I’ve seen just about every Michael Mann film (some more than once, unfortunately) and I’ve never been particularly impressed. I’m probably in the minority when I write that Heat (1995) was a bloated mess, and that all I remember from the turgid 1999 film The Insider are random bits: Russell Crowe’s glasses and Al Pacino doing an awful lot of yelling into cellphones. (Come to think of it, there was a lot of yelling in The Last of the Mohicans (1992) as well.)
And all I can recall, probably wrongly since I was 12, from his Nazis-and-vampires movie The Keep (1983), is a vampire-demon thingy floating in an archway. This was, I think, supposed to be one of the big special-effects shots — “no less than fourteen Academy Award winners and nominees for technical achievements and special effects”, says the trailer — except that the vampire-demon thingy seemed to be wearing those blinking LED glasses that Deborah Harry’s bandmates are wearing towards the end of the “Rapture” video. A bit of a letdown, even for 1983.
I think I remember Mann’s work better in fragments, so it’s only fitting that what’s below begins in bits and pieces. Mann’s Collateral is easily my favorite of his films (okay, that doesn’t sound like I’m saying much) and, in my opinion, one of the finest thrillers of the decade (and that’s saying a lot). Setting aside the 30 second-long introductory portion (where Tom Cruise gets his marching orders from Jason Statham, in a cameo), here is possibly the finest eight minutes of Mann’s career:
A minute and a half in, and where are we? All the “establishing shots” so far are close-ups. We hear different languages spoken in the background. One might argue that Mann is using this “foreignness” to accentuate this initial sense of disorientation for the viewer, but his intention becomes increasingly clear: this is Los Angeles.
The camera hovers and settles fleetingly: colors, lights…
…and surfaces.
It’s our first shot of Jamie Foxx, but we don’t know it’s him yet.
Ah — we’re in a garage.
Mann shifts between lots of reds and cold fluorescent greens here, in contrast to all those cool shades of blue in Manhunter (1986).
We finally see Jamie Foxx.
And now we know where we are, kind of.
Foxx enters his cab and cleans the windshield just a little bit more, even though the lustrous gleam of the previous images suggests that his cab’s probably already pristine. It’s a telling gesture, one of many subtle touches in the first 12 minutes that illuminate Foxx’s character.
He slips his postcard into the visor. I don’t think we get another extreme closeup until much later, because it’s time to venture out into the city.
And off he goes, literally riding into the sunset. (The mural seems to have been recreated from the original in Boyle Heights, but I don’t know Los Angeles.)
On the radio: hip hop, reggae, Latin pop. Passengers (including Debi Mazar in a cameo) argue in his back seat, but the music drowns it out for the audience.
The first of many extreme long shots. I like the way the grids contrast with the curves of cloverleafs and on-ramps. (Los Angeles has the shortest freeway on-ramps, I swear.)
I’m not sure if it’s the same digital camera he uses in Public Enemies (2009), but the color just pops.
One of many egregious product placements for Bacardi Silver — I think there are four in this introductory sequence alone — but when was the last time you saw a Latino gas station and convenience store in a mainstream Hollywood movie? Or nightclubs in Koreatown or East L.A., for that matter? Collateral takes us on a tour of Los Angeles that’s roughly analogous to all those places that Thom Andersen (in his brilliant 2003 documentary Los Angeles Plays Itself) says you never see on screen.
More surfaces and light.
Our first glimpse of Jada Pinkett Smith, though we hear her first, talking on her cellphone.
They drive off for downtown.
“Take Sepulveda to Slauson to La Brea. Take La Brea north to 6th, into downtown.” She hasn’t even looked at him at this point.
“The 105 to the 110 takes you there quicker,” he counters. They make a bet: if his route isn’t faster, then the ride is free. Do Angelenos really argue about traffic routes like this?
Groove Armada begins to play on the radio, and we get another sequence alternating between long and extreme long shots of the taxi on the streets. Cabs should be claustrophobic and stuffy, but not here, for the passengers keep getting visually pulled out and into the city. It’s a cliche to say the city is practically another character in the film, but the rhythm of the cuts throughout — Pinkett Smith, then Foxx, then both, then the sensuous radiance of the city around them, then back again inside the taxi — reinforces this.
In any case, she loses her bet. “Go ahead, say it,” she says, and Max is gentlemanly enough to say he got lucky with the lights.
Pinkett Smith moves closer to the center of her seat, partly because she’s more interested in talking to Foxx now. The audience finally sees her clearly, because she only slowly edges into Foxx’s field of vision, as it were: first as silhouette (potential fare), then behind the Plexiglas barrier, and finally she moves fully into his sphere.
“Take pride in being good at what you do?” she asks.
The focus returns to the foreground. “What, this? No, this is part-time,” Max says, but from the stammer in his voice we know it isn’t.”But I will be the best at what I do. But that’s something else.”
Now a quick reaction shot, but one not announced as such: the camera doesn’t move, but instead subtly shifts focus to Pinkett Smith as she tucks her hair beneath her ear.
He says he wants his future limousine service to be “like an island on wheels”, but his taxi already feels like it, with Richie Havens’ voice on the radio filling the soundtrack.
“When you get to the airport, you won’t want to get out of my limo” — a bit of a joke, because in a few minutes his next passenger won’t leave him alone.
Then a spectacular overhead shot — if a shot from a helicopter could be called seductive, this would be the one. Not sure if we’re still following Foxx’s cab at this point, but it doesn’t matter: we’re up and away, both above the city and yet still completely immersed in it.
And nine minutes into the movie, the ride comes to a stop. In the dark, they look like they’re sitting together.
“You like what you do?” the cab driver asks the prosecuting attorney. It’s a bit presumptuous for him to ask, surely, but at this point a bond has been formed between the two… and the audience. “Yeah,” she answers, but we can tell from her pause that she doesn’t, not really. “But not today,” she clarifies.
They talk for the next three minutes, and I won’t give a summary of their entire conversation, except to note that dialogue-wise the film could have spun off into Night on Earth territory and I wouldn’t have minded. She leaves the cab (but not before, almost unbelievably, she gives him her card), and this random, seemingly inconsequential, encounter between two strangers who make a connection comes to an end, to be followed by yet another random encounter between two strangers.
And this is only the beginning: the rest of Collateral is as slick and efficient as Cruise’s hitman, its dialogue both introspective and pungent, its visual style buffed almost to a fault. (One other unforgettable image: Cruise, looking like a great white shark, swimming through a nightclub floor looking for prey.)
You may wonder then, after all my complaining above, why I still bother watching Mann’s movies? Those first twelve gorgeous minutes of Collateral are the reason.
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