Heat (1995)
aka How I Spent My Summer Vacation First screened in December 1995 / Most recently screened and reviewed in September 2024
Director: Michael Mann. Cast: Robert De Niro, Al Pacino, Val Kilmer, Tom Sizemore, Kevin Gage, Danny Trejo, Amy Brenneman, Diane Venora, Natalie Portman, Mykelti Williamson, Ted Levine, Wes Studi, Jerry Trimble, Ashley Judd, Susan Traylor, Jon Voight, Tom Noonan, Dennis Haysbert, Kim Staunton, Hank Azaria, Ricky Harris, Tone Lōc, Steven Ford, Begonya Plaza, Patricia Healy, Kai Soremekun, Hazelle Goodman, Bud Cort, Xander Berkeley, Jeremy Piven. Screenplay: Michael Mann (adapted and expanded from his earlier film and screenplay L.A. Takedown). VOR:⑤
I get why it's tempting to minimize as "just more cops and robbers." But this is opera, high tragedy, morality play, and master class.
The Gene Siskel Film Center's one-night showing of Michael Mann's Heat, in 4K resolution and with a justly famous sound mix surging, slinking, and booming throughout the larger of its two auditoriums, was the best in-cinema experience I've had outside a festival since the end of the COVID closures. Beyond the sheer, multi-faceted magnificence of the movie, which I promise we're getting to, this screening could not have been better timed for me personally, for a few reasons. Yes, I'm going to force you through them, unless you understandably prefer to skip the next four paragraphs.
One, the school year is about to start, and I always hope to end the summer months with a great book and a great final hurrah at the movies. The former is harder to pull off: the recent New York Times list of the 100 Best Books of the 21st Century contained at least a half-dozen titles like Middlesex, Cloud Atlas, and The Warmth of Other Suns that I started in an optimistic end-of-August rush but soon became too busy to finish, despite adoring them. But on the morning of the day I went to see Heat, I also finished my 24-hour blaze through Nick Pileggi's Casino, which was a real rip-snorter, if not quite a "best of the century" book. And then, Michael Mann's masterpiece, which played up the street from my apartment, from 5:30 to 8:30. My plan had been to come home and double-feature it with Scorsese's Casino, but who can watch anything after Heat? Unless it's some nonsense while you're cleaning up the home office?
Two, Heat is an all-time favorite of my friend Peneflix, someone I've long admired in Chicago and who's become a great friend and major cheerleader to me in the past few years. Our plan to attend together didn't pan out, but movie-mad people know that seeing your dear ones' pets is a delicious way to deepen an already rich acquaintance. The pleasure only increased by getting to do so on a giant, top-flight screen in our shared home base of Chicago—also headquarters, by the way, of the one major critics' group anywhere in the world that took substantial, multi-category notice of Heat in its year-end awards. To wit: Peneflix's two great artistic passions are cinema and opera, not necessarily in that order. Having that association in mind only made me quicker to recognize while watching that Heat is, in fact, an opera. In its vastness of scope and cast, in its unabashed and fully achieved lunge at high tragedy, in Michael Mann's expert conducting and gauging of rhythm, and in the movie's astonishing soundtrack, which interpolates all sorts of periods and genres but sometimes surges upward into such a majestic, intimidating wall of sound that you feel like you're at Bayreuth.
Three, I've been working all summer on my book about Mike Mills's 20th Century Women, which takes such tender, plot-crucial notice of how Jamie, the boy at its center, is transforming in response to the ideas and the culture he's absorbing in his mid-teens. Not at all coincidentally, I've become retroactively curious about what I was consuming in my mid-teens, and how those stories and aesthetics and perspectives changed me in ways of which I'm both conscious and not. The brunt of those reinvestigations, sometimes at the start of a day of writing, more often as a late-night sequel, have been centered in 1994, because you know I love a round-number anniversary, and in 1995, when I was just slightly older than Jamie. Heat was on my docket to re-explore even before the Siskel posted its schedule. But imagine getting to punctuate a summer of 30-year-old hits (High School II, Natural Born Killers), misses (Color of Night, Jeffrey, Nine Months), larks (The American President, The Brady Bunch Movie, Circle of Friends) and mixed bags (Fresh, Reality Bites, Fallen Angels, Devil in a Blue Dress) with one of the towering studio landmarks of that era, presented as impeccably as possible with a fully engaged crowd.
Four, 1995 is special to me for another reason as the year I started college and, by moving to my first large city, became newly able to see as many movies as my campus jobs would pay for, in whatever genres and from a range of eras and countries. My boundaries and my horizons of awareness were so stretched, as were my parameters for different ways a movie might be good or not so good. Thus, 1995 is simultaneously the pivotal year in my filmgoing history and the one most replete with long-ago judgments for which I'm not positive I could vouch today. Hence the extra time I've spent since June reacquainting myself with movies I only remembered in broad outline, some of which I'd slightly underestimated (Antonia's Line, Outbreak, To Wong Foo...), some of which I think I rightly admired (12 Monkeys, The Addiction, Welcome to the Dollhouse), debated (Butterfly Kiss, Party Girl, Richard III), or shrugged off (Get Shorty, Losing Isaiah, Something to Talk About), most of which I lacked time to review in full.
Heat represents the best possible outcome, and also the rarest, for such a remembrance of things past. When I saw it with my brother over the 1995 Christmas holidays at a shopping mall in Woodbridge, Virginia, I thought it was ...good? At the very least, how does anyone argue with that concluding LAX cat-and-mouse shootout, or with the audiovisual overwhelm of the three extremely disparate but comparably virtuosic criminal set-pieces: the armored truck (immediate), the precious metals repository (abandoned), the mid-afternoon bank robbery (which I'm sure I found impressive but indulgent). Newly 18, and following an auspicious fall of cinemania when I'd been moved most by an intimate character drama, a divisively high-wire domestic farce, a four-course meal for actress-loving English majors, and an even more elaborate reinvention of the underworld action spectacular, I was slightly flummoxed at why Heat was three hours long, or why a few reviewers made such high-toned claims for it (though not nearly as many as people today assume). The clear theatrical highlight of that same trip home was Nixon, another all-pistons-firing film that's secretly also an opera, and in fact already was an opera. I'd lay down money that 18-year-old Nick was still not ready to see more in Heat than an especially emphatic and elongated version of the police procedurals that had sirened and paddywagoned all over television while I was growing up. Heat's cast was a formidable orchestra of first-chair players of a dozen very different instruments, though I'd also bet money that, back then, I thought Pacino overdid it and De Niro tilted too quiet. (I now rebuke both thoughts, marveling at Pacino's edgelording between focus and flamboyance and at De Niro finding a new, role-specific approach to the interplay of ferocity and introversion.)
Eight years later, in graduate school, I was invited to offer a second go-round of my first self-designed and self-taught upper-devision elective, "Hollywood and the Art Film." This time, I wanted to add clips from movies we wouldn't watch in full but which, as standalones, could exemplify nuanced craftsmanship of shooting, editing, acting, staging, and sound work, landing all their top notes of plot and emotion but riven with subtle accents and ambiguities. I rewatched Heat because it seemed like a good candidate and because I already suspected I'd short-changed it in 1995. (The Insider had wowed me in the interval, which kindled greater interest in Mann, as did a Nixon-initiated idolatry of Joan Allen, which led me into Manhunter.) I did wind up harvesting for class the scene in Heat where Charlene (Ashley Judd) is deployed as fly-fishing tackle so as to hook the limping fugitive Chris (Val Kilmer), possibly her ex-lover, maybe her still-lover, soon to be her own private Eurydice. The students marveled at how many questions the scene opened up and how different an experience it would be if a given shot were two or three seconds longer or shorter, or a different perspective prioritized, or the pans swapped for cuts and the cuts for pans. But of course, I was marveling the same way they were. Even on my then-new TV, which was about the size of an atlas splayed open, I could discern that Mann & Co. were as finicky about detail as both the thieves and the detectives in their film, if also equally prone to sudden outbursts and excess. I got excited about Heat again, only to let it lie for 20 years.
And now, here it is, the same movie, and here am I, a different person. We all know that one of the greatest pleasures of moviegoing is having a brand-new masterpiece land in your lap wherever you're sitting in the theater, especially if you didn't anticipate that reaction. But an equally great pleasure is when a movie you possibly low-balled on first encounter reveals its prodigious power on later contact—especially, again, if you weren't assuming that outcome and weren't hunching in your chair, forcing yourself to love something that you don't, quite. I've said this before, but people assume for good reasons that film critics only ever want to be right. Speaking for myself and for the ones I trust most, I love to be wrong when the swing is positive, and when I don't just feel I've inherited a beautiful gift but have maybe gotten sharper or wiser over time, more open to experiences I used to pre-judge, or for which I had less sensitivity.
So here's where we shift at last into a paean to Heat, and I'm afraid it's just a roll call of effusions. For one, I cannot believe that Michael Mann is so commensurately gifted as an individual psychologist, a collective ethnographer, and a mechanical engineer. I know that's been his reputation forever among sworn acolytes, and I've seen shimmers of their evidence in the Manns I've liked best: Manhunter (though not so much collectivity in that one), The Insider, Heat on second try, Ali both times, and Collateral. Every feature since then (Miami Vice, Public Enemies, Blackhat, and Ferrari) has convinced me only in parts, if at all. But not only does Heat offer consummate proof of Mann's (and Man's) empathic and machinic dimensions, the movie wouldn't work nearly as well or at all in the same way if its strengths fell disproportionally on one side of that putative divide.
The robberies, the stakeouts, the chases: all of these work because of Mann's sixth sense for intricate choreography, as exhibited by his characters and as mirrored by his surgical yet dance-like filmmaking. Sure, a sense of character comes through in watching how Robert De Niro's Neil metallizes himself into a pitiless, precision-timed instrument of intervention and extraction. Or in watching how the intemperate mania and almost supersensory concentration of Al Pacino's Vincent somehow spring from the same source. When he says as much to his wife, it sounds like a convenient rationalization, but we've also seen it to be true, and we'll keep seeing that: in how he moves, and in the slow or sudden sweeps of his gaze in moments of extremis, not just from dialogues and book scenes that exist to flesh out personality. Vincent, Neil, all the lawmen, all the accomplices (save one, which is a problem) are world-class automatons when they need to be, and never more so than in high-adrenaline contexts where you or I would be basketcases. Well, I would be; you get to assess yourself. We feel the way these virtuosos enter The Zone, because the filmmaking suddenly does so as well, sidelining the hormones and humane textures that prevail elsewhere.
Those textures, of course, are far, far from usual in this genre. Mann never includes a character just because, say, any top man must need a sidekick. Kilmer's Chris or Tom Sizemore's Cheritto or, on the cops' side, Ted Levine's Bosko would be a compelling protagonist in many a movie. Dennis Haysbert's Donald is practically in a different movie for most of his strangely sporadic scenes, and he's a more quivering, piano-wire Haysbert than we've almost ever seen. Then, Mann's script and direction explain why he's instrumental to this movie, and also how hard Changing Lanes's captivating but seldom-glimpsed Kim Staunton is laboring to keep Haysbert out of Mann's movie. Staunton's last scene is maybe 20 or 30 seconds, and even so it has two distinct movements: a fleeting Before that says a ton about this tertiary character's unlovable offscreen day-to-day, and then an After that rewrites her character's world, undoing her entire loom in one galvanic pull. At no point do any of the strangers cramming her personal space even remotely notice her. That's acting, directing, and screenwriting.
Wives and girlfriends are never obligatory add-ons in peak Mann, very much by the design of the director and his hard-charging casting agents, who met a dozen times with slithery Kevin Gage before they confirmed him over famous competition to play Waingro. (That guy is also in his own movie much of the time, and I've seen exactly enough of that movie, thank you.) I wish the redoubtable Diane Venora had played the lead in Blackhat, given her charisma and strength, even when she's breaking down. Venora would swallow any scene partner less anchored than Pacino, and the reverse is also true: nobody in this cast is pitching change-ups to any of the other batters. On that same theme, to quote my friend John, Ashley Judd "invented a new role in Heat, which Charlize continues to dine out on: brooding, sexy, competent, capable." Maybe you need an innocent to counter-ballast all the violence and earned cynicism in Heat, but if you think Amy Brenneman's Eady is stopping at naïveté, or that Mann and Brenneman together have nothing new to show us about naïveté, keep watching.
Same goes for Danny Trejo at the pay phone, and whispering up from the carpet. Hazelle Goodman for 15 seconds in a parking lot, seeming like a completely different and more powerful actress than her Woody Allen vehicle suggested with considerably more screen time. Mykelti Williamson letting Hank Azaria know how strongly he's plucking his very last nerve, without allowing himself to get distracted from a job. Azaria's own infantile self-pity. Tom Noonan's sepulchral dramaturg of thievery, seated on a Winter's Bone porch in the middle of Los Angeles, spooky enough to rattle even De Niro. William Fichtner's overwhelmed and then overconfident white-collar criminal, who could have been a nothing role or a walking cheap-shot, but there's a fragile humanity there, even if you sense it's been ages since one of Van Zant's morality checks didn't bounce. This movie has easily a half-dozen plotlines, maybe more, and three or four times that many important characters. Still, every time the film cuts to any of them, you perk up with eager interest. That never happens.
I cannot believe the amount of nutritious but self-effacing character information that lurks in, say, the tailoring of De Niro's suits and in his meticulously tended hair and beard; or in Brenneman continuing in the LA sun to dress as if for Appalachian wind; or in different characters' tattoos; or in the not-particularly-swanky TV set to which Pacino's Vincent pledges such possessive allegiance; or in Xander Berkeley's single-scene comic walk-on as the illicit watcher of said TV. Speaking of comedy, the late Ricky Harris sells his supporting part as an unreliable police informant as if we're watching a funny film. His diptych of scenes prove that neither the ballistic swelter nor the morgue-like chill of Heat is so rigid as to forestall the occasional, unexpected laugh. Clearly Pacino knows that, too. If you watch Heat with an audience, his Vincent Hanna reveals himself as an inspired comic creation and an audience favorite—not in the ways you laugh or groan at Pacino in less disciplined movies and performances. It's a laughing with Pacino that feels all the naughtier because Heat is such serious business.
Consider the weedy parking lot of the long-deceased Inglewood drive-in cinema, a backdrop for a minor altercation that in other crime films would be a midfilm peak—but the editing holds long enough on the lot that it doesn't feel like backdrop. We see that other sieges, socioeconomic ones, are happening across this city, without bank heists or high-level stings. Consider the way you can walk the right way in the right suit across a sunny corporate plaza at lunchtime, and not one person will notice the automatic rifle hanging openly at your side. While we're on that scene, another detail: the palpable heft of those rectangular totebags of cash that McCauley's gang conspires to lift, literally, out of Far East National Bank in L.A.'s Citigroup Center. These leonine actors don't pretend it's a featherweight task. I learned from Pileggi's Casino that $1 million in $100 bills weighs 12.2 pounds. Neil, Chris, and Michael are carrying $12 million cash out of Far East National. You do the math, but you don't need to: Mann shows the actors subtly straining, even while feeling superhuman. Everyone in Heat and in most Mann movies is mortal, tangibly embodied, even when they're iconic or cerebral or duped into a sense of invincibility.
As far as embodiment goes, I didn't walk home easily from Heat when it was over. I'd been exhilarated but also stressed out for the three prior hours. I'd bought a Diet Coke at the start but forgot about it after two sips; I sort of forgot my body entirely, until the shootout on Flower Street had me watching through my fingers, or the same sequence tempted me to cover my ears, or my teeth clenched as a sex worker realizes that she's not making it out of that hotel room, or my throat caught as Charlene got five seconds to calculate one of two futures for her child (unless she's pondering a third alternative?). I have no memory of Heat being this emotionally demanding at 18, just as I have no memory of it being this aesthetically head-spinning. I was so tired afterward! And fair enough: I had just left the netherworld of the LAX runways at nighttime, occasionally and inconveniently lit by a thousand klieg lights. Having demonstrated their ingenuities with continuity and dialectical editing in different passages of Heat, Mann and his four (four!) lead editors experiment in the movie's indelible finale with the limits of discontinuity editing. The cuts guarantee that we know exactly where we are but also don't understand where we are, just as Neil McCauley and Vincent Hanna do and don't know. We aren't even sure from shot to shot whose eyeline we're inhabiting, and maybe Vincent and Neil aren't feeling too positive, either. The quick cuts from Pacino's screen-filling face to De Niro's, or from De Niro's to Pacino's, submerge this cop-and-robber showdown into a Persona-level panic over identity. Both men know they are simultaneously hunter and hunted; both know they are each other's antagonist and doppelganger. ____ is fatally trapped, whereas ____ gets away. You fill in those blanks as you see fit. Depending how you're thinking about story and trajectory, there's no wrong answer.
And all the while, the roaring, the ROARING of the planes, escaping and descending. The final image of these men confirms we've been watching an opera: a production at the Lyric would be lucky to bring down its 50-pound curtain on a tableau this dramatically satisfying, or as tragic in both directions. This image, too, I had completely forgotten since my last viewing of Heat, 20 years prior. In fact, two hours into Heat this time, I realized with excitement that, as is often true with me, I couldn't remember anything about the ending. This is certifiably insane. First, because everything about Heat's concluding sequence is almost literally unforgettable. Second, because on my walk to the theater, I was actively anticipating how that Stygian pas-de-deux at LAX, that labyrinthine cemetery of electrical boxes I still don't understand, would look and sound and feel. Once the movie started, though, mere minutes into the freight-train plot, I forgot everything. The combined effect of an Olympic-class filmmaking team planning and recruiting and revising for a decade since the first script was finished, and throughout a 15-week shoot, and across months of editing and mixing and fine-tuning, is that all that effort and time melt away, as does the world outside the theater, as does whoever you were at 18 or at 26, or earlier this same afternoon. I contemplated all of that once I'd staggered home, and am clearly still aswirl in contemplation. But while any single scene of Heat was happening, that was all that was happening.
All that, and I didn't even mention the diner. Grade:A
