Heat was released in 1995 to a decent amount of critical acclaim, but is not talked about often enough today. Yet, today it still feels as modern, sleek and brilliant as it must have done in 1995. It came out the same year as Toy Story, a first for computer animation, a film of the future, a contrast to the gritty realism on display in Heat. Also, out that year was Bad Boys, a film that has since spawned two sequels. The two films are nominally similar, they exist vaguely in the same genre, they may target the same demographic of cinema goers. But Heat goes for depth and has its sight set far above the standard explosive action of Bad Boys (incidentally Will Smith and Mann would collaborate six years later for Ali).
Over Michael Mann’s career he often returns to the idea that two seemingly antagonistic and opposing characters are in fact simply two sides of the same coin. Public Enemies contains this theme within it and in a sense is a thematic and stylistic sequel (or perhaps prequel given its setting) to Heat. Both films have a criminal and a cop, both pairs are obsessive over their respective roles, both pairs can do nothing else except this and yet all of these characters still yearn for something else, something beyond the world of ‘cops and robbers’. The difference between the two films comes in the fact that Heat does it a lot better.
Although Johnny Depp and Christian Bale, who star in Public Enemies, are both very fine actors in their own right, in fact an argument could be made that Bale is the best actor of his generation, they are not Robert De Niro and Al Pacino. Film fans had been teased with this pairing since they both starred in The Godfather Part II, it would be the first time that they actually acted together on screen. And although it is only for one scene of dialogue, it was worth the wait. It is partially this scene that truly explains why Heat is the greatest of its ‘action thriller’ genre. We, the audience, hang on every sentence and every word, eagerly awaiting to find out what these two are going to say to each other next. We have followed both of these characters equally up until this point in the film, in a sense they are both our protagonists and our antagonists. And this is why we wait on every line; “You know, we are sitting here, you and I, like a couple of regular fellas. You do what you do, and I do what I gotta do. And now that we’ve been face to face, if I’m there and I gotta put you away, I won’t like it. But I tell you, if it’s between you and some poor bastard whose wife you’re gonna turn into a widow, brother, you are going down.” Al Pacino growls his lines at De Niro, not aggressively just in a manner that suggests he has seen too many atrocities in his life as a cop to keep his world-weariness out of his voice. De Niro is then the epitome of calm, he sits across the cop hot on his tail and yet shows no sign of anything but composure. They are contrasts in this respect but they are also both highly professional, highly competent and mutually respectful as shown by the last shot of the movie.
The script of Heat is also a major strength to the film. The characters can very effectively express themselves and as such we as an audience understand them so clearly. For example, when De Niro’s Neil McCauley is on his first date with Amy Brenneman’s Eady he says “I am alone. I am not lonely.” And in this one line we gather so much about him; his profession means he cannot form significant relationships, he has been alone for a long time, he tells himself that he is not lonely and that he does not need a relationship and yet we also know from his interactions with Eady that he is lying to himself. This then instantly creates tension in the character because we know that he is starting on the journey to breaking his one rule; “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.” And in this rule, we also understand Al Pacino’s Vincent Hanna. We see why his third marriage is failing; “You don’t live with me, you live among the remains of dead people”, why his step-daughter, a very young Natalie Portman, has severe issues, because he has to be the titular ‘heat’ around the corner, so although he is a cop, though he is on the ‘right’ side of the law, he is as affected by the inability to have a stable relationship as the criminal, again showing them to be two sides of the same coin. The script enables this complexity of character to exist in the film and thus it allows us to exist in their world beside them. Roger Ebert summarises best how characters in other films cannot be this complex because of the limitations of the script; “Of the many imprisonments possible in our world, one of the worst must be to be inarticulate – to be unable to tell another person what you really feel. These characters can do that.”
It is about halfway through the film when the major action set piece occurs and it is completely worth the wait. Michael Mann used the actual live sounds of the gunfire instead of dubbing artificial sounds over the top in post-production and that is why it sounds so distinctive. The shots echo around downtown Los Angeles as much as they echo around a cinema screening room. You are completely immersed in the sequence. The actors underwent weapons training from former SAS officers and the sequence is still shown to marine recruits as a proper way to retreat whilst under fire. The action is frenetic and wild, seemingly without choreography, though I imagine every second of it was extensively planned. The 800-1,000 rounds used every take certainly did not go to waste in what is possibly the best gunfight not in a war movie. Mann truly outdid himself here and the fact that it’s been twenty-five years and not a single movie in that time has been able to match this gunfight is a testament to Mann’s ability as a director.
Heat is also distinctive in the way in which the world of Los Angeles is explored. The city feels vast and open but also dangerous. As if at any turn there could violence. One can see how the makers of Grand Theft Auto were influenced by the film, but also how Nolan was influenced by it when planning how to represent his seedier, grittier version of Gotham City. Nolan, like Mann, gives the city a personality. In Heat that personality is cold and unfriendly, imbuing the characters with a self-interested mindset. As cultural critic Mark Fisher points out, this is not the family oriented The Godfather or Goodfellas; “Heat’s Los Angeles is a world without landmarks, a branded sprawl where markable territory has been replaced by endlessly repeating vistas of replicating franchises.” The New York of The Godfather and Goodfellas was home to the characters, in Heat Los Angeles is merely a job market, a good place for crime, a pragmatic choice to live. These characters are homeless. McCauley thinks he’ll find a home by leaving the country to find somewhere exotic to live, Hanna’s version of a home is the precinct chasing up leads on criminals. Both are constantly moving and adapting, neither are ever truly grounded in one place.Heat is a truly brilliant movie even two and a half decades after it was first released. The film is not just De Niro and Pacino appearing on screen together for the first time, but a complex look at dualistic characters in a morally barren environment. It is the best film of its kind and it is the best of Mann’s career. And I imagine it will continue to be so for a long time.
CineLiterate 