The Mann Candidate
COLLATERAL
[nota bene: The following review, by necessity, contains some spoilers! If you don't want to know the ending, don't read on!]
COLLATERAL is one of the best films of the year. It's features great performances from several stars including Jamie Foxx, Jada Pinkett Smith, Mark Ruffalo, and of course Tom Cruise (don't worry, I won't repeat my "Tom Cruise is the best working actor in Hollywood next to Johnny Depp" argument, for which see Nocturnal Admissions passim). The film looks great. It's got a terrific score (mostly by James Newton Howard). It's a drama that is both exciting and thoughtful at the same time. And Michael Mann directed it. Everybody I know was going to go see it anyway, but if there are any fence sitters or Cruise haters out there still waffling, please read on.
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The premise, from the script credited to Scott Stuart Beattie (scribe of PIRATES OF THE CARIBBEAN: THE CURSE OF THE BLACK PEARL, and the forthcoming THIRTY DAYS OF NIGHT, derived from a comic published by the firm now steered by our esteemed editor, Chris Ryall), has the sleek simplicity of a Larry Cohen movie (CELLULAR, PHONE BOOTH, IT'S ALIVE, GOD TOLD ME TO).
Max Durocher is a cabbie in Los Angeles. It looks to be a good night for him. After a shrewish yuppie (Debi Mazar) belittles her boyfriend (in a style the foreshadows that of Max's mother, played by Irma P. Hall), his second fare is a woman named Annie (Pinkett Smith) who turns out to be a prosecutor on the eve of a big case. They have a delightful, flirty, detailed, frank conversation (with an allusion to BROADCAST NEWS) that creates a lot of good will in the viewer for the characters, because one of them isn't going to pop again until the 90-minute mark.
The scene also makes you feel good because, damn it, even in real life people from different occupations and socio-economic backgrounds occasionally get together. It's a beautiful sequence and occurs just at the right time in the film.
Unfortunately Max's very next fare is the mono-monikered Vincent (Tom Cruise), who offers Max $600 dollars to chauffeur him to five stops around town and then the airport. But at Vincent's very first destination, a run down apartment complex, Max learns that Vincent is in reality a contract killer who has been paid to eliminated five people connected to a big drug case starting the next day. Max spends the rest of the night complying, rebelling, trying to escape, bearing witness to murder, and finally becoming a man of action himself borne of the bizarre tutelage he's received at the hands of Vincent.
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There is a subplot that occasionally takes us out of the suffocating confines of the cab, beautifully shot, by the way, by first Paul Cameron, who left over "creative differences," then Dion Beebe. Consult the new issue of AMERICAN CINEMATOGRAPHER (August, 2004) for a detailed article about the groundbreaking digital camerawork on the film. Or maybe that's a bad idea. Personally I was a little distracted by trying to guess which footage was by Cameron (I'm guessing the first 30 minutes in the cab), and which was by Beebe. Anyway, there is a fourth character, one Fanning (Mark Ruffalo), a slicked-back cop who, while casually checking up on one of his informants, stumbles onto a crime scene. After he puts it all together in the course of the night, he reveals to his boss (Peter Berg) and the dense, unknowing head of the task force supervising the drug case (Bruce McGill) that there is a hit man on the loose. His frustration in convincing them of this truth culminates in the most exciting disco shootout since THE TERMINATOR.
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Some critics may have difficulty with the film because it blends Mann's usual realistic surface look with preposterous, if exciting, set pieces that take the film into TERMINATOR, TERMINATOR 2, and SPEED territory. Personally, I didn't mind that. I liked those movies and was intrigued by Mann's take on them. Usually, Mann is the "anti-Tarantino," the guy who makes crime films, such as HEAT, with absolutely no references to other films in the genre. Here, though, I am guessing that these elements come from the screenplay. But who knows? The point is that the locations and the action allow Mann to photograph Los Angeles in a new and dreamy sort of way. What he does with the SPEED chase on the light rail is very interesting. Mann just quietly shuts down the film. And elsewhere in the film he has the guts and cunning to take out a character you've grown fond of with startling suddenness. And later he even managed to make me forget about a rather large parcel until it comes back into play during a climactic car chase.
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Others may have "problems" with COLLATERAL's reliance on coincidence. The sprawling environment of Los Angeles starts to feel quite cozy by the end of this particular evening. One coincidence is Fanning getting on the same elevator with Max and Vincent. It's explained in the movie, of course, but we tend to be less forgiving of convenient coincidences in movies than we do in life. The first, big coincidence is what generates the plot, however. That Vincent should be leaving the building that Annie is entering smacks of contrivance, but it, too, later proves to be logical. In fact, Max almost didn't pick up Vincent. And if he hadn't she might not have survived the evening. The point is that COLLATERAL is plotted. Very well plotted. But we aren't used to that in movies, and so grow suspicious of it.
In any case, I get around these two issues by contemplating how COLLATERAL fits into Mann's career, and also through sheer enjoyment of the brilliantly written dialogue.
Mann's films, maybe Mann's best films, usually have in common the subject of a fellow whose dreams are thwarted or altered by circumstance. In THIEF it was Caan's break-in artist trying to escape The Life. In MANHUNTER, it was Graham trying to live outside the influence of serial killers and their hold on his mind. In HEAT it was De Niro's dream of taking down one last score (almost always an invitation to defeat in movies). In THE INSIDER, it was Wigand's faith in research and his resistance to its suppression. Even ALI charts an interesting trajectory, in which, in matching jogging scenes book ended at the beginning and end of the film, Mann shows us the differences between the world Ali came from and the ideal world he dreams of thanks to his Muslim faith. Here it is Max's dream of starting his own limo service, and his ambition to retire to a faraway island, a photo of which he keeps clipped to his windshield visor. He also wishes to get out from under the thumb of his psychologically cruel mother, who has emasculated him. In the course of the movie Max comes closest to any Mann hero to achieving his dream.
COLLATERAL has some of the best dialogue I've heard in a movie in years, and I can't wait to read the screenplay. It's not just good during the clipped, fragmentary discourse of Vincent, but also in the moving, tender, confessional conversation between Max and Annie at the start. It is versatile dialogue and will probably be quoted for years. I also love the way that Cruise delivers it. You really fuckin' believe this guy. He has a whole repertoire of slang and personal code terms. Instead of saying, "Stop," Vincent says, "Red light, Max." Most of what Vincent has to say has to do with intimidation, manipulation, orders, and when he is impatient he can be very funny, as well he snaps coldly at Max while on the brink of a kill, "I'm working here." Vincent also has a great little speech derived from THE THIRD MAN, which gets a payoff in the last line of the script.
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If I had a criticism of this film (and I don't, really) it might be to wonder out loud why COLLATERAL is set in Los Angeles, instead of New York, as originally intended. What is it about the cinema that demands that NY is a taxi city and Los Angeles is a limo city? How much do these impressions, or stereotypes, or assumptions, dictate how much we appreciate or believe a film? Is there something about cities, or what we have learned about cities from movies, that demands that taxi movies all be in New York, while all political execution films be set in Los Angeles? But then I think, well, if New York is so much a "taxi" city, why does it matter if there is a variation in the genre. Thus, COLLATERAL is one of the great cab movies, and there aren't that many. There's TAXI DRIVER, of course, which COLLATERAL resembles at the start, and NIGHT ON EARTH, and even a portion of PULP FICTION. Cabbies, in movies, are like bartenders, the recipients of unwanted confessions. But also, like bartenders, they tend to be subsidiary creatures, not the heroes, as Max is in COLLATERAL.
COLLATERAL sounds like it might have been a troubled production. DPs were switched; Frank Darabont and even Mann apparently had a hand in the script; and at one point the film almost starred Russell Crowe as Vincent and Adam Sandler as Max. Still, the result strikes me as entirely successful and in Vincent offers up one of the most interesting characters in recent films. I find him almost half admirable. He helps Max stand up to his boss and his mother, and by both example and force he instructs Max in being less meek (the change comes in an elaborate scene in which Max has to enter a club and impersonate Vincent for his contractor, Felix, played with nifty ruthlessness by Javier Bardem). Yeah, sure, Vincent is a paid killer (he has been in the "private sector" for six years, hinting at former military training), and of course his power and strength derived from dire skills and competence and a certain fearlessness. I love Vincent and hate him, the way Godard used to both love and hate John Wayne.
NEXT TIME" RESIDENT EVIL: APOCALYPSE, two weeks hence.
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