the Lady in Red, Anna Sage (Branka Katic), who betrayed Dillinger outside the Biograph when the movie was over, how do you picture her? I do too. We are wrong. In real life she was wearing a white blouse and an orange skirt, and she does in the movie. John Ford once said, When the legend becomes fact, print the legend. This may be a case where he was right. Mann might have been wise to decide against the orange and white and just break down and give Anna Sage a red dress.

E’ l’ennesima riprova che considerare Mann il più fordiano dei registi della Nuova Hollywood è stato un abbaglio colossale: il regista di Chicago è invece un iconoclasta, uno sperimentatore, un formalista, affascinato dall’eccezionalità di ogni uomo.

Siano criminali o poliziotti, sportivi o giornalisti, siano taxisti o serial killer, gli uomini di Mann vivono, spesso da soli, nell’ossessione di essere i migliori.

“Non fare entrare nella tua vita niente da cui tu non possa sganciarti in trenta secondi netti, se senti puzza di sbirri dietro l’angolo”

Neil McCauley/Robert De Niro  (Heat – la sfida)