Improvisation, Evolution, the I Ching
Review of Michael Mann's Collateral
I’d like to ascribe some reason to it. I’d like to think it’s because they’re both seedy, both look like they need more one on one time with a loofah and because each has given birth to some awful music. I’d like to think Black Hole Sun fits into the equation somehow, as an expression of one of these things. The video, with its synthetic smiles and washed out cinematography certainly seems seems very LA.
So as all the various archetypes at odds in Collateral—the Feds, LAPD, the kingpin’s henchmen, our hero and antihero—descend upon a night club for a bit of climactic gun violence, it was fitting that some shit Cornell song or another would be thumping out of the theatre’s sound system. It annoyed me, set me on edge--just how I'd be if I was about to walk into the club they shoot holes in. I imagined this was the type of song any of these expendable people would listen to. It crystallized the Cornell/LA association.
I’ve never been to LA.
Tom Cruise describes the kind of place I expect to find if I ever go there:
“Sprawling, disconnected.”
Just like a Chris Cornell song—this Cornell song. Sound and Fury. Big sounds, layered guitar, throbbing base. Utter shit. It sprawls. Every note is drawn out and heavy with distortion. I guess it's technically Audioslave. But anyway you slice it, it's still Cornell's crappy self-indulgent lyrics. My apologies to Tom Morello, but your new band's singer sucks.
I’ve always liked the music in Michael Mann movies. It fits, despite my personal prejudices. I’ve always liked his camera work. The angles he dreams up fit mood at setting perfectly.
I’ve liked every movie Michael Mann has made. Even Ali. As far as I know he has never made a bad movie.
He never lets you forget where you are, who you’re with. He doesn’t waste the medium. He conveys meaning with every shot, every element—setting, music, everything. The little slider on the Plexiglas divider that separates the front and back seat of Max’ cab is always open, but Mann never shoots Cruise or Jamie Foxx through the hole. The glass is always in the way. It’s scratched, it has papers taped to it, there are fares posted. You only see the back of Foxx’ head, Cruise’s eyes. The characters are almost always obscured. When Mann tracks the cab, though, it’s usually from 100 stories directly above.
Disconnected.
Like LA, like Max, like the killer in the back seat.
Michael Mann makes movies the way Henry James wrote books, with obsessive attention to psychological details.
I hate Henry James. I might have mentioned that I like Michael Mann. James plods along, droning endlessly, obsessing over details, psychic minutia. Mann is obsessive too, but he doesn’t have the luxury of plodding along.
Cinema has a built-in metronome to deal with that.
Mann understands the pacing necessary to keep an action movie afloat. He manages to work in all the important stuff wherever he can find a moment. Revelatory glances are exchanged through gun fire. Max has a weird facial tick that always shows itself just before the camera cuts away. Mann puts this stuff in knowing you’ll miss a lot, but hoping that you’ll notice enough. That’s brave and elevates the script above formula.
It’s a familiar formula.
Cruise’s Vincent is one part Tyler Durden, one part T-1000 with a little cheeky Nihilism to keep the dialogue hip. He's the archetypal post-modern killer-philosopher.
Max has a back story that is similar to the 7/11 clerk that Brad Pitt and Edward Norton threaten to kill in Fight Club. He has dreams, but his life is on repeat. Vincent saves him from that.
Vincent kills a lot of people, but in a perverse way gives Max his life back.
Mark Ruffalo has been in every third movie I’ve seen this year. That’s an amazing feat in itself. He’s becoming one of my favorite character actors. He’s very good at transforming himself. This time he's the Latino cop who thinks there might be more going on than meets the eye.
His Detective Fanning is really close to fitting all the pieces together the whole movie. It takes a while, but he eventually gets it. Then just as he gets it, he gets it.
When almost every big budget motion picture is a thriller, all you can really ask from a director and screen writer working in that cramped intellectual space is that they try and kill off characters in unique ways at unexpected times.
Collateral gets high marks for both of those things. That it also manages Max' growth and dreams in very human terms makes a very satisfying experience.
As I said before though, this is essentially a movie of archetypal characters. Max is too human for his own good, Vincent is godlike. In the end it's a struggle against stasis--"Improvisation, Evolution, the I Ching"--it's about breaking free of the tethers that keep life in a holding pattern.
The one who does survives the night and gets the girl.
All in all it’s a great movie and Jamie Foxx does an amazing job. I got home and crossed him off my mental hate list of people who have made a career entertaining white people by doing the black thing.
That's a tough hole to dig yourself out of--just ask Martin Lawrence and Will Smith.
Asking if a Michael Mann movie is good is tautological as far as I'm concerned. "Good" is built in to every Michael Mann movie. This is conditional of course and part of the suspense of every Mann movie is worrying that this new one is going to suck. I call this inevitable downturn "Kevin Spacey Syndrome" (ex 1,2,3).
For one more year I can say with aplomb that Collateral is a Michael Mann movie and mean that it is good without reservation.
Mann goes too far toward the end though, getting very Terminator 2 with his shots of Cruise. It was like he was lifting shots directly from the James Cameron Action Movie Bible. I don't know what he was going for exactly, but I'm sure it wasn't this:
Regarding the blog title, you can tell Eastern Mysticism is hip again in Hollywood when sociopaths begin referring to it in screenplays.
posted by Luke @ 9:39 AM
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