Heat, p.1
Heat, page 1
BFI Modern Classics
Rob White
Series Editor
BFI Modern Classics is a series of critical studies of films produced over the last three decades. An array of writers explore their chosen films, offering a range of perspectives on the dominant art and entertainment medium in contemporary culture. The series gathers together snapshots of our passion for and understanding of recent movies.
Also Published
Jaws
Antonia Quirke
Eyes Wide Shut
Michel Chion
(see a full list of titles in the series at the back of this book)
Forthcoming
City of Sadness
Berenice Reynaud
Dilwale Dulhaniya Le Jeyenge
Anupama Chopra
The Idiots
John Rockwell
LA Confidential
Manohla Dargis
To Kate and Cora
Contents
Acknowledgments
1 Heat – A Bully of a Film
2 Michael Mann – Styling the Real Thing
3 ‘The action is the juice’
4 Blue Interlude
5 Drinking in the Dark
6 Face to Face
7 Concrete Canyons
8 Los Angeles
Appendix – L.A. Takedown
Notes
Credits
Acknowledgments
This book would not have been possible without the generous and copious aid of my friend and L.A. spy Manohla Dargis, the advice of Vicky Wilson, the research assistance of Paramjit Rai, Christen Lumen and Jonny Bug, Miles Ogborn, and the painstaking editorial encouragement and support of Rob White and his colleagues, not to mention my own at Sight and Sound.
Michael Mann, Al Pacino and Robert De Niro on the coffee-shop set
1 Heat – A Bully of a Film
I’d like to know what’s behind that grim look on your face.
Diane Venora’s Justine to Al Pacino’s Vincent Hanna
It was in 1996, at the Warner West End cinema (now the Warner Village) on Leicester Square, that Heat was previewed for the UK magazine press and I saw it for the first time. I want to recall the circumstances of that screening because Heat, as one of its characters might say, ‘goes deep with me’. Its treatment of work, destiny and male identity – themes rehearsed with fierce solemnity by its two stars Robert De Niro and Al Pacino – moves me to a stronger degree than anything in most of the art-house films of the 1990s. Yet this admiration for Heat is not easy to justify, not so much because the film is a violent portrait of a criminal crew and their relentless cop pursuer, one that celebrates machismo when I hope I’m usually looking for a cinema of sensitivity and maturity, but more because, in its ambition to be a tragic crime epic of the plazas, back lots and intersections of L.A., it often comes close to overkill.
Writer-director Michael Mann’s script uses a rhetoric of existential motivation that’s sometimes so hectoring it’s like being prodded incessantly in the chest. Yet this threatening up-closeness is all of a piece with the mood of troubled masculinity. You’re meant to be uncomfortable with these men because their directness is defensive, and you can tell that underneath their bravado they are twitchily uncomfortable with themselves. Pomposity and self-righteousness are as much a part of their armoury as automatic weapons.
Night train in the mist
Another obstacle to Heat’s claims to be a modern classic is the script’s earlier manifestation in the television movie L.A. Takedown (1989). At times, reminders of this network television progenitor – a gaudy come-on to the epic movie’s sombre pleasures – make it hard to revere Heat as more than an exaggerated heist movie.
But, as I hope I will show, Heat is much more than that and in 1996 it thrilled me (and not for the last time). Waiting for the film to start, many of the male reviewers around me were anxious to be impressed. Mann had by then become a respected figure for action buffs, with such cult successes as Thief (1981), Manhunter (1986) and The Last of the Mohicans (1992). The film cognoscenti were also present at the screening: archivists, historians and BBC programmers. As the film started, the high brightness of the projection made it hard to forget those around me. (A friend hadn’t shown up. The tension of waiting jangled with the mood of submission.) You could almost hear the fans in black T-shirts muttering, ‘Michael, please don’t fuck it up.’
I admit, I had a similar predisposition and it may be that an indulgent atmosphere aids the enjoyment of such a grim-faced film, because it helps the viewer to go along with the strident insistence of its two protagonists, the thief and the thief-taker, on the purity of their lethal trades. By five minutes in, the film’s dazzling craft had banished all my peripheral anxiety. The bombastic dialogue seemed only appropriate to the single-minded élan of the project. Heat’s opening scenes are so exactly composed, yet so riven with suspense, they envelop the viewer, sealing absolute attention. They are worth describing in detail.
Through flurries of steam a night train glides towards us. It has three headlights like the dots on dice, one above two below, and it bears the legend ‘Los Angeles’. The keening string music we hear over the credits and throughout this scene is set at such a low volume it feels as if there’s a sound level problem. Then the train brakes screech loud.
The wide-angle reverse shot that succeeds the opening shot reveals an elevated station of elegant recent design, with the train now squeezing away from us to a halt. The shot treats the track lines and the station’s contours – pierced from below by a stake-like escalator well – as near-abstract elements. These shots set such a high standard of pictorial quality that already the viewer is confident of watching an exquisitely designed film. (Any sudden foreground sound throughout this hushed opening sequence has that heightened, intrusive quality experienced in the murmur of early morning.) And symbolically we might be aware that we are about to watch a film about two characters who run along set rails through the night, unable to deviate.
Alighting from the train is Neil McCauley (played by Robert De Niro). Wary but determined, dark hair neat and sleek, goatee beard trimmed very close, he is wearing a grey boiler suit with the collar turned up. We see him descend the escalator, which seems unusually steep, his eyes flicking left and right, a folder in his left hand. As he heads for the hospital across the street, an overhead shot registers another abstract element – a road marking in the form of a stubby curved arrow placed centre screen and pointing towards the top right – which McCauley crosses diagonally in the opposite direction. With casual assurance he strides past a statue in the courtyard (a pietà, which prefigures the film’s ending), through the ER unit, past computer banks and gory surgical scenes in side rooms, and out to the parking bay, where he steals an ambulance. Immense self-control and efficiency are expressed by his every move. His precision mirrors that of the film itself when in its procedural mode: simple, pared-down, Mellevillian action.
In a construction goods yard in bright morning sunlight, a shrewd-looking elderly sales clerk in a crash helmet and pebble-thick glasses lays a casket marked ‘explosives’ on a desk for his young pony-tailed customer. The customer, Chris Shiherlis (Val Kilmer), shows him an Arizona driving licence and the deal is done.
Vincent and Justine, a well-preserved middle-aged couple (we recognise Al Pacino as Vincent and maybe Diane Venora as Justine), make tentative early morning love in bed in a modern, hi-tech house. Vincent showers and then Justine, enjoying a post-coital cigarette, asks if he’s taking her somewhere for breakfast – he can’t, he says, because he’s meeting ‘Bosko’. Justine’s pre-teen daughter Lauren (Natalie Portman) is near hysterical because her natural father is half an hour late to pick her up and she can’t find her barrettes. Justine tries to calm her, having herself already swallowed a handful of Prozac.
A muscular, long-haired man wearing wrap-around shades and a grubby black T-shirt (Kevin Gage) exits the toilet of a Mexican café and asks at the counter for a drink refill. Seeing a huge green Persill recovery truck pull up, he runs towards it and clambers up to the door. The tough-looking driver blocks him and asks him his name. ‘Waingro’, he says and is let in. He asks the driver, Michael Cheritto (Tom Sizemore), about the ‘real tight crew’ he’s working with today. Cheritto says, ‘Stop talking would you slick?’ Waingro removes his shades and stares at him as if answering a challenge, but Cheritto doesn’t notice.
We see McCauley waiting in the ambulance with Shiherlis beside him. A moustachioed Latino man, Trejo (Danny Trejo), calls on a walkie-talkie from his car: he’s tailing the target armoured truck, giving a precise run-down as to when it will appear at the chosen spot. It is seconds away. McCauley switches on the ambulance siren and pulls in front of the truck. Cheritto guns his recovery truck into life. It builds up speed as it runs beneath the freeway. Cheritto’s rig slams into the armoured truck with such force it upsets the truck onto its side, shoving a whole row of dealer cars several feet back. There’s a moment’s pause as a severed strip of the dealer’s blue bunting gently descends.
The crew, in metal ice-hockey masks, bulletproof vests and carrying automatic weapons, run to surround the truck, waiting to put a stopwatch on as soon as they hear the police alarm call given out on the radio. Shiherlis (the only one wearing a black mask instead of white) positions an explosive shape charge on the door, stands back and sets it off. The impact shatters the windscreens of the dealer cars. McCauley goes inside and hustles out the three guards whose ears are leaking blood and wax. Waingro guards them while Shiherlis rifles through the pa ckages. Trejo runs a line of tyre-slashers across the street.
McCauley descending
Waingro stares at Cherrito
The windscreens shatter
The staring guard
McCauley orders the execution
Waingro, irritated by the wide-eyed stare of one of the guards, pistol-whips him. ‘Cut that out would you slick,’ Cheritto tells him, pointing out that the guards can’t hear him because their eardrums have burst. As soon as Shiherlis finds the package he runs to the ambulance; the others are about to do the same when Waingro, still spooked by the guard’s stare, shoots him dead. A second guard then goes for a concealed pistol and is gunned down. Cheritto has the third unarmed guard in his sights, McCauley nods and Cheritto executes him.
As the crew take off their overalls in the ambulance, McCauley disarms Waingro and demands to know what happened. The tyre shredders take out patrol cars arriving at the scene. A few blocks away the crew abandon the ambulance. Shiherlis sets fire to it with all the costumes, weapons and equipment inside.
What was so remarkable about this in 1996? I was immediately impressed by how seriously Mann took this genre subject and by the expense lavished on the film’s look of heightened realism. The criminal crew here seems as efficient and well resourced as a Special Forces military unit but the illusion of plausibility holds. Despite the automatic rifles, bulletproof vests, steel masks and the like, you never feel as if you’re watching a James Bond film. The criminals give off an air of businesslike neatness (the psychopathic Waingro excepted). They are yuppie villains, whose tidy approach to armed robbery seems to match the 1990s idea of minimalist chic. None of them displays the overt muscularity common to action-movie heroes and villains of the time. Their use of explosives is discreet: designed expressly to avoid the great orange cinematic explosions that are such a signature in the films of Mann’s producer contemporaries such as Don Simpson, Jerry Bruckheimer and Joel Silver. The shape charge on the truck is felt as pressure, shattering eardrums and windscreens, not seen as pyrotechnics – even the torched ambulance belches flame without disintegrating.
There’s time amid the finger-snapping rush of a suspenseful heist for Mann to include that one moment of calm when the bunting drifts down.
The sound, movement and editing of this opening sequence is orchestrated exactly to mesh with the surging drama of the signature music – electronically treated strings, played by the Kronos Quartet. You could feel by the second how these scenes were raising audience expectations of the realistic action thriller – not only in the aesthetic terms of scale, design and appropriate restraint, but in suspense terms of timing, firepower and tactics. The throbbing of diesel engines merges with the distorted string drone. Machine-gun bursts seem timed to add percussion. Heat’s action moves are grounded in the real but their ambition, invention and stylised violence challenge the thrill-count of even John Woo’s fantasy action blockbusters.
The armoured car robbery quickly triggers fateful consequences. The crew make enemies of the bearer bonds’ owner, money launderer Roger Van Zant, and of Waingro when they try and fail to kill him for murdering the guard. Cheritto’s use of the term ‘slick’ puts Hanna and his men onto the crew while McCauley the perfectionist is distracted by a love affair. A second robbery is aborted because the cops are watching and a third leads to a bloody denouement.
And yet much of the time Heat is a sobering, rather slow action movie: a move-by-move policier staged in front of the big canvas of Los Angeles, and based on a true story told to Mann by Chuck Stevens, a former cop who had tracked down and killed a thief he admired professionally in the Chicago of the late 1960s. It is also, of course, fraught with male anxiety about women, work and violence.
This bully of a film hustles you along on its own terms, yet it is also confident enough to throw up contradictions in its wake, to leave a great deal of the interpretation to the viewer. Violent crime film, tragic epic, heist movie, realistic thriller, sobering action movie, policier, melodrama – by using all these terms in trying to pin down what I enjoy about Heat (and what disturbs me) I have intimated what a slippery behemoth it is to define, much more so than such typical recent Hollywood genre hybrids as Terminator II: Judgement Day (1991) or Natural Born Killers (1994), which are barely on speaking terms with realism.
This difficulty with Heat has been acknowledged elsewhere. J. A. Lindstrom in his Jump Cut article ‘Heat: Work and Genre’ reports that ‘reviewers were curiously uncertain as to what the film was about’.1 He cites the variance in attempts to categorise Heat from the New York Times, Variety, Hollywood Reporter, L.A. Times and Newsweek reviews. Richard Combs in Film Comment goes further, arguing that the film ‘gives off a blankness, an indeterminacy, that frustrates interpretation … it’s not easy to delve into, to find significance or resonance in its detail’.2
For me, rather than blankness, the obstacle to reading Heat is its fulsome ambivalence, its teeming contradictions: the tug-of-war between realism and myth, instinct and perfectionism, politics and pleasure, minimalism and brashness and the aesthetic confusion that attends its great ambition. There have been many complex heist movies about greed, deceit and destiny – Stanley Kubrick’s The Killing (1956), Jules Dassin’s Rififi (1955) and Quentin Tarantino’s Reservoir Dogs (1991) for instance – and slowly unfolding procedural sagas such as Sidney Lumet’s Prince of the City (1981) and Q&A (1990) are forerunners of another sort (although too bound up in courtroom exposition to be close relatives). Lindstrom has traced Heat’s thematic concerns back to Raoul Walsh’s James Cagney vehicle White Heat (1949) and to John Huston’s The Asphalt Jungle (1950)3 – which Jean-Pierre Melville claimed had all nineteen variations of his favourite cops and robbers situation in the one film.4 Heat may not add a twentieth but no other film I can think of so audaciously spins out the consequences of armed robbery over so long a screen time, so grippingly. It has flavours all its own, this film, and it may be that the very bombast I complain about is the decisive ingredient in making it a modern classic.
2 Michael Mann – Styling the Real Thing
Of all the ambivalences that make Heat such a high-wire act, none is more extreme than the contrast between Mann’s desire for a hard factual basis to his films and the gleaming, hyper-real end result. Though his crime scenes are compellingly realistic, there is much about Heat that approaches myth at the expense of concrete believability. The sense of these hyperbolic cops and felons as real people, in a real environment, gets obscured as much by the theatricality of the film’s speechifying as by the thrills of the action genre – let alone the studied elegance of Dante Spinotti’s compositions. Still, as we shall see, Michael Mann does insist on authenticity.
Believing myself that the ‘death of the author’ has been greatly exaggerated by theorists, and that the intentions of such a notorious perfectionist as Mann are genetically encoded into every frame of Heat, my approach is first to look at the director’s own assessment of his work. At the same time, in considering how far from pure genre such a hybrid epic can be pushed, curiosity should ensure that I examine as many facets as the film plausibly offers. Some of these may show that, in its effort to contain the authentic within a mythic ‘cops ’n’ robbers’ universe, Mann’s vision is sometimes corrupted and made strange even to its author by its own contradictions.
When the film was first released, Mann’s strategy was to ward off all attempts at pigeonholing. ‘Heat is a drama not a genre piece,’ he told Interview magazine.5 ‘The crime story … is initially discrete, then it fuses with the personal stories in the fateful and sometimes doom-laden decisions each person has to make.’ Similarly, he told the Sunday Times, ‘None of us viewed Heat as an action movie or genre movie. I deliberately didn’t allow the crime story to drive the plot. I wanted to tell a human drama, something like a classical tragedy.’6 Having seen how indeterminate the reviews were to be about which category Heat would fit into, the softness of Mann’s own definition suggests he wasn’t too sure himself – except for his conviction that the film was more than a genre movie and that it had a tragic dimension. For me Heat is mostly an expert crime procedural movie, yet sometimes it achieves a level of dramatic pleasure and complexity beyond such confines. What these aspects are I explore later, but Mann’s insistence on Heat being both a character piece and ‘something approaching a classical tragedy’ is revealing as much for its nervousness about the genre tag as for its vaunting artistic claims.
