Heat

(4K) “For me, the sun rises and sets with her, man.” Mann’s great tragedy. Writing about the masterwork that is Heat is hard to do. This isn’t just a film that I love. It’s one that I rank in the absolute highest of esteem. My second favorite film of all time. Sometimes I wonder if it’s my favorite. Truth is, I owe a lot to it. A lot. I think a lot of the avenues that I would embark upon which led me to actually look at films as something that I wanted to sincerely consume and take in and develop an appreciation for can be traced back to Heat. I remember finding a VHS tape copy for three dollars at a flea market, having just a vague enough understanding that Al Pacino and Robert De Niro were big deals, highly applauded actors (I was a growing Jack Nicholson truther first and foremost at this time but knew that De Niro and Pacino came with a similarly high level of prestige) and that anything with both of these guys in it must have been something to take seriously. That impulse led the sixteen year old version of me down a rabbit hole. I’m not sure that I would jump at the work of Martin Scorsese with De Niro when I did if I didn’t first find Heat. I’m not sure that I would take the chance, at the time that I did, on visceral films like Dog Day Afternoon and Serpico if I don’t first find Heat. And I am almost certain that I needed this to be my gateway drug to Michael Mann. With this, I found Collateral. With this, I found Thief. With this, I found Manhunter. The summer that I found Heat, Good Will Hunting and Fight Club fundamentally defined my first conscious attempts to examine a movie and reconcile with what it made me feel and what I actually took away from it. Heat rocked my world. And, all this time later, it still does. It’s no breaking news or revelatory statement to say that Michael Mann focuses a lot on men. Obsessive men. Men who are hardened and disciplined by the institution of prison or their morally murky professions. Men who cut all ties that bind for the sake of self preservation. His films, for all the flash and the bang, for all the impressive gunplay and moments of decidedly undramatic and not exaggerated violence, have a tendency to come with this huge weight of loneliness because of that. That’s the thing that I found myself most taken aback by on this most recent viewing. All told, I’ve seen Heat probably seven or eight times in my life by now. But I’ve very deliberately made my viewings the past few years somewhat sporadic, as if I need to savor it. It’s almost sacred to me. I’m not sure how necessary it is to do that, but it’s proven effective because the film feels like a punch to the chest each and every time I come back to it. But this time I was struck most deftly by the heavy emotional weight and the sense of futility that the whole thing is just drenched in. There really is never one moment that I can pinpoint where you really believe that anything these two men have in their immediate lives is built to last. Really, I don’t think Michael Mann’s screenplay gets talked about enough for how compact and clean it is. I’ve never judged movies on logic or realism. If everything else is firing on all cylinders, I can forgive when a plot asks me to suspend my disbelief or if it takes a leap to get somewhere. But there is nothing in Heat that leaves me scratching my head or stopping to question the practicality of what is happening. Things that you think are going to matter ultimately don’t, some characters make baffling decisions even when the most obvious and safer choice is right in front of them, other characters break everything we’ve been led to presume about them when pressed. Just like life. Just like real people. The real world is confusing and harsh and impartial, and that’s the world that Heat very concretely occupies. Mann’s script makes sure to cover as much ground as it can without leaning hard into exposition or conveniences. He also does an exceptional job of just dropping you into this world with these people. The opening moments of Heat are bizarrely tranquil and casual compared to the rest of the film. Neil McCauley might just be a paramedic, Chris Shiherlis might just be picking up hardware. He strikes an interesting balance with how uninterested he is in offering much of a formal introduction to his protagonists and how much work he does to flesh them out without stopping outright to read them off like a Wikipedia page. We know McCauley is a jailbird. We know he is doing everything he can to never go back. We know Chris is a gambler, that he’s shit with money. We know that Hanna has tried to be a married man and failed, and is continuing to fail. The amount of character work and context and established history he has behind so many of these people is all the more fascinating when you consider that we went damn near thirty years without even the notion that we might come back to this world, before he ever put pen to paper on the novelized sequel or announced his intentions to develop a second film. The world of Heat is lived in and robust. Its characters are complicated and inconsistent, like real people. And that was the angle of the story that really lingered with me across the runtime upon this most recent viewing. Mann makes no bones about showing the flaws in the world view that his two central protagonists apply to themselves. Neil McCauley is a walking contradiction, something that he pays for. Consistently across the film, he hammers home a mantra about no attachments, no commitments. Even his home is barren, impermanent. But it’s made abundantly clear that he feels a great deal of loyalty towards Chris, sticking his neck out for him on more than one occasion and in more than one way, sometimes in situations that he has no real inclination to act on. You can see the lingering remorse in his eyes when surrounded by his crew and the lives that they are (barely) making for themselves. Hanna notices that he’s the loner, but I’ve always chosen to believe that Neil is lying to Eady when he says that he is alone, but he’s not lonely. His entire downfall is because he could not let Waingro go, even when the heat around the corner is as hot as it has ever been. Mann recognizes that this is a man who does not adhere to his own code, and he punishes him for it. Not even so much by killing him, but by dragging others into his mess and showing fleeting promises of a life that he will never have. That’s where the switch up with his approach to Vincent Hanna is most fascinating to me. Very real argument to be made that Hanna is far closer to the man that Neil envisions himself to be. McCauley yearns for normalcy and chases after it when it threatens to run away from him after he’s gotten a taste of it, and admits as much. He only runs away from it just after the chance for freedom has escaped him and he’s doomed himself. Hanna, on the other hand, does everything but face the idea of living a normal life. He is constantly evading life at home, he is constantly on the prowl. He is most alive and energized when on the hunt. The passive disinterest he displays in his wife would almost make him unsympathetic if not for his affection for his stepdaughter, a byproduct of the obvious protector impulse that he can’t overcome. Vincent can’t not be chasing after something, can’t not think about putting away an external threat. That could be a master career criminal or his stepdaughter’s deteriorating mental health. The fascinating thing about both of these men is that they aren’t really in touch with themselves at all. Hanna calls out McCauley’s vacant lifestyle, prods him about walking out on a relationship. Neil acts as if that’s the easiest thing in the world to do. But when they’re both faced with situations that require them to do exactly that? Vincent all but skips and bounds down those hospital steps to abandon his doomed marriage for the hunt, Neil only does it because he knows he has to if he wants to get away. It’s the character work present in Heat and the nature of the film itself that really make me stop and look at this one with the age old, certainly overused, mindset that you truly couldn’t make something like this today. The only immediate contemporary comparison that I can even comprehend is the uniting of DiCaprio and Pitt for Hollywood. But the thought of a three hour marriage between crime saga and romantic tragedy being built almost entirely around the promise of seeing two men share scenes together just seems unfathomable in this era. Somehow, those handful of moments when Robert De Niro and Al Pacino are onscreen together feel every bit as earth shattering now as I imagine they did then. The entire film is based around the hunt and the chase and the collision course so when they do intermittently collide, it feels appropriately grand and colossal. The poignancy of the two of them sitting across that diner table and quietly confronting the ugly truths about themselves through one another is still so masterfully executed. But for all the near perfect character work and the tight plotting and the meticulously laid out chess board of the story, Heat is still a crime epic. Christopher Nolan has outright described part of the process behind The Dark Knight as ripping this film off (to glorious results in his own right) and it’s so easy to see how. There’s a beautifully practical sense of tangibility in the set pieces here. That opening armored truck heist is crushing and gritty. That iconic shootout sequence will never lose its raw power. Some of the most masterful use of sound design that I have ever heard. I always think I’m prepared for the scream of those machine guns and somehow I never am. I am always impressed by how quick and visceral the violence in Mann’s films are (especially later on in something like Collateral) and even here, people die quickly and unflatteringly. Bullets tear through you and your body lurches forward, black shit will come out of your ears with enough blunt trauma. Gritty, physical action filmmaking of the highest order. And to top it off, Dante Spinotti is a god. Los Angeles nights have never looked so vast and seedy. His shooting is vast, big and spacious. Heat is many things, but a small film is not one of them. It’s very much focused on the big picture, from the opening on the railroad to the closing moments at the airfield. It’s fitting that Mann is the king of Los Angeles and that Heat is the best that it has ever looked this side of, again, Once Upon a Time in Hollywood. Spinotti successfully manages to give nocturnal L.A. a lurking, creeping atmosphere but also gives it the same lawless aura of the Wild West. A postmodern bullshit apocalyptic wasteland. Hard to think of a moment that just has the juice (whatever or however you qualify such a thing) as Vincent Hanna racing down the highway after dark to tail down and pull over Neil McCauley with Moby’s thunderous cover of New Dawn Fades booming in your speakers. I’m sure I’ll read this back and kick myself for not mentioning something else or other. But what I do know: Heat is the greatest cops and robbers film ever made, largely because it’s really just a story about people. Men who delude themselves until they can’t do it anymore. Men who find kindred spirits in their institutional enemies because they’re the only people who can see each other, really, for who they are. Men who wreck everything around them for their own bullshit, but still find it in themselves to love at least one or two people, whether they want to or not. It’s New Year’s Eve and I’m here, once again, crying to God Moving Over the Face of the Waters.