Mann and Men
In Heat, Michael Mann proved he knew how to stage a bank robbery: the film’s go-for-broke centerpiece heist may be cinema’s finest. So the fact that his next picture, Public Enemies, is about John Dillinger, one of history’s most famous bank robbers, is a good sign. The trailer looks slick and sharp, and, as always, it’s filled with hard men delivering hard lines like “I like baseball, movies, good clothes, fast cars, and you.” Mann’s oeuvre is an endless string macho power plays. No one does deadly serious tough guys like he does; he’s cinema’s ultimate purveyor of high-toned masculinity. Even at his most absurd — Tom Cruise’s silver-maned, I Ching quoting hitman in Collateral — he’s still riveting. All of his films are immaculately shot too — Heat and The Insider, especially, seem to call out for Blu Ray treatment, but only Miami Vice is available.
Public Enemies looks just as smooth and just as tough as anything he’s done, but the worry with it is that he’ll repeat himself, borrowing bank heist bits from Heat and character-based tension from The Insider, or that he’ll drown himself in waves of manly cool like in Miami Vice. If he’s got a failing, it’s that he thinks of masculinity as mood rather than action; for Public Enemies to succeed, he’ll need both.
If he’s got a failing, it’s that he thinks of masculinity as mood rather than action.
I’m not sure I agree with you a hundred percent on your police work there, Peter. A couple examples:
In Collateral, the point where Max becomes masculine — and thus takes control of his fate — is during his confrontation with Felix. As Mann says in his director’s commentary, the difference in the before and after is Max’s adoption of Vincent’s confidence and verbal aggressiveness, his affirmation of and instant adaptation to context, and his unflinching decisiveness when faced with uncertainty, crisis, and death.
In Heat, masculinity is defined as what you are willing and able to do when you see the heat coming around the corner. At the drop of a hat, guns out and blazing and so on. Like Chris when he sees Vincent Hanna down the block, and most specifically like Neil, who only needs one muffled metallic sound down the alley to call the whole robbery off.
In Last of the Mohicans, again, masculinity is defined as immediate recognition and adaptation to context, combined with the willingness to act decisively at a moment’s notice. To know what you believe, what you stand for, and to do what is necessary when it’s necessary.
The closest Mann has come to defining masculinity in terms of mood is Miami Vice. But that’s because the context itself is highly stylized and abstract, impulsive and episodic. The movie throws us into the lives of these undercover cops in a cinematically violent smash cut to a highly kinetic club scene, and throws us out at the end of the story with similar disregard, as if we were just witnessing a day in the life of these cops along with the Ghost of Christmas Present. In this way Mann is daring us to be masculine ourselves, as the audience, to roll with the punches without needing someone to hold our hand. The mood, the mise-en-scène, is calculated to this end, as the sole enabler to the viewer to groove with the otherwise unknowable cyphers we’ve been given as protagonists (that’s why I thought Miami Vice was a fascinating movie in theory, even though it’s execution was flawed). Within the movie itself, however, the characters are masculine for all the same reason as Mann’s other movies.
Masculinity, not as mood, but as essence.
— JA · Mar 6, 06:49 PM · #
Damn apostrophe!
— JA · Mar 6, 06:54 PM · #
Ick. Guy makes razorblade commercials with eight-figure budgets. Pretty images, but his protagonists have all the character hardboiled right out of them – Edward James Olmos is the only actor I’ve ever seen actually pull off Mann dialogue and still seem human.
— Senescent · Mar 6, 11:02 PM · #