Public Enemies (Original Motion Picture Soundtrack)

Album Review

The soundtrack to Michael Mann's 2009 film Public Enemies, which centers on the life of criminal John Dillinger in the 1930s, a time when the public enemies list was exactly that — public — and was followed daily like a baseball box score, with the good guys winning sometimes and the bad guys winning sometimes (and yes, everyone was keeping score), unwinds with its own story to tell, one that ends up being a tragic love story, among other things. The sequence is wonderfully atmospheric in spots, moving from track to track almost like in a dream, thanks to the portions of the score by Elliot Goldenthal that are included, and also thanks to tracks like Diana Krall's hushed reimagining of "Bye Bye Blackbird" (a song at the very heart of the film's plot) and Blind Willie Johnson's haunting, wordless moan (which is echoed by his beautiful slide guitar playing) "Dark Was the Night, Cold Was the Ground," originally released on 78 by Columbia Records in 1929. Things start off with a bang, though, with Otis Taylor's driving, modal banjo monster "Ten Million Slaves," which drives its point home and thunders off like a runaway train on steroids. At the other end of the alley, Goldenthal's "Drive to Bohemia" is ghostly, soothing, and brief as the moment it underscores and defines in the film. Some soundtrack albums work all on their own apart from the film they were assembled to support, and some, of course, don't work so well stripped of the visual association. This one, thankfully, is haunting and memorable all on its own, flowing with it's own pacing and telling its own story, ending, in this case, in darkness and tears and Johnson's otherworldly slide guitar.