Heat

There is a part at the middle of Michael Mann’s 1995 movie, “Heat,” that light up the movie’s real subject. As it starts, a Los Angeles police detective named Hanna (Al Pacino) has been finding a high-level crook named McCauley (Robert De Niro) for days. McCauley is smart and cautious and seems impossible to catch. So, one evening, tailing McCauley’s car, Hanna turns on the flashers and pulls him over.

McCauley carefully hides the loaded gun he is loading. He waits in the car. Hanna comes up to him and says, “What do you say I buy you a cup of coffee?” McCauley says that sounds like a good idea.

The two men sit across from one another at a Formica table in a diner: Middle-aged, tired, with too much experience in their areas of work, they know exactly what they represent to one another, but for this moment of peace they drink coffee.

McCauley is a professional thief, skilled and gifted. When Hanna cleverly suggests otherwise, he says, “You see me doing thrill-seeker liquor store holdups with a ‘Born to Lose’ tattoo on my chest?” No, says the cop, he doesn’t. The conversation comes to end. The cop says, “I don’t know how to do anything else.” The thief says, “Neither do I.” The scene focuses on the truth of “Heat,” which is that these cops and robbers need each other: They occupy the same area, sealed off from the mainstream of society, defined by its own rules.

They are enemies, but in a sense they are more personal, more involved with each other than with those who are supposed to be their friends – their women, for example.

The movie’s other topic is the women. Two of the main players in “Heat” have wives, and in the runtime of the movie, McCauley will fall in love, which is against his policy. Hanna is working on his third marriage, with a woman named Justice, played by Diane Venora, who is sour because his job obsesses him: “You live among the remains of dead people.” One of McCauley’s crime partners is a thief named Shiherlis (Val Kilmer), whose wife is Charlene (Ashley Judd).

McCauley’s own policy is never to get involved in anything that he can’t lean-to in about 30 seconds. One day in a restaurant he gets into a conversation with Eady, played by Amy Brenneman, who asks him a lot of questions. “Lady,” he says to her, “why are you so interested in what I do?” She is lonely. “I am alone,” he tells her. “I am not lonely.” He is actually the loneliest man in the world, and soon figures out that he needs her.

This is what Roger Ebert said in his review: “This is the age-old conflict in American action pictures, between the man with "man's work" and the female principal, the woman who wants to tame him, wants him to stay at home. "Heat," with an uncommonly literate screenplay by Mann, handles it with insight. The men in his movie are addicted to their lives. There is a scene where the thieves essentially have all the money they need. They can retire. McCauley even has a place picked out in New Zealand. But another job presents itself, and they cannot resist it: "It's the juice. It's the action." The movie intercuts these introspective scenes with big, bravura sequences of heists and shoot-outs. It opens with a complicated armored car robbery involving stolen semis and tow trucks. It continues with a meticulously conceived bank robbery.”

McCauley is a mastermind. Hanna is the guy assigned to guess his next motive.

The cops keep McCauley and his crew under 24-hour surveillance, and one day follow him to a lonely warehouse area, where the thieves stand in the middle of a gigantic space and McCauley summarizes some plan to them. Later, the cops stand in the same area, trying to figure out what plan the thieves could possibly be thinking of. No target is anywhere in sight. Suddenly Hanna figures it out: “You know what they’re looking at? They’re looking at us – the LAPD. We just got made.” He is correct. McCauley is now on the roof looking at them through the lens, having succeeded in tricking them.

De Niro and Pacino, veterans of a handful of amazing movies in the crime genre, have by now spent more time playing cops and thieves that most cops and thieves have. There is always talk about how actors study people to model their characters on. At this point in their careers, if Pacino and De Niro go out to study a cop or a thief, it’s likely their subject will be created themselves on their performances in old movies. There is absolute accuracy of effect here, the feeling of roles assumed automatically.

Ebert mentioned this about the women: “What is interesting is the way Mann tests these roles with the women. The wives and girlfriends in this movie are always, in a sense, standing at the kitchen door, calling to the boys to come in from their play. Pacino's wife, played by Venora with a smart bitterness, is the most unforgiving: She is married to a man who brings corpses into bed with him in his dreams. Her daughter (Natalie Portman), rebellious and screwed up, is getting no fathering from him. Their marriage is a joke, and when he catches her with another man, she accurately says he forced her to demean herself.”

Ebert goes on to say: “The other women, played by Judd and Brenneman, are not quite so insightful. They still have some delusions, although Brenneman, who plays a graphic artist, balks as any modern woman would when this strange, secretive man expects her to leave her drawing boards and her computer and follow him to uncertainty in New Zealand.”

Michael Mann’s writing and direction raise this material.

It’s not just an action movie. Above everything else, the dialogue is complex enough to let the characters to say what they’re thinking: They are expressive, insightful, fanciful, and poetic when necessary. They’re not stuck with clichés. Of the many imprisonments possible in this world, one of the worst must be to be hesitant – to be unable to tell another person what you really feel. These characters can do that. Not that it saves them.

This is one of the greatest movies ever made, and easily another one of my favorites. If you haven’t seen it, you need to. It’s just great to see these two powerhouses in this movie finally together. Definitely check it out because you will love it, I promise you. Stay tuned on Monday to see the next installment in “Al Pacino Month.”