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De Niro is packing Heat |
Director: Michael Mann
Cast: Al Pacino (Lt Vincent Hanna), Robert De Niro (Neil
McCauley), Val Kilmer (Chris Shiherlis), Jon Voight (Nate), Tom Sizemore
(Michael Cheritto), Diane Venora (Justine Hanna), Amy Brenneman (Eady), Ashley
Judd (Charlene Shiherlis), Mykelti Williamson (Sgt Drucker), Wes Studi
(Detective Sammy Casals), Ted Levine (Detective Mike Bosko), Dennis Haysbert
(Donald Breedan), William Fichtner (Roger van Zandt), Natalie Portman (Lauren
Gustafson), Tom Noonan (Kelso), Kevin Gage (Waingro), Hank Azaria (Alan
Marciano), Danny Trejo (Trejo), Xander Berkeley (Ralph)
In the mid-90s, Heat
was the cinematic event of the year.
De Niro! Pacino! Together! In one scene! The two acting heavyweights – wildly
proclaimed and popular since the 1970s – had of course made The Godfather Part II together but had
shared no scenes. Here, however, we’d see them both at the same time riffing
off each other. The great thing is that there is so much more to Heat than just that one scene. Heat is a sort of poetic cops and
robbers flick, part stunning action adventure, part profound exploration of the
internal souls of men chasing down leads, both good and bad.
Neil McCauley (Robert De Niro) is a skilled career criminal
who lives his life with a monastic self-denial, saying you can have nothing in
your life “that you cannot walk out on in 30 seconds flat if you spot the heat
around the corner”. Vincent Hanna (Al Pacino) is a bombastic, egotistical,
workaholic detective with a self-destructive family life. Naturally, these two men
find themselves on opposite sides, as McCauley plans his next job and Hanna
works to stop him. But the men, with their similar codes dedicated to their
chosen career, find that they have an increasing mutual respect – not that that
will stop either of them “putting the other one down” if push comes to shove.
Heat is the
pinnacle of Michael Mann’s career, and his most triumphant exploration of the
conflicted, complex, masculine personalities at the heart of the high-adrenalin
worlds of crime and police work. Mann has a gift for giving the simple rush and
tumble of cops and robbers a sort of epic poetry, like a metropolitan Beowulf, and he achieves this again
here. Heat is a film that throbs with
meaning, it's cool blue lensing and chilly, modern architecture serving as a
perfect counterpoint to the cool, professional and focused personalities of its
characters.
Heat also goes the
extra mile by building this playground confrontation into a mythic battle of
wills, a battle of principles and ways of living that seem separated only by a
few degrees. Mann invests this with such sweep, such grandiosity (without
pomposity), such scale that it becomes a sort of modern epic, a film where
intense meaning can be mined by the viewer from every scene. Whether there is
in fact any meaning there – avoid listening to Mann’s commentary which drills
down so many of his elliptical character beats and open-ended scenes into the
dullest, most predictable tropes that he had in mind while filming – is another
issue, but Mann’s trick as always with his best work is to make something
really quite small and everyday seem like a grand, timeless epic.
It all boils down to that
famous coffee shop scene, where De Niro and Pacino for a few magic moments come
together. It’s a scene that explicitly asks us to see cop and criminal and
understand that there is in many ways very little to choose between them. It
hinges on the gentle competitiveness of the actors, and the way they subtly play
off each other. It also plays on our own histories of these two actors, of
decades of seeing them as two sides of the same coin, both carrying so much
cultural baggage for a string of iconic roles that saw them rule Hollywood for
over a decade. It’s the sort of scene given extra investment, where you sense
the mutual respect of the actors fuelling the strange bond that powers the
scene.
It’s also the one scene of the film that Pacino underplays
in. The rest of the film he goes way bigger, powering through each scene with
an explosion of shouting and drama. It’s a performance ripe for parody, with
more than an edge of ham, but it just about works. Pacino turns Hanna
(hilariously the character shares a name with a BBC political journalist of the
1980s) into the purest form of adrenalin junkie, a larger-than-life personality
who tears through people and cases with a focused determination that allows no
room for a personal life. De Niro downplays far more by contrast, apeing a sort
of 1940s noir cool, a monkish insularity that prevents anyone from getting
close to him, mixed with a laser-guided determination to do whatever it takes
to make his score.
Mann’s film throws these two characters into a series of
stunning set pieces with the bank robbery at the centre (“the one last score”
that McCauley can’t pass up no matter the danger). The robbery – and the shoot
out that follows it – is a triumph of action cinema, brilliantly shot and
edited. The gun play is stunning, with Andy McNab having served as a consultant
for the actors on the use of automatic weapons. The scene rips through the
screen, spewing bullets all over the place in a ruthless, no-onlooker-spared
rampage that also really pushes the limits of effective sound design. That’s
just the highlight of several scenes that – with guns or otherwise – hum with
tension, danger and excitement.
Mann also has enough room in this film though to skilfully
establish a number of supporting characters with compelling story lines of
their own. Val Kilmer is a tad wooden as McCauley’s number two, but his
storyline of troubled marriage is mined for unexpecting pathos (thanks also to
Ashley Judd’s fine work as his wife). Kevin Gage is very good as a psychopathic
criminal unwisely brought on board to fill a slot in an early robbery. Dennis
Haysbert has his own tragic plotline as a criminal trying to turn straight.
Diane Venora is excellent as Hanna’s neglected wife, as is Portman as his
vulnerable daughter-in-law. This isn’t to mention excellent performances from a
rogues gallery of character actors, from Jon Voight to William Fichtner.
Mann keeps all these plotlines perfectly balanced in a film
that is very long but never drags for a minute. Crammed with exciting set pieces
and brilliant sequences, it’s a film that manages to feel like it is about a
very masculine crisis – the failures of men to balance the personal and their
career, selfishly harming those around them because of their addiction to
action. Mann’s film looks brilliantly at the essential emptiness and sadness
this leads to – as well as the blinkered drive that never prevents men from
stopping for a second and changing their lives, no matter how many reflective
cups of coffee they have. Mann partners this existential, poetic feeling drama
with the ultimate crash-bang cops and robbers and thriller, which will leave
you on the edge of your seat no matter how many times you see it. Quite some
film.
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