Heat must be
a good name for a movie. By my count there have been five English-language
films with that exact title, starting with a 1972 flick starring and directed
by protégés of Andy Warhol. Most recently we’ve had an action comedy called The Heat, featuring Sandra Bullock and
Melissa McCarthy as buddy cops chasing down bad guys, while hilarity ensues.
But what I have in mind right
now is a tough-minded cops-and-robbers thriller from 1995, written and directed
by Michael Mann. Mann has been in Hollywood since the 1980s, making acclaimed
dramatic films like The Insider and Collateral. But many of us continue to remember him for
glamorizing the shores of South Beach in TV’s Miami Vice. Clearly, Mann is a guy who likes his characters to walk
on the wild side. And so they do in Heat,
which is set in the city of my birth, Los Angeles. Mann chose authentic locations
all over downtown L.A. and the Hollywood Hills, then staged a striking climax
on the tarmac of LAX. The nighttime skyline glitters; the views from stylish
hilltop homes are breathtaking. Result: L.A. has never looked so dazzling, nor so dangerous.
No, I can’t pretend I caught
every nuance of the complicated plot. There are lots of feints, lots of
betrayals, lots of gunfire and explosions, and it’s not always clear who’s
doing what to whom. Suffice it to say that the film’s two mega-stars, sharing
the screen for the first time, are Al Pacino and Robert De Niro, one playing a
career criminal and the other the cop who has sworn to take him down. Their few
scenes together are mesmerizing: suffice it to say that, despite the fact
they’re on opposite sides of the law, these two are birds of a feather. Both,
that is to say, are angry and driven loners who hold a mighty grudge against
the powers that be. They both recognize their kinship, and yet each is sworn to
take the other one down. That’s why the last scene of the film is a doozy.
De Niro and Pacino are not
the only names in Heat. There’s a
major role for Val Kilmer, a thug whose love for wife Ashley Judd almost does
him in. Jon Voigt plays another not-so-good guy, and a number of well-known
character actors play parts on both sides of the law. It should be noted that Heat stands out for having a goodly
number of developed female characters. They don’t exactly pass the Bechdel
test: all of them exist in relation to their male counterparts. Still, these
women (Diane Venora and Amy Brenneman in addition to Judd) are handled with
admiration and respect, along with pity. (One surprise for me was the presence
of a very young Natalie Portman in a small but key role as Pacino’s
stepdaughter.)
The reason for the
well-developed female roles speaks to the central theme of the movie. It’s
voiced several times, including in this De Niro line: “A guy told me one time,
‘Don’t let yourself get attached to anything you are not willing to walk out on
in thirty seconds flat if you feel the heat around the corner.’” It’s a mantra
by which the central characters live—and die. In the course of the film, De
Niro’s character falls hard for the nice young woman played by Amy Brenneman,
to the point where his solitary days seem on the brink of being over. But the warmth of a woman’s love is no match
for the heat generated by a life of crime.
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