Michael Mann's Heat

By J.D. Lafrance

“Don’t keep anything in your life you’re not willing to walk out on in 30 seconds flat if you feel the heat around the corner.” – Neil McCauley

“All I am is what I’m going after.” – Vincent Hanna

For his entire career Michael Mann has been obsessed with cops and criminals and the place where their lives intersect. He began to explore it in earnest with Thief (1981) by putting an emphasis on the criminal element. With Manhunter (1986), he shifted the focus to the law enforcement side. Fifteen years in the making, Heat (1996) was an epic culmination of his fascination with both sides of the law. In some respects, the film took the obsessive profiler from Manhunter and put him up against the no-nonsense expert safecracker from Thief while also examining how their cat and mouse game, through the streets of Los Angeles, affected those around them.

Mann parlayed the commercial and critical success of The Last of the Mohicans (1992) to cast two of the most well-respected American actors – Robert De Niro and Al Pacino – as the crook and the cop respectively, ramping up anticipation as it would be the first time these acting heavyweights would to appear together on-screen. They did not disappoint, delivering iconic performances as two driven men at the pinnacle of their professions, respecting each other’s skill but also acutely aware that if it came down to it one of them would probably die at the hands of the other.

The opening of Heat introduces the two main protagonists, high-end thief Neil McCauley (De Niro) and Los Angeles Police Department detective Vincent Hanna (Pacino) without any dialogue. Mann relies entirely on their actions to illustrate their defining characteristics. McCauley, disguised as a paramedic, steals an ambulance. It is how he does it that is so impressive. He walks through a busy hospital purposefully, taking in everything and touching nothing so that he leaves no clues behind for the police to find later. Within a matter of moments, he is gone.

We first meet Hanna as he is making passionate love to his wife, Justine (Diane Venora). From the beginning, Mann shows a sharp contrast between Neil and Vincent’s professional and personal lives. McCauley is all business. His life is devoted to preparing for his next criminal enterprise. Hanna is married — albeit in a relationship rife with problems but at least he has some semblance of a personal life. During the course of the film, the emphasis on the professional and personal lives of these two men will change and this will determine their respective fates.

Hanna may have a personal life but it is a relationship in decline. He is on his third marriage and is gradually losing touch with Justine and her daughter, Lauren (Natalie Portman). After Hanna and Justine make love she tries to invite him to breakfast but he brushes her off to go to work. A domestic setting is not where he feels most comfortable as evident when he appears at the crime scene of the armored car heist perpetrated by McCauley and his crew at the beginning of the film. As soon as Hanna walks on the scene he immediately takes control. Pacino is masterful as Hanna dominates the scene both physically — in the way he gestures and moves around — and verbally, in the authoritative tone that he speaks to the people around him.

Pacino displays a confidence of an actor totally committed to his role, which is appropriate considering his character is someone completely committed to his profession. With little prompting, Hanna’s subordinates fill him in on the evidence they found and expertly piece together what they think happened. He listens intently, absorbing everything and then quickly analyzes the situation. He assigns specific tasks to his men with utter efficiency. This mirrors the proficiency of McCauley and his crew robbing the armored truck. This is the opposite of what we saw Hanna like at home. He barely hears what Justine has to say and briefly acknowledges Lauren’s presence before quickly leaving for work.

If Hanna is all about the verbal side of the professional Mann protagonist, McCauley is the flip side of the same coin. He is the quiet individual who lets his actions speak for him. Mann defines McCauley’s character visually. This is achieved not only in the exciting armored truck heist sequence — the essence of ruthless efficiency, but, more significantly, when he returns to his home. Like most Mann protagonists, he lives in a Spartan, empty home. The establishing shot utilizes a blue filter that saturates the frame with the ocean infinitely stretching out in the background. Unlike Hanna, McCauley is a loner trapped in his own empty surroundings. This is further reinforced by a close-up of his handgun; placed on a coffee table. As he walks over to the large windows overlooking the ocean, the gun looms large, upsetting the composition of the frame as it dwarfs McCauley. He is a man dominated by his profession — it defines who he is as a person. The camera pans up and we see him standing in the middle of this large, empty room, the frames of the window acting as bars, metaphorically trapping him.

Mann uses architecture to illustrate McCauley’s personality. His apartment is comprised of large, blank white walls, cabinets with the bare minimum of dishes and very little furniture. There is just enough to make it functional. At one point, Chris Sherilis (Val Kilmer), one of McCauley’s crew, even says to him, “When you going to get some furniture?” to which he replies, “When I get around to it.” This simple design is also reflected in his fashion sense: simple gray or black suits with a white dress shirt. Like Frank in Thief, Will Graham in Manhunter, and later, Jeffrey Wigand in The Insider (1999), McCauley is constantly shown to be a solitary figure in an empty room. He claims, at one point, that “I’m alone. I’m not lonely,” but he is a forlorn figure or else he would not feel the need to get involved with Eady (Amy Brenneman).

Heat is different from other crime films in that it goes to great lengths to show how those around these criminals and the police that chase them are affected by what their loved ones do. Most of the relationships are very dysfunctional and none more so than between Chris and his wife Charlene (Ashley Judd). He gambles away the money he makes on scores and this makes her very upset. She tells him, “It means we’re not making forward progress like real grown-up adults living our lives.” They argue and she makes it clear that, for her, it is not about the money but their son, Dominick. She is concerned for his safety and well-being.

This scene of domestic disharmony is paralleled by Hanna’s own problems. When he comes home, Justine informs him that she had dinner ready for them four hours ago. She tells him, “Every time I try to maintain a consistent mood between us you withdraw.” He tries to articulate something resembling an apology but he is unable. This is not good enough for her and she leaves the room. The final shot is of him sitting alone watching T.V. Justine, like Charlene, is frustrated with her relationship. Both women are unhappy and not afraid to let their significant others know how they feel. Justine does not understand Hanna’s devotion to his job or his obsession with catching McCauley and his crew down. Both Hanna and Chris are unable to explain themselves to their wives. They may be the best at what they do but at great cost to their personal lives.

Up until this point McCauley has stayed faithful to his personal credo: “Don’t keep anything in your life you’re not willing to walk out on in thirty seconds flat if you feel the heat around the corner.” This begins to change when he meets Eady at a coffee shop. Initially, he is guarded and stand-offish — an attitude that comes with his job. Once he realizes that she is genuinely interested in him, he softens somewhat but is still evasive, lying to her about what he does (a salesman) and asking her a lot of questions while offering little in return. He gives out only vague details: “My father, I don’t know where he is. I got a brother somewhere.” He does, however, offer one interesting insight into his character. As they look out at the city lights of Los Angeles he tells her about his dream: “In Fiji, they have this iridescent algae. They come out once a year in the water…I’m going there someday.” Like Frank’s dream of a family in Thief and Wigand’s vision of seeing his children playing in The Insider, McCauley will be unable to realize his ambitions because of his failure to adhere to his own personal code. His fatal flaw is that he develops feelings for Eady and thereby betraying himself in the process.

In the relationships between men and women in Mann’s films, it is the men who always find a way to screw things up. They are always focused on other things and do not spend enough time on their personal relationships until it is too late. Justine articulates this best when she tells Hanna, “But you have got to be present like a normal guy some of the time. That’s sharing. This is not sharing. This is leftovers.” Hanna responds, finally articulating to her how he works, “And in sharing it we’ll somehow cathartically dispel all that heinous shit, right? Wrong. You know why? ‘Cause I got to hold onto my angst. I preserve it because I need it. It keeps me sharp, on the edge, where I gotta be.” This is not good enough for Justine who replies sadly, “You don’t live with me. You live among the remains of dead people. You sift through the detritus, you read the terrain, you search for signs of passing, for the scent of your prey and then you hunt them down. That’s the only thing you’re committed to. The rest is the mess you leave as you pass through.” Hanna is speechless at this point as he knows it’s true.

Like Dollarhyde in Manhunter, Waingro (Kevin Gage) is a tattooed serial killer and ex-member of McCauley’s crew who believes that killing hookers makes him more powerful. Both men have delusions of grandeur and represent wild, uncontrollable ids that must be destroyed. Waingro is also responsible for breaking up Hanna’s dinner party and dispelling their one scene of happiness and unity. The body of the young girl he killed is found and Hanna must leave to investigate it. Waingro is also one of the primary contributing factors to McCauley’s downfall. McCauley delays his escape from the city long enough to kill Waingro and in doing so leaves himself open for Hanna to catch up with him.

The film’s centerpiece is undeniably the classic meeting of Pacino and De Niro, on-screen together for the first time in the careers that takes place over coffee at a restaurant in Beverly Hills. This is the moment when both men size each other up and tell each other their personal philosophies. The dialogue between the two men reveals a lot about who they are:

Neil: If you’re one me and you gotta move when I move, how do you expect to keep a marriage?
Vincent: So, then if you spot me coming around that corner, you just gonna walk out on this woman? Not say goodbye?
Neil: That’s the discipline.
Vincent: That’s pretty vacant.
Neil: It is what it is. It’s that or we both better go do something else, pal.

It makes sense, then, that these two men understand each other better than they do their wives or girlfriends. They are more open with each other than with their loved ones as there is a mutual respect and bond between them. Over coffee they tell each other their dreams and Neil’s is particularly illuminating: “I have one where I’m drowning. And I gotta wake myself up and start breathing or I die in my sleep.” Vincent asks him, “You know what that’s about?” To which Neil replies, “Yeah, not enough time.” Like Frank in Thief, Neil’s dilemma is that he does not have enough time to do everything he needs to do. Neil is a fascinating variation on Frank’s character in the sense that he too is forced to decide between preserving a relationship and his work but, unlike Frank, he wastes too much time deciding on which one to follow. When Neil finally does make up his mind it is too late and he is punished for his indecision.

Heat’s most exciting action sequence is the now famous bank heist scene. Right from the beginning, Mann establishes a quick pace as Neil enters the bank with pulsating electronic music that anticipates what is going to happen. With incredible precision and timing, McCauley and his crew have taken out the guards, have control of the bank and are taking out large quantities of money in under a minute. The music is underplayed but still effective in creating tension during the sequence. Once McCauley and his crew emerge from the bank and Chris fires the first shot, the music stops and the rest of this exciting sequence plays out with no music — only the deafening roar of the guns firing as McCauley and his men try to escape and turn the streets of L.A. into a war zone. Mann made sure that the gunshots sounded realistic and went to great pains to make sure he got the right sounds for the machine guns. He alternates between shaky, hand-held cameras and fluid tracking shots with kinetic editing that brilliantly conveys the exciting action that is taking place.

The rest of Heat plays out the aftermath and fallout of the bank heist as McCauley ties up loose ends (dealing with Van Zant and Waingro) and escaping with Eady before Hanna can catch him. It is at this point that all the relationships between men and women break down. Hanna walks in on Justine with another man and they break up. Neil almost loses Eady and admits to her, “I don’t even know what I’m doing anymore. I know life is short, what time you get is luck.” Charline is taken into police custody and given a deal that will turn Chris over to the police but at the crucial, make-or-break point Charline does not sell-out Chris to the cops. Why? After everything that they have been through, does she still love him?

Ultimately, Heat is about choices. McCauley is in the clear and he knows it. He and Eady are on the way to the airport and Mann shows the internal struggle on his face as he debates in his mind whether to keep going to the airport or risk everything and even the score with money launderer Van Zant (William Fichtner) and Waingro. McCauley smiles slightly with the knowledge that he’s made it but then his expression goes back to hardened determination. Any humanity, albeit brief, is gone as he sets his mind to his next task: killing Waingro in retribution for messing up the bank heist and causing the death of most of his crew. It is a matter of personal honor but it will also be his downfall. Thematically, Waingro is a monster, like Molasar in The Keep (1983) and Dollarhyde in Manhunter, that must be destroyed. Waingro is the very antithesis of the Mann protagonist. He is unprofessional, vulgar, obvious and kills for trivial power trips.

McCauley’s final choice in Heat is also his most crucial. He must decide whether to stay with Eady or run on his own from Hanna who is now in hot pursuit. However, McCauley hesitates too long and this is what ultimately defeats him. He goes against his own personal code and is punished. Hanna does not and is willing to sacrifice his personal life so that he can take McCauley down. The film ends as it began — without dialogue as Hanna tracks Neil down and fatally shoots him. Hanna holds McCauley’s hand, comforting him during his final moments while cosmic music plays over the soundtrack.

Heat has gone on to inspire numerous other films and filmmakers. Directors for both the Hong Kong crime film Infernal Affairs (2002) and the British gangster film Layer Cake (2004) have cited the look of Mann’s film as an influence on their own work. Most impressively, before going into production on The Dark Knight (2008), director Christopher Nolan screened Heat for all his department heads. In recent years, Ben Affleck’s The Town (2010) and Den of Thieves (2018) live in the shadow of Mann’s film. Within his own filmography it is often considered his most important film. It was his most ambitious project at that point and which saw him working with his biggest budget and the most famous movie stars in De Niro and Pacino. As a review in Film Comment eloquently stated, it was as if Stanley Kubrick’s The Killing (1956) had been made on the ambitious scale of 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968). It demonstrated that Mann had graduated from being a filmmaker accused of style over substance to an auteur that had finally achieved a balance of his arresting style with his thematic preoccupations, expertly controlling every aspect of production to produce a sprawling mosaic cum crime epic that has been much imitated but never equaled.