***1/2 (out of ****)
Starring Tom Cruise, Jamie Foxx, Jada Pinkett Smith, Mark Ruffalo, Bruce McGill, Irma P. Hall, Jason Statham, Javier Bardem, and Barry Shabaka Henley
Directed by Michael Mann & written by Stuart Beattie
2004
120 min R
Dozen-or-So Best Films of 2004
My wife and I were early for something in downtown and started wandering around. Because we’re such big movie dorks our conversation turned to the films of Michael Mann, mainly “Heat,” “The Insider,” “Manhunter,” and his new release, “Collateral.” We speculated that deep-down the movie Mann really wants to make is a collosal and kaleidoscopic look at the organism we know as The City. The movie—which we imagined would be brilliantly photographed with deep focus shots up and down a half-dozen city blocks—would see things from every social and occupational level. There would be arteries of traffic, scurrying newspaper vendors and restaurant managers, trash getting picked up. Men in a starched white suits would sit at desks and computers for hours before migrating to lunch in enormous packs. Cash registers would be manned, tables would be bussed, taxis would be hailed, subway cars would be missed, beggars would collect change, and so on and so forth, late into the night. If there were recurring characters, they wouldn’t have names and they wouldn’t have stories. In our minds we would know them as Office Worker, Bus Driver, Inner City Mother with Two Jobs, Traffic Cop, etc. Reflecting on Mann’s films, this is what we concluded he’s always really wanted to do.
“Collateral,” Mann’s latest ode to the city, is an atmospheric and nocturnal look at Los Angeles, shot on digital video. Digital video has a long way to go if it hopes to replace celluloid, but it works as a stylistic alternative if a filmmaker wants a washed-out, hand-held immediacy. White guys look orange and black guys look dark blue. DV works for some movies, like this one and “Russian Ark,” but “Once Upon a Time in Mexico” and “Attack of the Clones” really deserved to be on film. With a number of shots that begin out-of-focus or never even focus at all, “Collateral” is in love with the blur of city colors. We recognize the glow of headlights, traffic signals, and neon signs. We know office buildings by their randomly-lit windows and the gloss of their darker-than-night reflections. Helicopter shots looking down on the city, as headlights pump through the streets like they were white blood cells, achieve a murky, abstracted beauty.
The movie opens just after the evening rush hour and a cabbie begins his shift. We see him travelling high-and-low, uptown, downtown, the good parts and the bad, and with every new location our music changes. Rock, soul, rap, classical, electronica—at first the constantly altering soundtrack seems needlessly choppy. But if you’ve ever spent a whole day driving alone you know how the radio becomes your companion, and you find yourself having a kind of dialogue with different stations and CDs.
Yes, there is a crime story, about a hitman and a taxi driver, cops and federales, gangsters and witnesses. But the exact nature of the crime story is beside the point. I enjoyed the vast and beautiful imagery in Mann’s obtuse biopic “Ali,” but found the story and characters vague and difficult to grasp. With “Collateral” Mann uses a substantial but imperfect screenplay, by Stuart Beattie (the overlong “Pirates of the Caribbean”), as the skeleton for his towering impressionist painting. We never learn what the gangster’s business is and we never learn what the witnesses saw. “Some people stayed at home and some people went out,” remarks an FBI surveillance man. The real story is a contest of wills and values between the hitman (Tom Cruise) and the cabbie (Texas native Jamie Foxx) who becomes his unwilling, captive chaffeur on a night of assassinations. To call this arrangement preposterous would be fair, but it is an intriguing vehicle for our late-night tour of the city, in which Mann lovingly shoots sleazy dives, run-down apartments, glittering nightclubs, cavernous high-rise apartments, and all those who inhabit them.
The hitman is an efficient, crisp middle-aged man named Vincent, played with a hawk-nosed viciousness that is, in a way, the culmination of Cruise’s surprisingly intense turns in “Mission: Impossible 2” and “Minority Report.” As it dawns on the cabbie that Vincent is, in fact, dispatching other human beings and not signing real estate forms, we come to realize that he is a textbook sociopath, a man completely unable to comprehend the feelings and needs of others. If what makes humans different than animals is our ability to imagine what we cannot observe with our senses, than Cruise’s Vincent is not quite human.
The restraint of Foxx’s performance as Max the cabbie is all the more surprising when we consider he got his start on “In Living Color.” (Even if “Ali” and “Any Given Sunday” were not completely successful, at least check out Foxx’s fine work in them.) He drives with his head low and keeps his taxi clean. He lives by two mantras: the tropical photograph on the dashboard and the claim that driving taxis is only to pay the bills before he begins his real life’s work. Trouble is, he’s been driving for 12 years…
Mann takes the men who work in the city very seriously. Recall Mamet’s “Glengarry Glen Ross,” in which men who do not succeed in business are accused of being women, children, or homosexuals, or when Jack Lemmon declares “a man is his job.” Conversely, my wife recently read a book called “Your Money or Your Life,” in which the notion that we should expect a career to provide anything besides money is debunked as ludicrous. Meaning and fulfillment, the book claims, were once and should again be the property of family, religion, hobbies, and other outside interests.
Page two of "Collateral." Back to home.