Michael Mann is the world’s greatest practitioner of the crime drama and Heat is his magnum opus. Like John Ford or Akira Kurosawa, Mann is a supremely talented auteur with a signature style, a roster of regular collaborators, a series of recurring ideas and a distinctive worldview. He stands out from his writer/director peers by telling the stories of isolated consummate professionals: master thieves, master killers, master hackers, master cops. Martin Scorsese and Francis Ford Coppola have a knack for creating great crime dramas, but their characters are typically rash, headstrong and quirky: colourful figures living in a world of heavy spaghetti and sudden death. A typical Mann character, whether cop or criminal, is icy, distant and ruthlessly competent. They live spartan lives in barren postmodern buildings, placing their craft above all personal considerations. Heat provides the best summation of the Mann protagonist’s philosophy: “don't let yourself get attached to anything you are not willing to walk out on in 30 seconds flat if you feel the heat around the corner”.
In a classic case of ‘we’re not so different, you and I”, Heat sees slick arch-criminal Neil McCauley (Robert De Niro) face off against veteran LAPD Lieutenant Vincent Hanna (Al Pacino). These men live on opposite sides of the law’s invisible line, and they understand each other perfectly. Both professionals respect competence and recognise the other as a philosophical compatriot. McCauley uses a small hand-picked crew to execute million-dollar heists, striking with precision after weeks of intense preparation. He knows the law inside and out, he has years of experience and he always selects smart targets. McCauley’s band of robbers are steadfastly loyal and rigorously trained, timing their operations to the second and instantly imposing complete control over their environment. The film begins as a new recruit lets the team down. Gung-ho psycho killer Waingro (Kevin Gage) plunges the team in jeopardy by needlessly executing a security guard. This results in a small massacre, drawing Hanna’s attention.
Waingro’s lack of professionalism exposes McCauley’s crew to intense scrutiny, destroying their low profiles. Through investigating the massacre and chatting with his informants, Hanna quickly deduces the membership of the team responsible. He places each of them under heavy surveillance, tracks their movements and works to turn their family members into police assets. After narrowly avoiding a swift death at McCauley’s infuriated hands, Waingro teams up with one of the gang’s enemies and plots revenge. The spurned killer uses brutal methods to harass McCauley’s crew from the outside while Hanna’s police investigation slowly gathers pace. Everything comes to a head in the movie’s highlight: a spectacular bank robbery that goes horribly wrong and spreads urban warfare across an entire city block. It’s typical of the film’s size and scale that its centrepiece is an enormous gun battle. While most of Mann’s films focus in on a single character, Heat is far more expansive. It uses a giant 170-minute running time to tell an epic ensemble piece spread out across a bustling metropolis.
Michael Mann’s direction is blazingly stylish and irresistibly smooth, but never ostentatious and never hollow. Mann forgoes whizzy camera stunts, intimate close-ups and complicated long takes, telling his story through a sturdy collection of medium-wide shots that highlight each environment as much as the actors. Isolated characters are depicted high up in the Hollywood hills or locked away in secluded beach houses, surveying vast horizons alone or in small clusters. Glowing streetlights shine like impossibly distant stars, always blurred and unreachable. Cinematographer Dante Spinotti, a regular Mann collaborator, casts a frigid blue tint over every image, making the coldness of Mann’s universe a visual quality. Mann’s clear cinematic influence is Jean-Pierre Melville, the French director who also created chilly, stylish thrillers about loner crooks. Like Melville, Mann obsesses over the tools and terminology used by the criminal elite, replicating every last detail of their enterprise with perfect aplomb.
Mann’s fidelity and perfectionism shine in the film’s most sublime sequence: the 11-minute bank robbery. Hanna’s timely intervention leads McCauley’s unit to launch a gruelling push through a busy city intersection, using parked cars for cover and firing short bursts at the gathering cops. All participating actors were given months of weapons training, firing live rounds to give them a feel for the weight and power of a fully-automatic assault rifle. The cast were up to the challenge. Tom Sizemore, Val Kilmer and Robert De Niro move like a special forces unit, pushing forward, improvising cover and picking off their pursuers with minimal verbal communication. Legend has it that an unbroken shot capturing Kilmer’s quick and effortless reload of a Colt Model 733 is regularly shown to US Marines as an instructional tool. Everything about this sequence looks, sounds and feels right. In his quest for total accuracy, Mann recorded the echoing noise of live gunfire and used it in lieu of stock sound effects. The bank robbery gets to the heart of Heat’s brilliance: it’s utterly thrilling and technically unimpeachable.
In addition to providing the film’s spectacular action sequences, Mann delves into the troubled personal lives of his cops and robbers, studying their bitter relationships and crushed dreams. Gun-toting bank robber Chris Shiherlis (Val Kilmer) and dedicated investigator Vincent Hanna both struggle to maintain doomed marriages, isolating their wives with their self-destructive behaviour. Chris is addicted to danger while Hanna loves his work more than his new family. Neither relationship will last. McCauley starts an oddly sweet romance with a kind bookseller named Eady (Amy Brenneman), but it begins on the basis of a lie. McCauley can’t tell the truth and he can’t quit his line of work, ruining a genuine opportunity for love. All of Heat’s characters are in search of a future that will never arrive. In an image that sums up their fruitless quests for comfort, Hanna’s depressed stepdaughter Lauren (Natalie Portman) is seen hopelessly waiting for an absent father who never shows up. Every marriage is destroyed and any hope of a new start is dashed by the same patterns of self-destructive behaviour. Mann’s characters are cursed to tread water until they die, whether by gunshot or natural causes.
Heat toys with elements of hyperlink cinema (a popular genre in the mid-90s) by connecting a vast ensemble of characters that are spread out across Los Angeles. Mann’s script introduces new characters struggling through tough lives before eventually connecting them to Neil McCauley’s crimewave or Vincent Hanna’s daily grind. A teenage sex worker becomes one of Waingro’s victims and physical evidence in a Hanna murder investigation. A paroled getaway driver is so disgusted with his new life that he reverts back to his previous profession, joining McCauley’s crew. Mann’s sympathy is with the parolee, a tender and loving man who’s exploited by his corrupt boss, a vile weasel who forces his vulnerable employees to kickback 25% of their wages. The parolee’s story is a heart-breaking reminder of Mann’s fatalistic worldview. His script suggests that even those with the best of intentions will always have their futures poisoned by their pasts. Every character who has ever spent time behind bars will remain imprisoned for their rest of their short lives.
Almost all of the cast give performances that conform to the typical style of Mann’s characters. The filmmaker’s cops and crooks use a low register, keep emotion out of their voices and load their conversations with dense job-specific jargon. They don’t shout, they don’t scrap and they don’t chat about what they watched on TV last night. De Niro, Kilmer, Sizemore and Voight have all given loud performances elsewhere, but in Heat they’re conditioned into subdued bluntness. Al Pacino is the exception. In a world of murmured sentiments and quiet scheming, he brings his blistering Tony Montana energy, hooting and hollering at full volume as his eyes bulge out of their sockets. Vincent Hanna is manic and intimidating, regularly using his unhinged ranting to shellshock crooks and informants into submission. This cop is a raging bully with a hair-trigger temper and a restless eye, making the pains of his personal life the fuel for his dangerous work. Before anyone can try to mislead him or threaten him, Hanna spooks them witless.
Beyond their superb attention to detail and show-stopping action set pieces, Mann’s films are defined by their potent sense of atmosphere. Heat is filled with a constant sense of yearning, a constant sense of ache. It’s there in De Niro’s lonely stare out across the Pacific ocean and his quiet dream of night-time in Fiji. It’s there in Kilmer’s tarnished but relentless commitment to his character’s wife, Charlene: “For me the sun rises and sets with her, man.” It’s there in Eady’s final crestfallen glance out into the darkness. It’s there when the hopeful smile fades from Kilmer’s face. It’s there when two men hold hands, one living and the other taking his last breath. The film’s great success rests in its profound combination of repressed emotion and technical perfectionism. Every robber has an extensive vocabulary, but it relates exclusively to their work. In moments of realisation and devastation, very few words are said, and silence fills the void. The emotion is understated but overwhelming. Much as I admire the gonzo excess of Pacino’s performance, his fits of comic rage do rub up against the film’s gorgeously sombre tone.
I revisited Heat after learning of Val Kilmer’s death. Chris Shiherlis is the role that I’ll always remember him for: the pinnacle of his screen performances. Kilmer’s character is a tragic figure, a broken romantic who winds up the haunted survivor of a vicious bloodbath. Chris speaks few words and he has a tendency to mumble his way through conversations about his feelings and failings, like a child coughing up a secret. Kilmer’s slightly petulant performance is note-perfect. It’s strange to think that he was the film’s commercial hook, the sexy youthful face that would appeal to the Top Gun and Batman Forever crowd. Pacino and De Niro are the reliable top-billed stars, but it’s the film’s supporting cast that give Mann’s world a sharp texture and make it buzz with life. Over time, Tom Sizemore’s wonderfully understated supporting role as intimidating heavy Michael Cherrito emerges as the keystone supporting the entire structure. Heat is Michael Mann’s Godfather, his Magnolia, his Hamlet. All of the artist’s positive qualities are present and in abundance.
Beautifully written