Thief (Michael Mann, 1981)

Back in January I wrote about Michael Mann's incredible theatrical debut Thief (one of the best feature debuts ever, even if Mann had a significant amount of experience by the time he got around to it) for Film.com. It's a hell of a movie, and Criterion's Blu-Ray of it is unimpeachable, restoring the film to its full visual power after years of being stuck with a non-anamorphic, dull transfer on home video. An early contender for a best Criterion releases of the year list. But it's the film that really matters, so check out my thoughts on it over at Film.com.

Criminally Underrated: Miami Vice

I've written about my turn-around on Miami Vice before, a few thoughts of which are echoed in this piece for Spectrum Culture arguing it as an underrated work. That old positive review was still reluctant to use the word "masterpiece," but my love for the film has only grown in the years since I confessed the wrong-headedness of my initial pan. These days, I consider it second only to Spielberg's A.I. as the finest American film of the '00s, and I hope I make a convincing case for it.

My full article is up at Spectrum Culture.

Second Thoughts: Public Enemies

[Edited: 7/21/2012]

The majority of mainstream critical opinion largely matched my initial reaction to Michael Mann's Public Enemies -- that it was an overlong, undercooked mash-up of the epic detail and design of Heat with the digital realism of Collateral and Miami Vice. Some reviews, however, have already flagged it as a modern masterpiece. Spirited, well-written defenses can be found all over the Web, with some of my particular favorites located at Kevin J. Olson's Hugo Stiglitz Makes Movies and Doniphon's The Long Voyage Home. They, among others, argue that the disjointed minimalism of Public Enemies works to its benefit, not detriment, that the seemingly underdeveloped characters remain largely two-dimensional in our perception because Mann is using them to undermine the more romantic notions of the gangster genre.

Upon a second viewing, and after revisiting a number of Mann's other films and especially Miami Vice, I can appreciate and, to an extent, accept that argument. Public Enemies strikes me as the gangster equivalent of Jarhead: an attempt to demystify the allure of gangster violence the way Jarhead sought to deny the belief (stated within the film) that all war films inherently celebrate conflict due to their visceral content. It's a bold gambit, and a risky one, as Mendes' film went so far in the other direction that it perversely fulfilled its mission statement by being simply boring, a charge leveled at Mann's latest by its detractors.


Public Enemies opens in true Mann fashion, with only the sparest dialogue over shots of gangster John Dillinger (Johnny Depp) arriving at prison and hastily edited visual cues that reveal how he's already organized his escape with his incarcerated gang. The escape, as it must, goes awry, Dillinger's perfect plan foiled by the predictable influence of unpredictability. One of the gang loses his cool and beats a guard, resulting in the shooting of another guard and the subsequent alerting of the rest of the prison. As the crew makes a break for the getaway car, tower guards shoot and kill Walter, the only gang member Dillinger displayed any personal connection toward during the breakout, and Mann lingers on Dillinger as he watches the life fade from his friend's eyes and, at last, releases the man's hand as the car speeds away.

This moment references the protracted deaths in Miami Vice, which all seemed to drag out because of the digital video and the way it captured movement (bodies fell more slowly, it appeared), yet Mann ends with moment with curt finality, the body suddenly halting after being dragged along by the car. Dillinger pulls a gun as he closes the door and presses it to the throat of the man who botched the escape, before throwing him from the car and leaving his limp body on the side of the road as suddenly as he'd just seen his friend die. This immediate perversion of the romanticism of the previous death, combined with the look on Depp's face -- his eyes are as lifeless as the ones he stared into -- shows the real Dillinger under all the Robin Hood myths. Here is a man who compartmentalized emotion and dissipated it instantaneously, a man who would kill without a moment's hesitation.

This abrupt, immediate dissection of a mythos is then applied to FBI agent Melvin Purvis (Christian Bale), whom we meet chasing Pretty Boy Floyd (Channing Tatum) through a field before dispatching him with a well-aimed rifle shot. Purvis has the same brooding look on his face as he watches Floyd bleed out, and he too steels himself from it, dumping whatever he felt just as quickly as it entered into his mind. I found the film soulless when I saw it in the theater, and I still think that's true; what I missed, perhaps in the thrill of finally seeing a Mann film on the big screen, is that it's because its lead characters have no souls.

The casting of the two leads reflects upon Mann's cheek. Depp, one of the most vivid, complexly cartoonish actors in the biz, plays his role entirely straight; his eyes have conveyed rakishness and danger before -- the Pirates of the Caribbean films come to mind -- but never with such cold intensity, not even when he played the tortured barber out for revenge in Sweeney Todd. He looks like a caged animal in Public Enemies, always looking for a way out even when things aren't so bad. Dillinger enjoyed a massive cult of personality during his robbery spree, sparked by his Robin Hood-esque refusal to take the money of customers, only the bank's. Mann, however, sees him as nothing more than a pathological criminal, driven to rob as if a biological need and willing to kill anyone who might threaten his safety.


Bale, coming off a string of blockbusters that were turning him into the growling, tough-guy hero of the new generation, plays a character every bit as blindly committed to simple-minded, borderline fascistic notions of justice and the law. Purvis stands up for J. Edgar Hoover (a deliciously campy Billy Crudup, who appears to be channeling all of Hoover's fetishes and kinks through his clipped, high-pitched whine) and meticulously follows the book on catching felons even though it's still being written. He believes in a code of ethics in his work, yet he displays a remarkable ability to dash that code in a moment's notice to catch a suspect. Dillinger naturally attracts our attention, with both the benefit of owning more screen time and of the seductive nature of crime in general, but Purvis is the true Mann protagonist: a man who violates his strict moral code despite placing utmost importance upon it. Bale here is Batman and John Connor used to ironic purpose to highlight the dubious ethics of lawmen given liberties to pursue criminals without oversight, an implicit political statement that Mann never forces onto the narrative.

The closest we get to character exposition from either comes from a romantically terse exchange between Dillinger and Billie Frechette (Marion Cotillard), a coat-check girl who catches the robber's eye. When he punches out a customer and invites her to come with him, the two engage in that pat nonsense of "I don't even know you!" that comes with such whisk-you-off-your-feet moments, but Dillinger manages to sum up his life in a burst of dialogue that might be the first truly romantic thing he's ever said in his life: "I was raised on a farm in Moooresville, Indiana. My mama ran out on us when I was three, my daddy beat the hell out of me cause he didn't know no better way to raise me. I like baseball, movies, good clothes, fast cars, whiskey and you... what else you need to know?"

It's an attitude that pervades the picture as a whole: Mann is less concerned with what motivates these characters than how their actions define them, and that brief speech manages to be oddly charming while working as a sly dig at all the movies who take two hours to explain a criminal's behavior as the product of a bad childhood and greed. We're never given a reason for Dillinger robbing banks, nor even moments that show him taking pleasure in a large haul; yet the clinical way he runs his robberies, the way he lets the customers keep the money they have on them to build his mythos and to win over the hearts of ordinary citizens who might protect him simply in numbers, and his curt behavior in everyday situations reveal a calculating psychopath who knows how to manipulate things to his advantage. Likewise, Purvis, also clinical, betrays his code of conduct because he wants to succeed at his job, and if Dillinger will kill anyone to save his own skin, Purvis will cut any ethical corner to track down a criminal.


Yet each man has his limits. Dillinger, icy and murderous as he may be, clearly cares for Billie, and obviously not for any boost in social status either. He loves her so dearly that he even listens to her life story, and Mann places the sound of Billie recounting her childhood over shots of the two making love, signifying that allowing someone to delve into their past -- something Dillinger doesn't believe in -- is an act of spiritual unification and adoration every bit as physically romantic as sex. Purvis also displays his humanity with Billie; when the feds capture her and one agent beats her for information, until Purvis can no longer sit by and acquiesce to the loss of his morality and stops the torture.

Mann's films typically feature a confrontation of sorts between the "hero" and "villain" (that line is usually blurred) -- Miami Vice sitting at one extreme, where the entire film is about interactions between cops and criminals before the final battle, and at the other is The Insider, which derives much of its tension by assailing Jeffrey Wigand with unseen forces -- and Dillinger and Purvis do have a conversation about 50 minutes into the film, as Dillinger sits in a cell awaiting transfer after the cops catch a lucky break. The two establish an instant kinship with each other: neither derives much pleasure from his line of work -- only the more psychotic members of each side, such as Baby Face Nelson (Stephen Graham), express any delight -- and they share an unspoken bond when Dillinger brings up death and the way you can see life drift from the eyes. The diner scene in Heat revealed basic truths of Neil McCauley and Vincent Hanna and how they related to each other, and this scene works in the same fashion: Dillinger cuts to the heart of their differences by noting that Purvis likes to take criminals down from a distance, picking them off with a rifle shot after a plan comes together and the bad guys are outnumbered, while John is in the middle of a fracas, planning as he goes. They're both empty-hearted killers, but Purvis attempts to distance himself from this self-understanding.

The proximity of this confrontation to the similar pre-showdown battle of wits in Heat reflects the manner in which Public Enemies serves as a stylistic and thematic mélange of the director's filmography. It contains the same highly detailed crime procedural found in Heat, the minimalism of Thief, the grainy romanticism of digital forays Collateral and Miami Vice, the faithful period recreation of The Last of the Mohicans and the unorthodox biopic structuring of Ali. It builds to an overload of Mann's various styles, and, frankly, it doesn't always work. Surprisingly, the picture looks sharper on Blu-Ray, the shifting digital and film shots not clashing so violently as they did in the theater; however, I still find myself wanting to take in this world and being constantly denied.

But if Public Enemies serves as a grab-bag of Mann's corpus, it also is perhaps the one film in his catalog that most concerns the cinema or, more accurately, the effect of the cinema. The people who endured the Great Depression, as many do now in our current financial predicament, escaped to the theater for respite. Furthermore, this was the age before television, when people received news either on the radio or as newsreels that preceded features at the movies (when Dillinger is transferred by plane, Mann shows reporters waiting at the end of the runway and even provides a POV shot of one of their cameras filming the landing). Ergo, criminals like Dillinger could easily appear larger than life, as normal citizens only ever saw them on screens bigger than themselves. Many supporters -- myself included -- of Oliver Stone's Natural Born Killers cite the film as "ahead of its time," yet we see here that the public's love affair with violent criminals stretches back decades, perhaps further -- when cops drive Dillinger to jail, citizens line the streets to wave ecstatically at him. One of the key scenes of the movie, in which Dillinger heads to the local theater, which displays his mugshot on the screen before the movie and asks the audience to look around for the criminals "among you." It's obviously a typical PSA, written out by the Feds and delivered to theaters to announce to their patrons, and the scene works less as a moment of suspense and more as a perverse sort of wish fulfillment for Dillinger, who gets to see himself on the big screen before the movie comes on; in a way, he got top billing. Of course, Dillinger dies just outside the Biograph Theater, after seeing Manhattan Melodrama, during which he clearly envisions himself as Clark Gable (whose character was, ironically, modeled after the gangster).


That brief romanticizing of Dillinger through cinema, while ultimately revealed to be hollow, informs some other scenes, most specifically the one where he strolls into an FBI office and walks around in the room dedicate to his case without being caught. The sheer effrontery of his actions betray a man who, for all his cold danger, is starting to buy into his own myth. There are even a few shots that utilize the same golden hue as the Godfather films, and for the same purpose: such shots establish the legend of the character even as Mann gently subverts it with the terrible truth of that character. Mann fills the screen with death, but he never exploits it, instead using it as a drawn-out yet blunt method of breaking down the allure of the criminal life. Those shots of Purvis and Dillinger watching men die at the start telegraph this, as does the end of the astonishing Little Bohemia shootout -- how great is it to actually see the smoke from gunfire fill a room in a realistic fashion? -- a sudden caesura that replaces the bursts of Thompson and BAR fire with a shot of a gangster's final, ragged breath, visible in the cold, floating in the air like a soul leaving the body.

Yet Mann clearly has the same dalliance with the romanticism of crime that Dillinger has, and he devotes a brief but telling couple of scenes to the changing face of crime in America. The betting pool controlled by the Mafia, who eliminate competition and establish a single betting operation for the entire country, represents the death of individual crime, even among organizations like the mob. Dillinger is a dying breed, his charisma derived in part because he was so unapologetically a criminal where later gangsters always tried to pass themselves off as "legitimate." He doesn't have a waste management front or a friend in Congress; he's just got a Tommy gun and a collection of contacts he met in prison.

The name of the film is Public Enemies, yet the ad campaign only featured Depp and Bale: in the film, the FBI receives more scrutiny and scorn than Dillinger. Purvis is just as dangerous as Public Enemy Number One, just as loose with his morals and just as willing to take extreme measures to get what he wants. This is not Mann's indictment of police so much as a snapshot of a time when criminals and cops were identifiable, when cops didn't need to go undercover and criminals didn't need to hide behind loopholes: Purvis hints that the line between the two is about to blur, his showy, fashionable dress and distanced behavior edging near our perception of a mob boss. Hoover, whom Mann reminds us never served in any field capacity in apprehending criminals, introduces draconian tactics to fighting crime that greatly infringed upon rights and liberties, calling into question the worth of a police force that also strong-armed the innocent. Perhaps, then, Mann suggests that the de-mystification of crime also affected those on the side of the law.

As it happened with Miami Vice, I find my opinion significantly altered, but I am not prepared to call Public Enemies the rousing success the way I would Mann's previous feature. As his other digital/film combos, he wants to place us into the action without gimmickry and to let us experience emotions as they come. But Public Enemies is about two characters who don't know how to process emotions normally, Dillinger because he spent his formative years in prison for a grocery shoplifting that didn't warrant the punishment, Purvis because he's so thirsty for glory he's set aside his humanity. This creates a dissonance between Mann's intentions and the nature of the characters that sometimes works and sometimes doesn't, leading to occasional lulls. Nevertheless, I understand now what Mann was trying to do, and, like Miami Vice, I can confidently say that I'll be revisiting it for years.

Miami Vice

One of the first reviews I wrote for this blog was of Michael Mann's hotly contested 2006 opus Miami Vice. I've since taken it down, as it was unfocused, sloppy and made points without fleshing them out or connecting them. I could cattily offer something pithy like, "Well, I guess it's appropriate, then, considering the subject," but A) that doesn't make it any less sloppy a review and B) I'm not so sure I can so easily dismiss Miami Vice with such a flippant comment. I did save the post, and my general impressions can be summed up as such: I enjoyed the gunfights -- this is a Michael Mann film -- but I found the story muddled, the characters flat and the film overall too long by a third.

After reacquainting myself with Mann's films and visiting some for the first time, however, I return to Miami with an altered perspective. It's easy to take Mann at face value when you first watch his films: compared to the other crime-minded writer-directors of our time -- Quentin Tarantino and David Mamet -- Mann eschews flowery prose for blunt, technical dialogue, fussing over the details while blitzing through lines in a way that would do Howard Hawks proud. However, if we slow down to consider those details -- both written and visual -- we see not a director merely obsessed with how things are done but why people do them. As two-dimensional as so many of his characters are, he makes them real through his ability to capture fantastic performances by actors both strong and weak as well as his thorough knowledge of the tics and quirks of the people he creates. Mood, above all else, matters in a Mann film, despite the visceral thrill of Heat's epic shootout and the gripping tension of The Insider and Collateral: buried in the tension are the characters' reactions to what occurs to them, not simply narrative movement but personal growth and adaptation.

Above his other films (or at least the ones I've seen -- there's a gap between Thief and The Last of the Mohicans), Miami Vice elevates mood over any other aspect of the storytelling. Combined with Mann's deliberately blurred, dirty aesthetic, Miami Vice, to my utter amazement, completely undermines the glitz and glamor of the original, Mann-produced television series (possibly the most quintessentially "80s" piece of popular entertainment with its broad appropriation of New Wave music and dress and its celebration of economic self-love of Armani suits and Ferraris) that it becomes the opposite. It runs so far in the other direction, placing emphasis on mood and grime over plot-heavy procedural and gloss, that it might just be the film to get your Michael Bay-loving frat buddy into impressionism, and if that does not make it a great film it certainly warrants a closer inspection than many of its viewers (myself included) have afforded it.

The first immediately apparent stylistic shift from the show's aesthetic sheen is Mann's willingness to paint Miami as a bit of a carelessly painted-over dump. In his documentary traversing the United States, British author/comedian/actor/renaissance man Stephen Fry found much to love about our country, save for an uproariously brief tour through Miami, which Fry cut short because he so detested it: "It has that feeling of being designed as a holiday paradise," he says of the beach area, "and, indeed, all the dreary things that go with the word 'paradise' -- like palm trees and huge cut-out parrots -- that promise so much and deliver so staggeringly little." Of the city itself, he drawls, "Surely it must have a heart and a soul and a meaning and a kind of delightful center or something, but I've yet to find it."

Mann seems to agree with this assessment of the two distinctly different yet wholly off-putting cityscapes of the Miami-Dade area: the director wrenches the dirty aesthetic of Collateral's night-time hell into the light, an effect analogous to picking up a date in a crowded, dark nightclub and bringing him or her into broad daylight to see the horrible truth of the person you thought was so slick under a blacklight and now realize was nothing more than a photo negative. His color palette is dominated by a jaundiced yellow; the phrase "this city is dying" typically belongs in the realm of comic books, but by applying it through the visuals Mann subtly communicates the disease spreading through Miami, all the while using this color scheme to undermine the hollow allure of the city.

Mann's affection for authentic speech can prove difficult initially, as each film brings with it its own lexicon, even though he treads in the crime drama so often that one might expect some constants. The initial round of dialogue in the first 15 minutes of Vice is as abstract and baffling as the blurred, ultra-grainy cityscape around the characters who speak it: we recognize Sonny Crockett (Colin Farrell) and Rico Tubbs (Jamie Foxx) by name, but we learn nothing of them as they mingle in a party working a prostitution sting. Suddenly a man, a former informant named Alonzo (John Hawkes) calls Sonny and frantically mentioning something about his wife and getting out of town. As Crockett and Tubbs track him down, they learn that he went from ratting to them to informing for the FBI. Alonzo is desperate to pick up his wife and leave, but Tubbs receives a call and solemnly informs the compromised informant, "You don't need to go home."

You can almost snap your fingers to the dialogue in this opening blast, each line spewed out with the curt professionalism of people who have little time to waste. Somehow, Mann's camera manages to outpace it, cutting to a group of dealers springing a trap for an undercover agent before revealing that Alonzo sold out the Feds and showing cops reaching Alonzo's house and seeing a pair of legs on the ground with blood pooling beside them through the windows before Tubbs gets the call. By showing us what's about to be discussed Mann lets us mull over these images in the few seconds, processing it viscerally and emotionally without the hampering effect of words telling us how to interpret what we've seen. While it obviously bears ties to the original TV show and its digital camerawork recalls Collateral, perhaps the best base of comparison in Mann's prior corpus is The Last of the Mohicans: it too works best when nothing was being said at all, and it uses deceptively flat characters and dialogue to evoke atmosphere.

Narratively, Miami Vice is a curious beast: it moves so quickly you start to wonder if the copious amount of powdered substances somehow rubbed into the film itself and gave it a jump start (it might explain the grain, which is downright snowy at times), yet nothing much seems to progress. The film touches upon nearly every cliché in the book: Crockett and Tubbs infiltrate the drug cartel after Alonzo's confessions compromised spies across all federal agencies and leaves only the MDPD with a chance to go undercover, and soon Crockett gets so deep he begins to lose himself (the conceit of a principled man losing sight of his code a major theme of Mann's work). He falls for Isabella (Gong Li, a bit of casting that seems a cheeky art touch until Mann explains in the commentary that Cuba has a thriving Chinese community), who helps run the Colombian cartel and is a consummate businesswoman who nevertheless allows herself to love Crockett back. Many such tropes are not only shown by directly stressed in dialogue that, for another writer, would smack of poor construction and on-the-nose distrust in the visuals to communicate obvious developments; in Mann's hands, however, they become targets to be set up and shot down, slicing cliché to ribbons with volleys of his trademark gunfire. He lets us feel Crockett's confusion instead of moving from plot device to plot device. Isabella does not let her relationship with Sonny compromise her identity, and she maintains a focus on her job until the end, with only a quiet moment of pain that comes with the inevitable realization of Sonny's true occupation.

As the plot herks and jerks around to the whims of its alternating digital and film shots, Mann focuses instead on his impressionistic, often existentialist world. Miami Vice is about shots of its characters gazing out on the ocean and painterly skies, the digital photography allowing the director to capture objects in such extreme background that even the objects in the fore, while still in focus, begin to lose definition: at any moment they could diffuse into the grain that breaks them up, or into the ghostly lights of streetlamps, boat beacons, helicopter spotlights and lightning crackles across the sky. Those existential stares across the ocean find counterpoints in Mann's equation of our beings with the blood within us: he gives brief pause to shots of the pool of blood beside the feet of Alonzo's wife, the streak left when Alonzo then jumps in front of a big rig in grief, a splatter on a wall, the pink mist that arises from headshots (a reference to the great impressionist Renoir's use of pink, perhaps?) and the familiar sight of blood hitting the camera lens, but with the added twist of Mann then turning the camera to catch the light and explode in lens flares made from the splatter, as if capturing freed souls.

All of this is not to say that Miami Vice lacks Mann's typical attention to detail -- note the scene where Crockett and Tubbs meet Montoya, the real leader of the cartel, revealing Yero to be just a lieutenant and Isabella his superior: Tubbs focuses on the kingpin, while Crockett only has eyes for Isabella, and Mann gives us close-ups of Montoya and Isabella's matching watches, suggesting to him a romantic connection but later revealing how powerful Isabella herself is -- but, as an impressionistic work, it cares more for movement, capturing outlines and emotional perception over contours and "truth." Its sex scenes are as randomly placed and haphazardly justified as any other action movie, but the scenes between the leads and their ladies reveal more about the four characters than anything in the dialogue: in the case of Tubbs and Trudy's (Naomie Harris) scene, Tubbs' joke about climaxing early reflects the entire narrative structure of the film: a state of constant pre-ejaculative frenzy and abandon.

A dirty, snowy, sickly film, yes, Miami Vice nevertheless contains a perverse beauty: the digital photography allows for extreme detail in all its grain, such as a shot of a .50 cal bullet tearing through a car seat and revealing the minor flare of the small fire it causes in the seat's lining. I'm beginning to think that all of Mann's films need at least two viewings to fully process (expect a second post on Public Enemies in the near future), but none of his films has benefited so drastically from a rewatch as this, and I find myself in the shocking position of conceding that Miami Vice, by God, might truly be the masterpiece its supporters claim it is after all.

Collateral

The best case for Michael Mann's visual genius can be made by comparing his depictions of Los Angeles in Heat, his most well-known and best-received film, and Collateral, his first foray into digital video (indeed the first major use of digital high-definition cameras in feature filmmaking). The L.A. of Heat was gigantic and shimmering, large enough to contain the Wagnerian scope of its epic take on the cops-and-robbers genre. Music, too, informs the aesthetic of the Los Angeles of Collateral, but it exchanges the opera of Heat for jazz.

As such, Collateral is intimate, improvisational, its alternately crisp and blurry landscapes reminiscent of the smoky haze of a hip dive. It shifts tempos and keys and dynamics, as terrifying as it is seductive. Vincent (Tom Cruise), a suave hitman, loves jazz, to the point that he takes the time out from his assignments to enjoy a performance in the same club where giants like Chet Baker and Charles Mingus used to play. As a jazzophile, he loves improvisation and expresses a reverence for the unpredictability of life.

These are traits largely absent in Max (Jamie Foxx), a cab driver who finds himself Vincent's courier and hostage during a five-stop killing spree. Max is the perfect cabbie: he knows all the back routes in the city and is honest enough to take them rather than deliberately seek out traffic. He has big plans for life, and he insists to his other passengers that he's just driving part-time to save up the cash to start a limo company. Vincent, however, learns that Max has been driving for 12 years. Where the hitman appreciates the constancy of variability, Max cannot act unless has accounts for every detail.

Let's be honest: Collateral isn't revolutionary storytelling. It's blunt. It's contrived. But damn it, i works, precisely because the digital cameras add an air of immediacy and breathlessness. Mann does not strive for a feeling of cheap realism, but he does make the audience a part of the action. His ability to convey intricate details through to-the-point dialogue and fast-paced editing takes Stuart Beattle's script and streamlines it. Furthermore, the digital photography, with its low-light capability, introduces a spontaneity to the strict linearity of the narrative: as the cameras can pick up action in dimly lit conditions, Mann could film scenes without worrying about meticulous lighting, allowing for memorable moments such as the shot of a coyote running across the street in front of Max's cab.

The dramatic weight of the story naturally concerns Max's fear and moral crisis in reaction to ferrying around a killer, and the action -- as is befitting a Michael Mann thriller -- is visceral and gripping (why do people even bother putting gunfire in their movies in a year featuring that contains a Michael Mann film?). Mann and editors Jim Miller and Paul Rubell maintain a constant level of tension between its storylines -- Vincent's engagements, Max's attempts to escape, the joint investigation of Vincent's murders by LAPD detectives (led by Mark Ruffalo) and the FBI (headed by Bruce McGill) -- never quite reaching the masterful level Mann and Rubell exhibited with The Insider but never losing any momentum. Mann can even cut to completely ancillary asides without breaking the flow, such as a humorous trip to the hospital to visit Max's mother (the always funny Irma P. Hall) and an unnecessary but gripping scene in which Max must pose as Vincent to obtain replacement dossiers for the ones he destroyed from Vincent's employer (Javier Bardem).

Below the surface, however, is a battle between ideologies. The clashing outlooks of the two main characters fits each character's occupation: Max takes the shortest, best-planned route not simply because he's a nice man but because he can't accept an imperfection, while Vincent accepts the unpredictability of life because he has to know how to adapt to any situation. Beattle envisioned Robert De Niro in Foxx's role, but that smacks too much of an excuse to have De Niro play the role of a taxi driver again. For once, the producers were right to insist on someone young: by casting in Foxx's age range -- then in his late '30s -- Max can believably cling to his dream of owning a limo company. A man his age is nearing the point of no return for his dreams but, unlike someone in De Niro's age group, he can still fulfill them. Thus, Vincent's influence, vile and twisted as it might be, can actually improve his life, and Collateral is as much about Max's maturation as it is the thriller plot.

When he first gets into Max's cab, Vincent comments upon his distaste for Los Angeles, finding its disjointed structure and dense population confusing and impersonal. Collateral's jazzy style and frenetic pacing reflects the disorienting layout of the city, but Mann uses the story to disprove Vincent's assertion of L.A.'s soullessness. It may be a place that crushes dreams and barely registers its dead, but Mann finds some nugget of worth in there, just as Scorsese did with New York (that Taxi Driver connection is more revealing than it lets on). Tom Cruise, the megastar with eternally youthful looks, frosts his hair to age himself and plays the villain, albeit one who imparts wisdom and perspective onto Foxx, then still easing his way into a film career. By the next year, he'd become the first actor to receive two Oscar nominations in the same year, for this and Ray. I would not fully align Collateral with the cinema, not in the way I would Public Enemies, but it's interesting to note Mann's love for Los Angeles -- inexorably tied to Hollywood even if Collateral never comes anywhere near it or the feel it evokes -- buried beneath the thrills.

Public Enemies

There may be no major Hollywood director as underrated as Michael Mann. Only Martin Scorsese can claim to capture America's seedy underworld better, and even the master lacks Mann's attention to detail. He's far from a "style over substance" director, though; masterpieces like Heat and The Insider take the time to examine their characters outside the superb action sequences. Sadly, that character examination is sorely lacking in his new film, Public Enemies, in which his characters are so calculatingly shot that they might as well be a part of the beautiful backgrounds.

Maybe that's the point: too many films destroy our mythic figures by applying cheap psychology to them, and Mann is trying to spare us yet more talk of abusive fathers or warped moral codes. Such explanations are hinted at, but they're delivered through lines that mock such conventions, as if the movie buff Dillinger is as sick of them as we are. Yet a film with a known outcome needs some sort of revisionist analysis to justify its existence, especially one clocking in at two and a half hours.

As a result, Johnny Depp and Christian Bale – two of the most brilliantly off-kilter actors in the business – never get to sink their teeth into their roles, those of infamous gangster John Dillinger and FBI agent Melvin Pruvis, respectively. These men, as with the cop and robber in “Heat,” are perfect foils for one another: Dillinger robs banks because he cannot accept authority, while Purvis is trying to prove the usefulness of the FBI, which is still in its infancy in the ‘30s. Both spend a great deal of time staring into the dying eyes of fallen comrades, only furthering their resolve.

However, Mann spends so much time playing up both sides as heroic archetypes that neither ever becomes interesting. Heat worked because both the cop and the robber were trapped, tragic victims of their own pride and world view. Pacino and De Niro's characters were perfect foils because they saw in each other a kindred spirit, the only person who could fully understand their turmoil. There is no equivalent to the diner scene in Public Enemies, nor is there even a successful juxtaposition between the two: we merely see the Robin Hood-esque robber and the agent who is no less heroic for taking him down.

Dillinger and Purvis duke it out in a Depression-era America painstakingly researched and perfectly recreated that it would look as real as anything you’d see on your own street corner even without the documentary-like direction. But that camera work, combined with the sharp detail of digital cameras, makes the film feel more like a technical exercise than a visceral crime epic.

Nevertheless, Mann has a gift for pacing, and Public Enemies zips along despite its padded length, which lapses into a loop of planning-robbery-aftermath. Its action scenes, the best of which being the shootout at the Little Bohemia Lodge, jump out of nowhere and, true to heists and crackdowns, are over as soon as they begin. The little details of Dillinger's heists, from letting the customers keep their money to tying hosting to the getaway car to discourage any gunfire, give these scenes a sense of visceral realism. True to form, Mann makes the gunfire loud and the muzzle flashes blinding -- be sure to bring some aspirin with you, just in case.

If only the actors had something to do, they might have filled the gap between these brief but overpowering shooting matches. Marion Cotillard, in her first role since her Oscar win for La Vie en Rose, is completely flat as Dillinger’s main squeeze, and Billy Crudup brings nothing more to the role of J. Edgar Hoover than a bad accent. Mann has an under-appreciated knack for getting great performances from his actors, be they master craftsmen like Al Pacino and Daniel Day-Lewis or more star-oriented players like Tom Cruise and Will Smith (who genuinely earned his Oscar nomination in the otherwise unremarkable Ali). Only Stephen Graham’s manic portrayal of Baby Face Nelson breaks free of the cage that holds everyone else; Dillinger lives the gangster life for the media that turn him into a sensation, but Nelson is just plain crazy, and Graham pulls it off beautifully.

I don't want to suggest that the film is boring, mind you; the shootouts only continue to prove that Mann is the finest action director working today. But what's with the shaky-cam? The reason why the battle in Heat remains one of the great cinematic gunfights is the simple fact that you can tell what's going on. In an age where action editing consists of forcing a first-person perspective on the audience to the point that we can no longer make out all the vast special effects, I was looking forward to Michael Mann showing the kids how to do it right. These scenes vacillate between the artful camera work that defined his old action sequences with the hands-on digital approach that informed recent work like the brilliant Collateral and the misfire Miami Vice, and they left me wanting more even as I was absorbed in the moment.

In the end, “Public Enemies” is a technically resplendent film that never shifts out of first gear until its chief action sequence, only to shift down again as soon as it’s over. Mann always was too fond of his scripts, which sometimes paid off (Heat) and sometimes derailed what might have been a decent flick (Miami Vice); this most definitely fits the latter. Well, assuming this film has a point at all, because I've yet to figure out why Mann made it at all. As it is, it’s certainly worth your money as a popcorn flick, but too much of this film, right down to its title, is uncharacteristically and tragically generic.

The Insider

Michael Mann deservedly earned himself a reputation as one of the preeminent action directors of the last 20 years, but that unfairly typecasts him. He brings the same attention to detail to his dramas that he does to his action flicks: Ali, heavily, heavily flawed as it was, was as interesting outside the boxing ring as it was within it. His experience with more visceral fare allows him to maintain a steady pace while maintaining an ability to capture every shot in pristine clarity. That precision makes every shot seem necessary, and it has a way of creating tension, as it leads the audience to believe that something important is on-screen, that anything cast in such detail will have some bearing on the narrative later in the film.

Ergo, while he may have superior films, The Insider best showcases Mann's talents. Making an actual thriller as opposed to shooting an action film like one gave the director license to make moments almost unbearable in their suspense. Even the scenes in which the corporate aspect of this corporate thriller come to the fore do not lessen the tension of Jeffrey Wigand's paranoia, for they expose a much deeper corruption than Wigand can uncover. Like the best of the old newspaper thrillers, The Insider pits intrepid whistle blowers against faceless enemies with unlimited resources as they desperately try to tell their story without dying.

Wigand, head of research for tobacco company Brown and Williamson, loses his job when he discovers that the tobacco industry used a chemically-altered form of nicotine in their cigarettes that made them more addictive while also increasing the risk of cancer and never informed the public in order to make bigger profits. Even though the company fired him, he must still honor his nondisclosure agreements or face a multi-billion-dollar lawsuit; fearing he might take his knowledge to the news anyway, executives attempt to force Wigand into signing an even more stringent agreement by threatening to withhold severance benefits, including the medical insurance he needs to cover his asthmatic daughter's medical fees. An outraged Wigand tells them where they can shove it and takes up a job as a high school teacher to get healthcare.

By random chance, Wigand crosses paths with 60 Minutes producer Lowell Bergman (Al Pacino), who was referred to the former executive to decode some information regarding health and safety-related documents concerning cigarettes. Worried that any involvement with a journalist could place him in a courtroom, Wigand initially refuses, but eventually capitulates and agrees to meet him at a hotel. The two begin a correspondence, and Wigand slowly reveals more and more details about the "Seven Dwarfs," the seven leading tobacco corporations, and how the CEOs of each perjured before Congress concerning their knowledge of nicotine's addictive properties.

The more Wigand divulges, the more he starts noticing strange things. A man spies on him at a golf course. Someone leaves a bullet in Wigand's mailbox. Eventually, his wife opens an email containing a death threat. Mann shoots these scenes in a style highly reminiscent of that great whistle blower film All the President's Men: shadow doesn't so much bathe the frame as wash over it like a tidal wave, all of it contrasted with the cold, artificial light he likes to use to play up his urban elements. That sickly faint-green hue only exacerbates that feeling in your gut that something terrible is about to happen.

Russell Crowe gives what may be his finest performance as the older Wigand: he walks with the slack gait of a desk jockey and delivers his lines with alternate boredom and frenzy. Sadly, Crowe seems to use that same characterization for any American role these days, but despite his self-typecasting, his Wigand stands out. He provides a nice foil for Pacino, playing against type as the more subdued of the leads; indeed, Crowe seems to be playing what would usually be the Pacino part, though Al excels in his "straight man" role.

Even as the threats pour in and his family begins to crumble, the strong-arming only strengthens Wigand's resolve. He agrees to testify in a Mississippi state case against Big Tobacco for Medicaid costs covering those affected by smoking, only to find himself served with a restraining order that the industry's elite lawyers cooked up. At last, Mann reveals the real thrust of the story: this is not the story of Jeff Wigand so much as a commentary on the monetary structure of news groups. CBS interviews Wigand for a 60 Minutes segment, only to censor the interview because the station receives ad money from the tobacco industry and can also be sued for billions. Mann and writers Eric Roth and Marie Brenner uncover the irony of journalists striving for integrity and truth when corporations known for their corruption have a stake in major journalistic avenues.

That's what makes The Insider so enraging: though Wigand succeeds in getting his message to the public, how many people in how many fields have been silenced in one form or another by corporations that seem to have sway over everything? Whistle blowing always takes a degree of courage, but it's downright suicide in some cases. But Mann never beats us over the head with this theme, allowing us to spend more time gripped by the plot. For all its talkative scenes held in boardrooms and surreptitious meeting places, The Insider is Mann's most involving film. It may not reach the heights of his epic, Heat, but I can think of no better argument for the man's greatness than this 2-1/2 thriller that passes in half the time.