KINO OBSCURA

“All I am is what I’m going after.”

David Liu | 26 May 2012

Vincent Hanna is on to something. I recently viewed Heat for the fourth time after a friend suggested a late night movie to start the weekend, and for the fourth time came away admiring its visual compositions, its gritty yet figurative dialogue, its inherent affinity to literature and art.

Not unlike Fitzgerald and Hemingway, Michael Mann’s best films are brooding contemporary narratives defined by solitude, moral ambiguity and obsessive pursuit of elusive trophies. What continues to strike me about Heat — and similarly wired films like Ford’s The Searchers and Fincher’s Zodiac — is how Mann’s tireless devotion to method and mood results in a worthy analogue to great literature. Is there another American action picture that leaves its audience so wondrously full on a final sequence so tragically empty?

Art & Film: Michelangelo/Mann

David Liu | 26 May 2012

From the canvas (in this case, marble block) to the cinema.

Pietà (Michelangelo, 1498-99; marble)

Heat (Michael Mann, 1995)

Near the beginning of the film, Neil McCauley walks past a replica of Michelangelo’s Pietà. Near the end, world-weary Vincent Hanna fights to keep his suicidal step-daughter alive.

Tender Is the Night

Michael Mann’s Miami Vice: An Appreciation

David Liu | 27 June 2011

Even serious devotees of Michael Mann’s works are sometimes reluctant to like Miami Vice. This is understandable. For many critics and audiences, the 2006 crime drama — written and directed by Mann, based on the hit television series he produced in the late 1980s — came off as alternately dazzling and incoherent, majestic and stale. This sentiment might be attributed to two factors: that the film lacks the thematic cohesion of Heat, The Insider and The Last of the Mohicans; and that Mann’s decision to forgo the gaudy trappings of his show in favor of a stripped-down 21st century policier inevitably creates a chasm that’s difficult to navigate.

From the opening harbor rendezvous scene, we get the first hint that Sonny Crockett and Rico Tubbs, played respectively by Colin Farrell and Jamie Foxx, do not lead normal professions. Arriving by means of a heart-racing credits sequence over the waters of Miami, they stand back, measured and wary, observing a prostitution deal go down right before their eyes. Cut to night, the Mann male’s preferred time of day. Jay-Z’s sneering verse on “Numb/Encore” blares triumphantly all around. We see Crockett, Tubbs and their compatriots standing in the middle of a nightclub crowd, watching coldly over the dance floor without taking part in the festivities. They are silent remnants of a dying breed.

The film’s protagonists are battle-hardened Miami-Dade police detectives, the latest products of Mann’s ongoing obsession with modern law enforcement. Meticulous almost to a fault, Crockett and Tubbs represent the extreme Mann archetype. Displaying neither the world-weary complexity of Neil McCauley and Vincent Hanna in Heat nor the chest-pumping bravado of Cassius Clay in Ali, they’re creatures of habit, possessed by the intricacies of their undercover work. Their attempts to crack down on a prostitution ring become foiled when their former informant Alonzo (John Hawkes) commits suicide, shortly after learning that a Colombian drug cartel had discovered his position within the FBI and murdered his wife.

The narrative that follows is at once convoluted and breathtakingly open-ended, thanks to Mann’s avant-garde approach to visual storytelling. DEA task force liaison head John Fujima (Ciarán Hinds) enlists Crockett and Tubbs as deputies, tasking them with going undercover and probing the highly complex Caribbean narcotics trade by way of go-fast boats. We discover that the cartel is operated by brooding drug lord Jesus Montoya (Luis Tosar). Posing as smugglers, Crockett and Tubbs offer their services to Montoya’s cartel, all while Crockett secretly romances the drug lord’s Chinese-Cuban mistress, Isabella (Gong Li, stilted but still regal). Their desire to escape manifests itself in a bravura sequence set to Moby as the two lovers speed toward Havana to begin a tryst with no future.

It isn’t until the final third of Miami Vice that the film finally crystallizes, and what emerges should be rightfully celebrated as a treatise on the existential nature of undercover work. When an Aryan Brotherhood gang affiliated with the cartel kidnaps Tubb’s girlfriend, intelligent agent Trudy (Naomie Harris), work and love become inextricably linked. The tensions eventually culminate in a large-scale shootout that recalls the Figueroa Street carnage sequence in Heat, with all of the cold, hard-hitting minimalism that has come to be expected of Mann. Muzzle flashes illuminate the darkness, lending a ghostly, fractured beauty to the Miami night; the affair between Isabella and Crockett finally succumbs to the vagaries of fate and occupation.

The final frame, occurring just as Mogwai’s “Auto Rock” swells into a poignant crescendo, reaffirms that no one in modern American movies captures solitude on an audiovisual level like Mann does. We see Crockett striding back into the hospital to visit an injured Trudy, but not before he takes one last glance at the departing Isabella, fading slowly but surely into the vast watery expanse. Such is the plight of every character in the Mann universe: Torn between a fanatical commitment to duty and an insatiable desire for freedom, they depart as they come, tragic heroes and heroines borne back ceaselessly into the only world they were fated to know and fight for.