Does Hollywood Want Us to Love the Bank Robber?


Buzz up!

Johnny Depp can't save Americans from the recession. But if 2008 was the year we fell for Batman's anti-heist heroism, Public Enemies could mark the beginning of our culture's anti-bank backlash.

By S.T. VanAirsdale



In Public Enemies, director Michael Mann (left) stages the mythology he mastered in Heat, only the morality of Johnny Depp's hero is that of a recession's rebellious everman: "Desperate people got no other choice."

Upon his capture and extradition to Indiana in January 1934, John Dillinger held a press conference. The world's most famous bank robber preened and swaggered, leaned on a prosecutor's shoulder, and admitted his crimes as casually as he had drained dozens of financial institutions in the seven months prior. The media and its audiences, languishing in the pit of America's worst-ever depression, ate it up.

Exactly 75 years later, with another Great Depression looming and bank heists on the rise, a man wanted for a robbery in Columbia, South Carolina, nudged the culture of the celebrity criminal to its appropriately twenty-first-century conclusion: "On tha run for robbin a bank," Joseph Northington posted to his MySpace page (since taken down). "Love all of yall."

Hollywood, which has once again burnished Dillinger's mythology in this week's Public Enemies, won't likely regard Northington with similar interest down the line. (He was soon apprehended and pleaded guilty in May.) But maybe it should: Along with this year's renewed populist rage against banks and industry titans at large, a thriving new class of thieves with mini-myths of their own is all but made for the movies. Consider the "Benjamins Bandit" currently at large in Portland, Oregon, terrorizing his fifth bank on Friday with a taste for only $100 bills. Or the pregnant woman who held up a North Carolina teller before a distracting cell-phone call prompted her penniless escape. Or the burglary booms afflicting St. Louis, Omaha, and even poor Beaumont, Texas, where two rare bank hits last week epitomized the surge in America's hard-times pastime: the heist as heroism, albeit fleeting and fancy-free.

Sure, they don't make the folk heroes like they used to (though you have to admit, an ADD-rattled break-in — or at least a purse-stealing — would have greatly improved Juno). It's hard to imagine an armed criminal in 2009 turning to a poverty-stricken man, as Johnny Depp's Dillinger does in Enemies, to announce, "I'm here for the bank's money, not yours." That moral code was part of the reason hundreds of onlookers flanked the icy streets of Crown Point, Indiana, to greet America's Most Wanted on his way to jail, where he'd soon bust out and reinforce his legend until his martyrdom at FBI hands six months later. His cause, however violent and self-serving, wielded an unmistakable romance for a beleaguered nation.



Not to mention Hollywood, for which Enemies signals at least the fourth telling of Dillinger's story. It's certainly the most topical, weaving rage worthy of a Republican tea party or an AIG hearing into Dillinger's love affair with destitute coat-check girl Billie Frechette (Marion Cotillard) and his ritual, almost fetishistic humiliation of top cop J. Edgar Hoover (Billy Crudup). Timelier still: According to the most recent available FBI statistics, reported bank robberies climbed almost 20 percent between the third and fourth quarters of 2008 — the same period during which Lehman Brothers collapsed and 170 other banks collected $175.5 billion in federal bailout money. In New York City alone, such robberies in 2008 increased by 57 percent over the year before.

That's no coincidence, but if director Michael Mann and his studio patrons at Universal could have predicted the economic relevance of their subject matter, then they probably wouldn't be in the movie business. Mann will be the first to admit that the pesky writers' strike flip-flop — not those pesky credit-default swaps — put Enemies on the fast track to zeitgeist. And Universal execs in particular will remind you that zeitgeist isn't really a market you can corner anyway: Sam Raimi's Drag Me to Hell (aggrieved gypsy curses out career-minded banker who won't rescue her from foreclosure!) has yielded a disappointing $40.6 million for the studio since its release a month ago. Columbia Pictures fared even worse with its Clive Owen/Naomi Watts evil-bank-conspiracy thriller The International, which fizzled to a $25.4 million domestic gross in February.

Mann is an interesting case, though. His 1995 masterpiece Heat probed the nihilism of heists, scoring a direct hit at the affluent midpoint of the Clinton Administration. Robert De Niro's gentleman robber wears suits and lives on the bach, taunting his adversary with inquiries like, "Do you see me doing thrill-seeker liquor-store holdups with a 'Born to Lose' tattoo on my chest?" Well, no. But what happens in the bad times, like 2009, when that self-assurance turns on itself? Near the end Enemies even Dillinger confesses (on his way out of a movie theater, no less) to the crises that occur when "desperate people got no other choice."

Hence our pregnant would-be robbers, our Benjamins Bandits, and the rest — maybe not all "Born to Lose," but generally born to follow until they're caught, give up or, as in the cases of three unlucky robbery suspects in 2008, get gunned down at the scene of the crime. Even if they aren't our new Dillingers, they are our irascible stand-ins for a time of unspeakable lows and uncertain saviors, when Hollywood would do well to find an anti-hero we can trust: a Joker as Batman, if you will ("We are tonight's entertainment!" — only without the knife).

And while Christian Bale is signed on to be playing more Dark Knights and cops and boxing instructors than his real-life, on-set rage-a-hero (we watched that!), there's some traction for a box office built after the bailout — if not directly upon it, or its safecracking after-effects. Naturally, Michael Moore was an early adapter to the culture's outrage, fast-tracking his latest documentary "exposé" to address last year's economic meltdown. Twentieth Century Fox, meanwhile, dusted off its long-gestating sequel to its 1988 recession-era gem Wall Street; Michael Douglas's imprisoned greed-god Gordon Gekko is set to return, rehabilitated scruples and all, to shepherd young trader Shia LaBeouf through the Financial District's shark-infested waters. Oliver Stone is not attached to direct, alas, appreciably lowering the likelihood of a populist broadside (as if someone in any of the aforementioned robbers' positions would even care). At least Hilary Duff has the prescience to get behind a retelling of Bonnie and Clyde, currently stalled — like so many independent films — in pre-production and scheduled for a 2010 release.

For moviegoers craving a stricter, more immediate morality — one that replaces Tommy guns with tax refunds, or at least offers a more satisfying comeuppance than, say, The Road — satisfaction is going to have to come in more ways than Shia as Gekko, and satisfaction can't come soon enough. In the meantime, if it's a bank robber who begins to deliver us from the worst of times, as Dillinger did without shame, then why shouldn't Hollywood buy in? Just don't forget MySpace — someone needs to cover product placement.

S.T. VanAirsdale is a senior editor at Movieline.com. His film criticism and industry analysis have appeared in the New York Times, Vanity Fair, New York, the Huffington Post, Defamer, and The Reeler, which he founded.