director/screenwriter
Michael Mann
producers
Art Linson
Michael Mann
cinematographer
Dante Spinotti
music
Michael Brook
Brian Eno
Elliot Goldenthal
Terje Rypdal
editors
Pasquale Buba
William Goldenberg
Dov Hoenig
Tom Rolf
cast
Al Pacino (Vincent Hanna)
Robert De Niro (Neil McCauley)
Val Kilmer (Chris Shiherlis)
Jon Voight (Nate)
Tom Sizemore (Cheritto)
Diane Venora (Justine Hanna)
Amy Brenneman (Eady)
Ashley Judd (Charlene Shiherlis)
Mykelti Williamson (Drucker)
Wes Studi (Casals)
Ted Levine (Bosko)
Dennis Haysbert (Breedan)
William Fichtner (Van Zant)
Natalie Portman (Lauren)
Tom Noonan (Kelso)
Hank Azaria (Marciano)
Danny Trejo (Trejo)
Henry Rollins (Benny)
Tone Loc (Torena)
Jeremy Piven (Dr. Bob)
Xander Berkeley (Ralph)
Bud Cort (Solenko)
mpaa rating: R
running
time: 171m
u.s.
release: 12/15/95
video
availability: VHS -
DVD
other michael
mann films
reviewed on this website:
- collateral
- the insider
- manhunter
- miami vice
|
Moviegoers
who want to see Robert De Niro and Al Pacino share the screen
will have to wait another 21 years, I guess. They appeared as
father (De Niro) and son (Pacino) in 1974's The Godfather
Part II, but, since De Niro appeared in the flashback sequences
and Pacino in the modern ones, they didn't actually work together.
The same is true of Heat, the long and confusing new cops-and-robbers
drama from Michael Mann (Manhunter,
The Last of the Mohicans). Pacino's Vincent Hanna, a detective,
spends the movie chasing De Niro's Neil McCauley, a criminal
mastermind. Midway through the film, Hanna pulls McCauley over
and suggests they go get coffee, and I settled back hoping for
the fireworks of two modern movie legends sparking off one another.
But Mann never gives us what we want: a clear shot of both of
them in the same frame. He keeps cutting to De Niro or Pacino
talking to someone filmed from the back -- who could actually
be the other star or could, for all we know, be a stand-in. They
have one other (climactic) scene together, and Mann blows that,
too.
Heat has been getting some heavy-duty reviews, as if it
weren't just a cop drama but the cop drama. Michael Mann
seems to cast a spell of blindness over otherwise intelligent
(male) reviewers, who dutifully praise his handling of violence,
his understanding of alienation, blah blah blah. But the Heat
I saw clocks in at two hours and 51 minutes, and I felt every
minute. In outline, the movie isn't about anything but a guy
who robs banks and a guy who wants to catch him, but Mann pumps
it up, throws in characters and subplots that could have been
left out with absolutely no adverse effect, holds his camera
on the men staring at the Los Angeles city lights .... Heat
isn't a terrible movie; it has some fleeting pleasures. But it's
a jumble. Mann can't come up with a compelling narrative, so
he piles narratives on top of each other, and each scene has
identical dramatic weight. You can't tell what's important and
what isn't, and some may mistake the movie's incoherence for
profundity.
This is as much as I could make out. Some banks get robbed, some
cops get killed, and some thieves get killed. Except for Hanna
and McCauley, nobody seems to have a name; characters with names
like Van Zant are referred to, but I still don't know who Van
Zant is. Heat isn't complex; it's just complicated. People
like Jon Voight (looking like Gregg Allman in Rush) and
Tom Sizemore (I remember his short gray hair) drift in and out
of the movie, doing things I never quite understood; if they
register at all, they only register visually. If you'd never
seen Wes Studi before, you'd never know from his flunky role
in Heat that he can be a powerfully scary actor (in Last
of the Mohicans). Mann resorts to giving hip cameos to Henry
Rollins and Tone-Loc, who are as blurry as everyone else on the
screen -- except the two Godfathers.
Val Kilmer is in it, too, giving a non-performance that makes
me afraid that his mesmerizing work in Tombstone was a
fluke. He has a wife (or is she a girlfriend?), played by Ashley
Judd, who has nothing to do except bitch at Kilmer and hold a
baby. (Is it hers? Is it theirs? Is it a Rent-a-Baby?) Pacino
also has a wife, played by Diane Venora, who gives the same jaded
performance she gave in Bird, only without the humor.
She gets the worst lines, too: Defending a fling with some loser,
she spits at Pacino, "I had to degrade myself with Ralph
so I could get closure with you." Take that. Venora's
depressed daughter is played by Natalie Portman, and, again,
if you hadn't seen this young actress in The
Professional you'd never know she had any spirit. Finally,
De Niro finds love with NYPD Blue's Amy Brenneman, as
some sort of innocent bookstore clerk and aspiring graphic designer.
(Do we ever see her working on anything? No. Does she ever show
De Niro her portfolio? No.) These are gifted actresses, but the
women they're playing are made of paper -- old paper, too. (They
all deliver some variation of "Be careful" to their
men.) Heat has been acclaimed for its compassionate treatment
of non-stereotypical female characters. That's a joke, right?
Michael Mann specializes in hip abstractions. The difference
between him and Quentin Tarantino, another hipster abstractionist
working in the crime genre, is that Mann takes himself seriously.
He gives the impression of being a deep thinker with a colorful
palette, but all he has is the colorful palette (which is easy
when you have an ace cinematographer like Dante Spinotti, who
does the honors here). Mann isn't satisfied with simple entertainment.
He wants to give you the definitive cop show (Miami Vice,
Crime Story), the definitive safe-cracker movie (Thief),
the definitive serial-killer movie (Manhunter), the definitive
historical saga (Mohicans). Heat is his definitive
macho-showdown movie, and the proof is in the casting. Would
any of us be the least bit interested in Heat if it starred,
say, Michael J. Fox and James Belushi? Mann uses Al Pacino and
Robert De Niro for the great-American-actor gravitas they can
bring to the shallow characters. The only real drama in the movie
is our collective memory of all the classic movies De Niro and
Pacino have done over the last three decades, and this is the
dream match: De Niro versus Pacino, like Ali versus Tyson in
Madison Square Garden -- this is it, this is the big one.
About Mann's script, the best I can say is that there's always
something going on, even if we're never sure what. I guess if
I try real hard I can justify the serial-killer subplot: one
of De Niro's henchmen goes nuts, escapes, and starts picking
off prostitutes. But really the psycho is in the movie to give
Pacino more corpses to find. There's a scene in which Kilmer
gets around a roadblock by flashing fake ID; doesn't he have
a criminal record, and are the LAPD that easily fooled by Kilmer's
new haircut? As a director, Mann has always been overrated. Every
scene has at least one image that calls attention to itself,
like De Niro's car momentarily turning white when it passes under
tunnel lights. Except for the way De Niro softens towards Amy
Brenneman when they first meet, the movie has no real feeling,
just Mann's intellectualized concept of feeling. And since the
character are so hollow there's no context for the few heated
emotions there are.
The movie doesn't really insult your intelligence (except for
a moment when Al Pacino roughs up Henry Rollins -- Pacino's whole
body is maybe the size of Rollins' neck); it does test your patience,
though. It's no mystery why Heat has scored with critics.
They were all psyched for Casino
-- so psyched that no movie could have lived up to the anticipation
-- and they were let down, and now they've latched onto Heat,
pretending that it's what they desperately want it to be: the
big American masterpiece of the fall. Will the movie connect
with a large audience? I doubt it -- not after word-of-mouth
gets out and the critics' emperor Michael Mann is revealed to
have no clothes.
Heat boils down to Pacino, De Niro, and Mann's pretentious
direction. I honestly don't know why the stars committed to Mann's
script. Was it the chance to play large, empty characters they
could then fill with acting flourishes? Given nothing new or
specific to express, De Niro and Pacino fall back on familiar
mannerisms. Vincent Hanna is a synthesis of Pacino's flamboyant
turns in Scent of a Woman and Dog Day Afternoon,
with a dash of Serpico; Neil McCauley is pretty much De
Niro's efficient boss in Casino with a goatee and a gun.
Both men have exciting or amusing moments, but they're not playing
people. Michael Mann doesn't do people; he does icons. Heat
is an almost completely abstract cops-and-robbers movie about
The Cop and The Robber. Some may enjoy the abstraction itself,
the decorative images, the masculine brooding, the elaborate
planning of heists; they may even float lazily in the nearly
three-hour length and not worry about following the plot. But
the movie, like Pacino and De Niro, never truly comes together.
It's the De Niro-Pacino movie for De Niro-Pacino fans who don't
care that it makes no sense; it's like those lame crossover comic
books where Superman and Spider-Man team up -- the idea of them
being in the same story is meant to be so thrilling that we'll
overlook the flaws out of gratitude. Sorry. Michael Mann is an
ambitious but cold director, and this film, like his other work,
has size without shape, incident without meaning, ideas without
focus, artistry without personality, fire without heat. |