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April 14, 2006

Heat

The Games Men Play

By Andrew

Michael Mann's Heat [1995] depicts a grown up game of cops-and-robbers. It follows a tight-knit cabal of professional crooks. The crew, tighter in all their strategy, scheming and gunplay then your average squad of Special Ops, is led by understated con Neil McNauley (Robert De Niro). The end to McNauely's career is close; he insists he is but one big score away from retirement to Fiji, where he longs to see tropical algae light up the sea's horizon. Even closer to McNauley, however, is the angst-ridden lieutenant Vincent Hanna (Al Pacino), a man who wants to save the day, but can hardly hold together his home life.

In Heat, cops-and-robbers is played as if its chess. McNauley's philosophy is to never "let yourself get attached to anything you are not willing to walk out on in 30 seconds flat if you feel the heat around the corner." The character has the likes of Lieutenant Henna in mind, but writer/director Michael Mann has other ideas. In the film, "Heat" serves a double-meaning; it not only refers to the law, it refers to love. Or, more precisely, a certain kind of heterosexual love: emotional availability to the women and children in a man's life. While Pacino and De Niro face off, so do notions of self-interest and responsibility towards others.

All the men in Heat have a hard time finding love of any variety. While Lieutenant Hanna's marriage is a mess, and his stepdaughter is a wreck, McNauley struggles to make it with an aspiring graphic artist without betraying his criminal lifestyle. It's appropriate that, in the final scene of Heat, the male leads would find themselves dueling on the landing strip of an airport, because they too have trouble getting off the ground, never quite transcending the cruel LA crime world they inhabit (I'm reminded of Wong Kar Wai's Days of Being Wild, in which the restless male protagonist aspires to be like a bird that lives forever in the air, never having to touch the ground).

Mann's film itself is after the same transcendence as its male leads; it wants to go beyond its violent cops-and-robbers plot to achieve something far more complex. Sometimes it succeeds, but it mostly flies like a skipping stone on water, remaining airborne once or twice before succumbing to the gravity of the world around it. When it finally gives in, it drowns in the very ocean that serves as the canvas for Neil McCauley's dreams of tranquility.

For all its mise-en-scene and double meanings, Heat is essentially a dick flick dressed up in stylish threads. It is a "dick flick" in two senses - both in it's following the life of a detective, and in its endless ruminations on the moral dilemmas of Flawed Men. Apparently, the cast was given heavy weapons-and-tactics training by a former British Speical Air Service Sergeant; but after witnessing scene after scene of Pacino's Yelling Act, and De Niro's Stern-Talking-Tos, it is all too clear what the actors didn't need training in: how to be Men. Anyone with a trained eye can this is what Mann is going after; its evident in the subtleties. The cold, hard world of Men is clearly evidenced by the hockey masks donned by the cons in the film's opening heist, and later in a hockey fight that appears on a television screen in the film's final act. But writer/director Mann seems just as cold to his female characters: with an exception or two, they all seem to be restless homemakers, devoted to the men in their lives for reasons never quite explored.

In this light, all the film's lessons about the necessities of male emotional availability amount too little, too late. Audiences don't need detailed subtle symbolism to get the point about masculinity; it's what Pacino and De Niro's careers are riding on. It is what America loves them for. It's what makes them great actors, and it is also what makes their acting rather tiresome. If American audiences demanded masculinity be transcended, their acting careers as we know them would no longer exist. For instance, I doubt Pacino or De Niro could ever pull off the remorseful breakdown of Daniel Day-Lewis in Rebecca Miller's The Ballad of Jack and Rose (though I'd be glad to be proven wrong).

I want a film to take me places I have never been — in plot, and in place. I've had a number of friends travel to New York and back; Ben (of our own Lucid Screening) even lives there. I am always fascinated by their stories of big city life, however brief, as I've been saddled for twenty-two years in suburbs and college towns of the Pacific Northwest. So I'm also fascinated by a film that can capture a city, wherever it may be. For instance, the NYC details kept Spike Lee's Inside Man interesting. The Hong Kong of Wong Kar Wai's films seems especially candid; when a Mcdonald's restaurant appears in Fallen Angels, it feels less like product placement (though I'm not ruling that out) and more like an honest portrayal of the city as it is, corporate blight and all. Michael Mann's L.A. is the same way: in all its neon, fluorescent glory, outshines everything else in Heat.

Heat brings me back to something I often wonder to myself. Given the proper padding, could any old plot drive a film rife with layered meaning and philosophical musing? For instance, I doubt anyone enamored with The New World really cares that it is about John Smith and Pocahontas; the myth of their story, and all that it implies, is secondary to Terrence Malick's pensive form and style. Or worse, consider the persistence of praise for Birth of the Nation (which I admit I have not seen). Despite its admiring portrayal of racist terror, the film lingers in our memory as a great innovator of technique, as commentators continue to insist that the way something is made - an art's form - can somehow be divorced from its content - the art's message - without any lasting damage. But I wonder to what extent the form orients the message; for instance, its Malick's ponderous representation of his characters that leaves them open to dumb stereotypes.

Hate the player or hate the game? That is the question. Hate the director's choices, or hate the Hollywood world that made the choices so narrow to being with? To live with any sort of integrity — to approach anything remotely resembling transcendence — the two can't be separated. While I admire anyone that is willing to invest thought and ideas into their artwork, there is nothing that says I have to agree with those ideas. A lot of film critics seem to be bowled over when a film is well-made — the finesse of the player — and do little to consider the validity of the ideas the film is trying to convey — that is, the meaning behind the game. Heat has its moments — many of them — and it is intelligent like no other film in its genre. But it is never smart enough to abandon its genre altogether. Heat seeks to transcend its violent genre - asking us to hate the game, not the player. But ultimately, it loses itself trying to determine where all the love and hate is supposed to take us - like a real man, it refuses to ask for directions.

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