I don't usually write about movies in this space, but after seeing Michael Mann's impressive Dillinger flick, Public Enemies, and then reading the usually astute David Thomson's takedown in The New Republic, I want to rise to Mann's defense--without spoilers.

Thomson doesn't get the title--why isn't the movie called Dillinger? Here's why, I think. This gorgeous, rich, deeply anti-romantic but strangely stirring movie pits two cabals of public enemies against one another: Dillinger and his largely affectless bank robbers pals versus the grim-faced, soulless FBI (featuring a wonderful star turn by an unrecognizable Billy Crudup as J. Edgar Hoover). All the guys stand a bit outside themselves watching themselves play themselves--and watching the press, and the movies, fall all over them. Johnny Depp's underplayed Dillinger gets away with huge amounts of crime in a little more than a year, and his motives are sunk deep behind his eyes. His method is not The Method. He doesn't show many autobiographical cards, which makes him more of a blank, noirish antihero than we're used to these days. Depp splendidly impersonates a hollow man who lives for the rush--especially a long sequence near the end as he steps off the edge into memorable oblivion.

It was those closing moments that flooded me with all the feeling that I'd been missing--suppressing?--up to that point. But why whine? This movie rewards the senses but also challenges you to think: What's really going on here? Where's the joy and the doom in crime? Why isn't the passion screaming nonstop out of the screen? In the depth of the Greatest Depression, it's as if the blood's sapped from the country. There are schemes, ambushes, prison breaks, and betrayals galore, but no grandeur. People do their jobs. Bonnie and Clyde, which as Pauline Kael wrote in her greatest piece, "put the sting back in death," this isn't.

The usually astute Thomson fails to be aroused. He finds the movie "prettified" into mere genre. It suffers from "enervating vagueness." There are no knockout lines. Thomson misses the usual stuff of gangster flicks, the "rapture of bodies breaking open, dropping to the ground and coupling in motel rooms." Here is the kind of writing that (if I may be forgiven the lurid alliteration) sprayed room freshener on the Terminator/Tarantino takeover of Hollywood. But Thomson, his irony detector turned off, howls because Mann omits scenes like the one in the 1931 Public Enemy where James Cagney jams a grapefruit into a woman's face--the kind of scene where "our childish urge to be outlaw is summoned to the screen itself...Take that! Fuck you, America!" Take that America--only one kind of gangster movie allowed here! "Our childish urge" must be indulged. It Is Written.

But evidently Mann has something else in mind. Thomson raises the interesting question of why Public Enemies doesn't resemble its genre predecessors, but he thinks it's because Mann doesn't know how to make a terrific movie. Right observation, wrong explanation. It's not 1931 and not 1967. Today's battered America is not boiling with rage. It's mostly anaesthetized. People dance, stroll, dress up, and go (in fact) to the movies. They stand outside themselves, watching in slo-mo. Even people who take action are somehow inert. Things happen to them.

All decades get the gangster movies they deserve.