Collateral (2004)
2009 thoughts: I haven't seen this movie since I saw it in the theater in 2004 with the wife and a friend. Even though we really enjoyed it, it's clear that "Collateral" is, in some part, Michael Mann licking his wounds after "The Insider" and "Ali." While those movies garnered 9 Oscar nominations, neither of them recouped their production costs during their initial theatrical run (according to BoxOfficeMojo.com). You can imagine the suits demanding that Mann return to his comfort zone of cops and robbers, and he obliged with his most gimmicky premise and middlebrow dialogue that spells out most of the movie's main themes. "Collateral" is by no means an artistic cop-out, though, with Mann expanding digital cinema in "Collateral" after dabbling with it in bits of night footage in "Ali." The dividends paid off, with "Collateral" earning more than double its $65 million budget. 2004 review after cut.
My wife and I were early for something in downtown and started wandering around. Because we’re such big movie dorks our conversation turned to the films of Michael Mann, mainly “Heat,” “The Insider,” “Manhunter,” and his new release, “Collateral.” We speculated that deep-down the movie Mann really wants to make is a collosal and kaleidoscopic look at the organism we know as The City. The movie-which we imagined would be brilliantly photographed with deep focus shots up and down a half-dozen city blocks-would see things from every social and occupational level. There would be arteries of traffic, scurrying newspaper vendors and restaurant managers, trash getting picked up. Men in a starched white suits would sit at desks and computers for hours before migrating to lunch in enormous packs. Cash registers would be manned, tables would be bussed, taxis would be hailed, subway cars would be missed, beggars would collect change, and so on and so forth, late into the night. If there were recurring characters, they wouldn’t have names and they wouldn’t have stories. In our minds we would know them as Office Worker, Bus Driver, Inner City Mother with Two Jobs, Traffic Cop, etc. Reflecting on Mann’s films, this is what we concluded he’s always really wanted to do.
“Collateral,” Mann’s latest ode to the city, is an atmospheric and nocturnal look at Los Angeles, shot on digital video. Digital video has a long way to go if it hopes to replace celluloid, but it works as a stylistic alternative if a filmmaker wants a washed-out, hand-held immediacy. White guys look orange and black guys look dark blue. DV works for some movies, like this one and “Russian Ark,” but “Once Upon a Time in Mexico” and “Attack of the Clones” really deserved to be on film. With a number of shots that begin out-of-focus or never even focus at all, “Collateral” is in love with the blur of city colors. We recognize the glow of headlights, traffic signals, and neon signs. We know office buildings by their randomly-lit windows and the gloss of their darker-than-night reflections. Helicopter shots looking down on the city, as headlights pump through the streets like they were white blood cells, achieve a murky, abstracted beauty.
The movie opens just after the evening rush hour and a cabbie begins his shift. We see him travelling high-and-low, uptown, downtown, the good parts and the bad, and with every new location our music changes. Rock, soul, rap, classical, electronica-at first the constantly altering soundtrack seems needlessly choppy. But if you’ve ever spent a whole day driving alone you know how the radio becomes your companion, and you find yourself having a kind of dialogue with different stations and CDs.
Yes, there is a crime story, about a hitman and a taxi driver, cops and federales, gangsters and witnesses. But the exact nature of the crime story is beside the point. I enjoyed the vast and beautiful imagery in Mann’s obtuse biopic “Ali,” but found the story and characters vague and difficult to grasp. With “Collateral” Mann uses a substantial but imperfect screenplay, by Stuart Beattie (the overlong “Pirates of the Caribbean”), as the skeleton for his towering impressionist painting. We never learn what the gangster’s business is and we never learn what the witnesses saw. “Some people stayed at home and some people went out,” remarks an FBI surveillance man. The real story is a contest of wills and values between the hitman (Tom Cruise) and the cabbie (Texas native Jamie Foxx) who becomes his unwilling, captive chaffeur on a night of assassinations. To call this arrangement preposterous would be fair, but it is an intriguing vehicle for our late-night tour of the city, in which Mann lovingly shoots sleazy dives, run-down apartments, glittering nightclubs, cavernous high-rise apartments, and all those who inhabit them.
The hitman is an efficient, crisp middle-aged man named Vincent, played with a hawk-nosed viciousness that is, in a way, the culmination of Cruise’s surprisingly intense turns in “Mission: Impossible 2” and “Minority Report.” As it dawns on the cabbie that Vincent is, in fact, dispatching other human beings and not signing real estate forms, we come to realize that he is a textbook sociopath, a man completely unable to comprehend the feelings and needs of others. If what makes humans different than animals is our ability to imagine what we cannot observe with our senses, than Cruise’s Vincent is not quite human.
The restraint of Foxx’s performance as Max the cabbie is all the more surprising when we consider he got his start on “In Living Color.” (Even if “Ali” and “Any Given Sunday” were not completely successful, at least check out Foxx’s fine work in them.) He drives with his head low and keeps his taxi clean. He lives by two mantras: the tropical photograph on the dashboard and the claim that driving taxis is only to pay the bills before he begins his real life’s work. Trouble is, he’s been driving for 12 years…
Mann takes the men who work in the city very seriously. Recall Mamet’s “Glengarry Glen Ross,” in which men who do not succeed in business are accused of being women, children, or homosexuals, or when Jack Lemmon declares “a man is his job.” Conversely, my wife recently read a book called “Your Money or Your Life,” in which the notion that we should expect a career to provide anything besides money is debunked as ludicrous. Meaning and fulfillment, the book claims, were once and should again be the property of family, religion, hobbies, and other outside interests.
Mann does not pass judgment on these two paradigms but knows many men envaluate themselves and others solely by their occupations and financial success. Max the cabbie is caught between being good at what he does and always having to claim that it’s not really his job. He is the cleanest, most efficient taxi driver Vincent has ever seen, yet in a schizophrenic, paralyzing twist he is forbidden by the code of masculinity to take pride in being good at what he himself considers a menial existence. Vincent is forever defending his amorality-killing for pay without the slightest inkling of who his targets or employers are-with the flimsy statements “it’s my job” and “I do this for a living.” His mantra is a sarcastic mishmash of words and phrases like “adapt,” “roll with it,” “improvise,” “Darwin and I Ching.”
In addition to the battle of wills there are several scenes of brief, intense, and frighteningly efficient violence. Cruise turns gunplay into a dance competition in which the winner is the man who needs the fewest steps. Watch the terrifying quickness with which he dispatches two muggers. Watch Vincent only get angry when he needs the extra adrenaline. “Collateral’s” kinetic highpoint is a bloody encounter in a crowded nightclub. More dancing. Mann is known for his direction of acting as well as action, and besides his leads he gets good, self-effacing supporting performances from Jada Pinkett Smith (“The Matrix Reloaded”), Mark Ruffalo (“You Can Count on Me”), tough character actor Bruce McGill (“Matchstick Men”), Barry Shabaka Henley (“Ali”), Irma P. Hall (“The Ladykillers”), and Javier Bardem (“The Dancer Upstairs,” another great actor in his land cast as a drug dealer in ours).
“Collateral” is also divided along racial lines. Not only is Cruise one of the few white characters Foxx meets, but he is blazingly white: light grey hair, light grey suit, white shirt. This is not just a tactical artistic decision made by Mann so that the demon always jumps out of the crowd. Vincent is at total ease when it comes to bossing around minorities, and he uses an elevated, even condescending diction. He is like an avenging angel sent by the establishment to rub out upstart minorities (only one of his five victims is white). The oppressor has come down from the ivory tower, with all its training and resources, to keep the Morlocks in their place, if you’ll allow me to mix my metaphors. Even “Collateral’s” cops, who are normally white in these kinds of gritty films, are seen in a murky light, and we can’t quite tell if they’re really Latino, or part Latino; Mark Ruffalo’s slicked-haired Detective Fanning pronounces “Ramon” with a perfect Spanish lilt.
After “Ali,” “Collateral” could be seen as Mann’s retreat into the safer, more familiar territory of guns and gangsters, where he made his first splash. Perhaps, but it is another step closer to what I suspect is his dream movie. It certainly reasserts his position as the premiere cinematic painter of cityscapes.
P.S. The actor who intentionally switches suitcases with Tom Cruise in the airport is Jason Statham, who played a virtually identical character in the film “The Transporter.” Klea Scott, who is credited only as “Fed #1,” also played a federal agent in the Lance Henriksen/Chris Carter TV series “Millennium.” This isn’t as satisfying as spotting a pack of Morley cigarettes in “Thirteen,” but it’ll do.
Finished September 6th, 2004
Starring Tom Cruise, Jamie Foxx, Jada Pinkett Smith, Mark Ruffalo, Bruce McGill, Irma P. Hall, Jason Statham, Javier Bardem, and Barry Shabaka Henley
Directed by Michael Mann & written by Stuart Beattie
2004
120 min R
My wife and I were early for something in downtown and started wandering around. Because we’re such big movie dorks our conversation turned to the films of Michael Mann, mainly “Heat,” “The Insider,” “Manhunter,” and his new release, “Collateral.” We speculated that deep-down the movie Mann really wants to make is a collosal and kaleidoscopic look at the organism we know as The City. The movie-which we imagined would be brilliantly photographed with deep focus shots up and down a half-dozen city blocks-would see things from every social and occupational level. There would be arteries of traffic, scurrying newspaper vendors and restaurant managers, trash getting picked up. Men in a starched white suits would sit at desks and computers for hours before migrating to lunch in enormous packs. Cash registers would be manned, tables would be bussed, taxis would be hailed, subway cars would be missed, beggars would collect change, and so on and so forth, late into the night. If there were recurring characters, they wouldn’t have names and they wouldn’t have stories. In our minds we would know them as Office Worker, Bus Driver, Inner City Mother with Two Jobs, Traffic Cop, etc. Reflecting on Mann’s films, this is what we concluded he’s always really wanted to do.
“Collateral,” Mann’s latest ode to the city, is an atmospheric and nocturnal look at Los Angeles, shot on digital video. Digital video has a long way to go if it hopes to replace celluloid, but it works as a stylistic alternative if a filmmaker wants a washed-out, hand-held immediacy. White guys look orange and black guys look dark blue. DV works for some movies, like this one and “Russian Ark,” but “Once Upon a Time in Mexico” and “Attack of the Clones” really deserved to be on film. With a number of shots that begin out-of-focus or never even focus at all, “Collateral” is in love with the blur of city colors. We recognize the glow of headlights, traffic signals, and neon signs. We know office buildings by their randomly-lit windows and the gloss of their darker-than-night reflections. Helicopter shots looking down on the city, as headlights pump through the streets like they were white blood cells, achieve a murky, abstracted beauty.
The movie opens just after the evening rush hour and a cabbie begins his shift. We see him travelling high-and-low, uptown, downtown, the good parts and the bad, and with every new location our music changes. Rock, soul, rap, classical, electronica-at first the constantly altering soundtrack seems needlessly choppy. But if you’ve ever spent a whole day driving alone you know how the radio becomes your companion, and you find yourself having a kind of dialogue with different stations and CDs.
Yes, there is a crime story, about a hitman and a taxi driver, cops and federales, gangsters and witnesses. But the exact nature of the crime story is beside the point. I enjoyed the vast and beautiful imagery in Mann’s obtuse biopic “Ali,” but found the story and characters vague and difficult to grasp. With “Collateral” Mann uses a substantial but imperfect screenplay, by Stuart Beattie (the overlong “Pirates of the Caribbean”), as the skeleton for his towering impressionist painting. We never learn what the gangster’s business is and we never learn what the witnesses saw. “Some people stayed at home and some people went out,” remarks an FBI surveillance man. The real story is a contest of wills and values between the hitman (Tom Cruise) and the cabbie (Texas native Jamie Foxx) who becomes his unwilling, captive chaffeur on a night of assassinations. To call this arrangement preposterous would be fair, but it is an intriguing vehicle for our late-night tour of the city, in which Mann lovingly shoots sleazy dives, run-down apartments, glittering nightclubs, cavernous high-rise apartments, and all those who inhabit them.
The hitman is an efficient, crisp middle-aged man named Vincent, played with a hawk-nosed viciousness that is, in a way, the culmination of Cruise’s surprisingly intense turns in “Mission: Impossible 2” and “Minority Report.” As it dawns on the cabbie that Vincent is, in fact, dispatching other human beings and not signing real estate forms, we come to realize that he is a textbook sociopath, a man completely unable to comprehend the feelings and needs of others. If what makes humans different than animals is our ability to imagine what we cannot observe with our senses, than Cruise’s Vincent is not quite human.
The restraint of Foxx’s performance as Max the cabbie is all the more surprising when we consider he got his start on “In Living Color.” (Even if “Ali” and “Any Given Sunday” were not completely successful, at least check out Foxx’s fine work in them.) He drives with his head low and keeps his taxi clean. He lives by two mantras: the tropical photograph on the dashboard and the claim that driving taxis is only to pay the bills before he begins his real life’s work. Trouble is, he’s been driving for 12 years…
Mann takes the men who work in the city very seriously. Recall Mamet’s “Glengarry Glen Ross,” in which men who do not succeed in business are accused of being women, children, or homosexuals, or when Jack Lemmon declares “a man is his job.” Conversely, my wife recently read a book called “Your Money or Your Life,” in which the notion that we should expect a career to provide anything besides money is debunked as ludicrous. Meaning and fulfillment, the book claims, were once and should again be the property of family, religion, hobbies, and other outside interests.
Mann does not pass judgment on these two paradigms but knows many men envaluate themselves and others solely by their occupations and financial success. Max the cabbie is caught between being good at what he does and always having to claim that it’s not really his job. He is the cleanest, most efficient taxi driver Vincent has ever seen, yet in a schizophrenic, paralyzing twist he is forbidden by the code of masculinity to take pride in being good at what he himself considers a menial existence. Vincent is forever defending his amorality-killing for pay without the slightest inkling of who his targets or employers are-with the flimsy statements “it’s my job” and “I do this for a living.” His mantra is a sarcastic mishmash of words and phrases like “adapt,” “roll with it,” “improvise,” “Darwin and I Ching.”
In addition to the battle of wills there are several scenes of brief, intense, and frighteningly efficient violence. Cruise turns gunplay into a dance competition in which the winner is the man who needs the fewest steps. Watch the terrifying quickness with which he dispatches two muggers. Watch Vincent only get angry when he needs the extra adrenaline. “Collateral’s” kinetic highpoint is a bloody encounter in a crowded nightclub. More dancing. Mann is known for his direction of acting as well as action, and besides his leads he gets good, self-effacing supporting performances from Jada Pinkett Smith (“The Matrix Reloaded”), Mark Ruffalo (“You Can Count on Me”), tough character actor Bruce McGill (“Matchstick Men”), Barry Shabaka Henley (“Ali”), Irma P. Hall (“The Ladykillers”), and Javier Bardem (“The Dancer Upstairs,” another great actor in his land cast as a drug dealer in ours).
“Collateral” is also divided along racial lines. Not only is Cruise one of the few white characters Foxx meets, but he is blazingly white: light grey hair, light grey suit, white shirt. This is not just a tactical artistic decision made by Mann so that the demon always jumps out of the crowd. Vincent is at total ease when it comes to bossing around minorities, and he uses an elevated, even condescending diction. He is like an avenging angel sent by the establishment to rub out upstart minorities (only one of his five victims is white). The oppressor has come down from the ivory tower, with all its training and resources, to keep the Morlocks in their place, if you’ll allow me to mix my metaphors. Even “Collateral’s” cops, who are normally white in these kinds of gritty films, are seen in a murky light, and we can’t quite tell if they’re really Latino, or part Latino; Mark Ruffalo’s slicked-haired Detective Fanning pronounces “Ramon” with a perfect Spanish lilt.
After “Ali,” “Collateral” could be seen as Mann’s retreat into the safer, more familiar territory of guns and gangsters, where he made his first splash. Perhaps, but it is another step closer to what I suspect is his dream movie. It certainly reasserts his position as the premiere cinematic painter of cityscapes.
P.S. The actor who intentionally switches suitcases with Tom Cruise in the airport is Jason Statham, who played a virtually identical character in the film “The Transporter.” Klea Scott, who is credited only as “Fed #1,” also played a federal agent in the Lance Henriksen/Chris Carter TV series “Millennium.” This isn’t as satisfying as spotting a pack of Morley cigarettes in “Thirteen,” but it’ll do.
Finished September 6th, 2004
Starring Tom Cruise, Jamie Foxx, Jada Pinkett Smith, Mark Ruffalo, Bruce McGill, Irma P. Hall, Jason Statham, Javier Bardem, and Barry Shabaka Henley
Directed by Michael Mann & written by Stuart Beattie
2004
120 min R