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FILM COMMENT
July/August 2004
FIRST LOOK: MICHAEL MANN'S COLLATERAL
a nocturnal white-knuckle thrill rideBy Gavin Smith
One of American cinemaās foremost stylists is back on the streets÷and heās gone digital. Michael Mann has returned to his genre roots with Collateral, a sleek, stripped-down thriller set in nighttime Los Angeles. Where his previous film, Ali, called for a vast canvas, Collateral is a miniature. The film glides along slowly, building a mood of claustrophobic menace before kicking into high gear for a supercharged final act.
Collateral begins with cab driver Max (Jamie Foxx) accepting a challenge from smartly dressed, self-possessed lawyer Annie Farrell (Jada Pinkett Smith). She has just given him directions to her destination, and he suggests an alternative route to avoid the rush-hour traffic. While sheās clearly used to calling the shots, she takes him up on it - on condition that if it ends up taking longer, the ride will be free. Max wins the wager with the casual ease of someone who knows his job and does it well. Heās not just any cabbie - and sheās not just any lawyer. Sheās a U.S. attorney about to pull an all-nighter at the office before a federal grand jury hearing the next day.
Seconds after dropping Annie downtown, Max lands the next (and final) passenger on his shift. Like Annie, Vincent (Tom Cruise) appreciates Maxās expertise. And, like Annie, he has a proposition: heās in town to close a real-estate deal that requires the signatures of five separate parties. If Max will take him to the remaining four addresses and then back to LAX, Vincent will pay him $600. Max accepts the offer. Vincent disappears into an apartment building. A few minutes later, a body crashes onto the parked cab from two floors above. When Vincent reappears, a freaked-out Max accuses him of the murder. His passenger corrects him: he may have pulled the trigger, but it was the bullets and the fall that killed the man plastered across Maxās roof and windshield. Collateralās central conceit might have come from the pulp imagination of Larry Cohen: a taxi driver is hijacked by a contract killer and forced to chauffeur him from victim to victim. The film is taut and compact, and roughly a third of it plays out inside the cab as Max and Vincent traverse the city. Two steps behind them is a cop (Mark Ruffalo) who has figured out that the victims are all due to testify for Annie at the grand jury hearing.
Unfolding over the course of a single night, Collateralās outlandish scenario is radically pared down. While the filmās title suggests the essentially transactional nature of Vincent and Maxās enforced relationship, they eventually begin probing each otherās psyches, looking for soft spots - Stuart Beattieās screenplay (with a Mann rewrite) is a Kammerspiel on four wheels. Why me?, Max wants to know. ćBecause youāre good and weāre in this together,ä Vincent replies. The exchange sums up Collateralās narrative imperative as well as one of Mannās central preoccupations - professionalism. Whether heās dealing with a safecracker, a frontiersman, an FBI agent, or a scientist, Mannās fascination with the cool poetics of meticulous procedure and the existential psychology of rock-solid know-how is always upfront.
Tom Cruise, the consummate professional, is perfect as Vincent - maybe too perfect. Itās Hollywood logic to cast an emotionally remote actor as a cold-blooded killer. On the other hand, Cruise does manage to get at the underlying melancholy and loneliness of the lone wolf who may be captivated by the improvisational freedom of a jazz master but who never puts pleasure before business. Jamie Foxx got a little lost in the crowded frame of Ali (along with most of the cast), but Mann has made it up to him by giving him a terrific showcase, center stage with Cruise, and the actor makes the most of it - heās at once completely believable and admirably self-effacing.
Mannās fleet, dynamic handling of action has never been better - a convulsive four-way shootout between Vincent, the FBI, and two rival gangs in a jammed Koreatown club joins the pantheon of his greatest setpieces. And particularly in the final third, the director reaffirms his status as one of the cinemaās great lyric poets of urban space. For those who saw the eight or so episodes of Mannās 2002 series Robbery/Homicide, the look of Collateral may not come as a complete surprise. For the most part, like that short-lived series (and a handful of scenes in Ali), itās shot on high-definition video. The results are extraordinary, because Mann uses the format for maximum expressive effect, capturing a sense of depth in the darkness and manipulating color in postproduction to generate a heightened, dreamlike liminality and an array of voluptuous visual textures. Mannās style has always been tinged with sci-fi overtones, but Collateral is something else: it looks and sounds like a movie from the future. Letās allow Cruiseās killer the last word: ćMillions of galaxies of hundreds of millions of stars, in a speck on one, in a blink, thatās us - lost in space· the cop, you, me· who notices?ä - Gavin Smith
© 2004 by The Film Society of Lincoln Center
