Heat

MOVIE DETAILS

Rating: 8.3 out of 10
Director: Michael Mann
Writer: Michael Mann
Star: Al Pacino, Robert De Niro, Val Kilmer
Genres: Action/Crime/Drama
Release Date: December 15, 1995 (United States)

Michael Mann’s “Heat” is centered around a sequence which exposes its true subject. At this point, a detective from the Los Angeles police department called Hanna (Al Pacino) tracks for many days a high-level thief known as McCauley (Robert De Niro). Being smart and quick to react, McCauley seems to be untouchable. Therefore, one evening Hanna tails him by car and switches on the flashers before pulling him over.

McCauley carefully repositions the loaded gun he had been carrying. He waits in his car while Hanna approaches and says, “What do you say I buy you a cup of coffee?” McCauley says that sounds like a good idea.

Across from each other at a Formica table in a diner sit two men: Middle-aged, weary, with too much mileage in their lines of work they know exactly what they stand for to each other; but for now they drink their coffee.

McCauley is supremely skilled as a professional thief. When Hanna hints otherwise, he says, “You see me doing thrill-seeker liquor store holdups with a ‘Born to Lose’ tattoo on my chest?” No, the cop does not. The talk ends there. The cop says: “I don’t know how to do anything else.” The thief says: “Neither do I.” This scene is “Heat’s” reason for being: these cops and robbers need each other; they are in the same space, sealed off from mainstream society and governed by its own rules.

They are each other’s enemies but in another way they are more intimate than friends even more involved with one another than with those who should be their closest friends; such as women.

The women are the movie’s second subject. Two of the principal characters in “Heat” have wives; and during the course of it McCauley will fall in love which is against his policy. Hanna is on his third marriage, with a woman named Justice (Diane Venora), who complains that he is obsessed with his job: “You live among the remains of dead people.” One of McCauley’s partners in crime is a thief named Shiherlis (Val Kilmer), whose wife is Charlene (Ashley Judd).

McCauley’s own policy is never to get involved in anything he cannot walk away from in 30 seconds flat. One day in a restaurant he starts talking to Eady (Amy Brenneman) who asks him a lot of questions. “Lady,” he tells her, “why are you so interested in what I do?” She is lonely. “I am alone,” he tells her. “I am not lonely.” But he is the loneliest man on earth and soon finds out that he needs her after all.

This is the traditional struggle in American action films, between the man with “man’s work” and the female lead, the woman who wants to domesticate him, wants him to stay home. “Heat,” with an unusually literate screenplay by Mann, handles it with intelligence. The men in his movie are hooked on their lives. There’s a scene where the thieves essentially have all the money they need. They can retire. McCauley even has a place picked out in New Zealand. But another job presents itself, and they can’t pass it up: “It’s the juice. It’s the action.” The film intercuts these introspective scenes with big, bravura sequences of heists and shoot-outs. It opens with a complicated armored car robbery involving stolen semis and tow trucks. It continues with a meticulously planned bank robbery.

McCauley is the mastermind. Hanna is the guy assigned to divine his next move.

The cops keep McCauley and his crew under 24-hour surveillance, and one day follow them to an isolated warehouse district, where the thieves stand in the middle of a vast space and McCauley outlines some plan to them. Later, the cops stand in that same spot, trying to figure out what plan could possibly have been hatched there among those thieves. No target is visible anywhere in sight. Suddenly Hanna gets it: “You know what they’re looking at? They’re looking at us the LAPD. We just got made.” He’s right about that, McCauley is now on a rooftop watching them through a lens, having smoked out his tail.

De Niro and Pacino, veterans of so many great crime movies together by now that they’ve spent more time playing cops and robbers than most cops or robbers ever do De Niro and Pacino are legends of cinema not only because they’ve played so many great characters, but also because they’ve played so many similar ones. There is always talk about how actors study people to base their characters on. At this point in their careers, if Pacino and De Niro go out to study a cop or a crook, likely as not the cop or crook will have patterned himself on their performances in old movies. Here there is absolute precision of effect, the feeling of roles assumed instinctively.

What’s interesting is the way Mann tests these roles with the women. The wives and girlfriends in this movie are always, in a sense, standing at the kitchen door, calling to the boys to come in from their play. Pacino’s wife (Venora), played by Venora with a smart bitterness, is the most unforgiving: She’s married to a man who brings corpses into bed with him in his dreams. Her daughter (Valeria Golino), rebellious and screwed up, isn’t going to get any fathering from him; when he catches her with another man she accurately says he forced her to demean herself.

The other women (played by Judd and Brenneman) aren’t quite so insightful. They still harbor some delusions although Brenneman, who plays an artist with de rigueur piercings and tats all over her place, baulks as any modern woman would when this strange secretive man expects her to leave her drawing boards and Macintoshes behind and follow him off into New Zealand uncertainty.

This material is raised by Michael Mann’s writing and direction above its genre obligations for character development; there’s nothing arbitrary here even Tom Sizemore’s one-note psychopath has been thought through nobody just passes through without showing us something about themselves that we’re glad we saw.

It is not merely an action movie. More than anything else, the characters are capable of expressing their thoughts through dialogue which is sophisticated: they can be articulate, perceptive, imaginative or poetic if need be; they do not rely on cliches; among the numerous forms of captivity known to our world, none is worse than being unable to talk about what one feels towards another human; such prisoners lack words for true emotions. This lot does possess them all. Still this cannot help them much.

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