Heat: A Game of Cops and Robbers

The characters in most of Michael Mann's films fall into two distinct categories: cops and robbers. Whether a character is one or the other has nothing to do with what society has made them and everything to do with their nature. These characters are always men, and though their natures are opposed they often find that they have more in common with each other than they do with the women who share their beds. That's not to say that Mann isn't interested in women as subjects, but it's hard to tell from his films whether or not he understands them. His male characters certainly don't. Generally, the presence of females offers a moment of solace to the male characters before they are pulled back into the Darwinian struggle with other men that defines their existence. Over the course of a career spanning nearly 40 years, Mann has only directed a handful of theatrical releases including The Last of the Mohicans (1992), The Insider (1999), Collateral (2004) and Public Enemies (2009). However, his great work to date is Heat (1995), an entirely engaging action thriller that relies on character more than gun play to propel its story.


Heat is the story of two men: a thief, Neil McCauley (Robert DeNiro), and a detective, Vincent Hanna (Al Pacino). The two are obviously very similar. They each have a tight, regular crew of men they work with, and they are both the best at what they do. It is the way that they let their work effect their romantic lives that the men are most similar. Hanna is on his third marriage which is falling apart and McCauley tells his girlfriend he is a salesman because he lives by a strict code that requires no personal attachments that he can't abandon when he senses trouble.


In the book In a Different Voice (Harvard University Press, 1982), feminist psychologist Carol Gilligan addresses the different situations that men and women perceive as dangerous. Gilligan writes, "If aggression is conceived as a response to the perception of danger, the findings of the images of violence study suggests that men and women may perceive danger in different social situations and construe danger in different ways--men seeing danger more often in close personal affiliation than in achievement and construing danger to arise from intimacy, women perceiving danger in impersonal achievement situations and construing danger to result from from competitive success." It's doubtful that Mann read Gilligan's book before he made Heat, yet the gender issues that Gilligan addresses are perfectly illustrated in the film. Hanna and McCauley are both defined by what they do, and although intimate relationships with women are comforting, more often than not the relationships merely interfere with work. Neither Hanna nor McCauley knows how to do anything else, and neither of them wants to do anything else. For McCauley to be the best requires him to be free of any attachments, so that when he is pursued he has no regrets over what he is leaving behind. For Hanna to be the best it requires him to be as mobile as McCauley, which means showing up late for dinner and leaving his wife alone while his step-daughter is recovering in the hospital.


It's not only the audience that notices the similarities between the lives of Hanna and McCauley--each man seems to acknowledge a kinship with the other. This kinship is established midway through in the film's great scene (the first that DeNiro and Pacino ever appeared in together). Hanna has been trailing McCauley and his men for some time and McCauley knows it, and eventually Hanna finds out that McCauley knows. Instead of continuing their game of cat and mouse, Hanna pulls McCauley over on the freeway one night and suggests that they get a cup of coffee. McCauley agrees to the idea, and soon the two men are sitting at a diner talking about their professions, their lives, and even their dreams. As their conversation is coming to a close, they acknowledge that one of them, eventually, will have to kill the other. "Or maybe we'll never see each other again" says MacCauley. But neither of them seems to believe this.


The scene is great for many reasons. Not only are two of the greatest actors of their generation together on screen for the first time (they were both in The Godfather Part II, but shared no screen time) but it invests the audience in these two men emotionally. So that the climax is not merely a shoot-out between a cop and a robber, but a confrontation between two complex and interesting men. When one of them does have to kill the other, it's not just a bad guy killing a good guy or a good guy killing a bad guy--it's a man knowing he has killed the only person who understands him.


Returning to Heat over the years is a refreshing experience not only because of the honesty and intelligence of the characters, but because of the purity of the action scenes. Mann takes gunfire and its consequences seriously. This is true for most of his films, but especially Heat, where the gunfights are as frightening as they are exhilarating. The most notable sequence is when a bank robbery spills out to the streets of L.A., and there is a gunfight between McCauley's crew and the police. Not only can you hear the guns being fired, you can almost feel the impact of the bullets.


Mann has returned to similar subject matter for Collateral and (more blatantly) for his new film Public Enemies. Each is an excellent example of action film making, however no film Mann has made since attains the perfection of Heat. It's uncertain exactly why, but those other films seem restrained in some way--as if Mann was held back because of the circumstances of the stories. Thankfully, this was not the case with Heat, which is one of the best (certainly one of the most underrated) films of its decade.