As Michael Mann’s Public Enemies comes closer to opening, it’s reasonable for movie pundits to calculate whether this may be the picture where Johnny Depp gets his Oscar at last. Why not? He’s 46. He’s playing the spectacular lead, John Dillinger, and Depp has been knocking at the door (somewhat shyly) for years now. But don’t forget that Christian Bale is playing Melvin Purvis, the G-man who eventually nails Dillinger. And if you remember the remake of 3.10 to Yuma, it wasn’t the swagger of Ben Foster and Russell Crowe that stayed in the mind. Theirs were flashy or lazy performances, compared with the haunted gaze and stillness of Bale as the ordinary man who had seen that he was going to die.These days, Bale seems to be everywhere: he was John Connor in Terminator Salvation just a few weeks ago and he has been Bruce Wayne in Batman Begins and The Dark Knight. He might have guessed during that last film that Heath Ledger was turning in the starry performance, but that didn’t stop Bale pursuing the most interesting and depressive Wayne the Batman franchise has given us. Christian Bale is a real movie actor.

Don’t be surprised. Twenty-two years ago, Bale delivered one of the greatest screen performances ever by a child – he was the boy (based on the real JG Ballard), the artful dodger of the Japanese internment camp in Steven Spielberg’s Empire of the Sun. For me, that is still Spielberg’s best film. But Bale’s acting in it reminds me of 3.10 to Yuma. The kid he plays is parent-free and on the loose. He’s at liberty in such a way that he’s regressing to the state of some feral creature. At the same time, he risks death every day and is swept on by a quite mad dream of heroism and glory. Bale is driven by a music he hears, and he is so good in his scenes with John Malkovich and Joe Pantoliano that you can see how easily the child could be corrupted out of hero-worship. With Miranda Richardson, he glimpses sex and motherhood, and hardly knows whether to adore her or strike her down. I’ll be amazed if Depp’s Dillinger is a quarter as frightening.

So Bale is owed – because no one even nominated him for Empire of the Sun. He was a kid from Haverfordwest in Pembrokeshire, and he was a boy in Branagh’s Henry V as well as Jim Hawkins to Charlton Heston’s Long John Silver. He was a youth in Prince of Jutland, The Portrait of a Lady, Little Women and The Secret Agent. He even played Jesus for television in Mary, Mother of Jesus.

Playing Jesus isn’t always a good career move, but Bale bounced back with one of the coolest of modern monsters – Patrick Bateman in the film of American Psycho. That wasn’t a great picture, and it was a project where the film’s makers may have been too nervous to proceed. But Bale’s ability to make the phrase “clean-cut” horribly ambiguous was both unnerving and compelling. He was capable of so much more, and he had the face of a handsome young man who had seen dread and annihilation – it was truly the kid from the internment camp come of age.

That was nine years ago, and in the time since, Bale has waited and gone into hard training. He has taken unexpected directions, eschewing star parts, but developing all the time – Captain Corelli’s Mandolin, Laurel Canyon, The Machinist, The New World, Werner Herzog’s Rescue Dawn, The Prestige. Indeed, he’s acted as if he felt like a character actor, and as if he saw no reason why anyone could expect to be mature until 35 or so – his age now. If I were Johnny Depp, I’d be worried – after all, you know what Depp’s going to do in Public Enemies, don’t you? He’s going to shoot you down and grin – it’s an old movie habit. But the killers on the side of the law are often darker figures, because they believe it is their duty. Ever since Empire of the Sun it has been clear that Bale understands madness, and can do it without being melodramatic.

Source: Guardian Uk