Heat: A Cinematic Monument
You have to know when to walk away. Even more, you have to know what you’re willing to walk away from—and what you aren’t.
Michael Mann’s Heat is one of the most highly revered crime movies of all time, but it does so by being a contradiction. Heat is both sprawling in its life with each character while maintaining a suffocatingly tight scope. The movie stays consistently grounded in the workmanlike focus of both cops and robbers while reaching a level of catharsis akin to the best of Greek tragedy.
These may seem like hyperbolic terms, but Mann has made a singular and unforgettable film. By returning to a classic genre with an earthy approach and a wide ranging cast with full grasp of their talents, Heat established itself as the hinge around which more recent crime movies turn.
Heat splits its time between a group of criminals executing heists around Los Angeles and the police officers trying to catch them. With a near three hour runtime, however, that gives Mann plenty of space to delve into the lives of the men across both crews to a truly impressive degree.
The criminals, led by Robert DeNiro’s Neil McCauley, are shown to be rigid professionals from the start. A knockoff of an armored vehicle is executed swiftly and efficiently. It would have been clean, too, if not for the violent inclinations of Waingro (Kevin Gage), a hired addition to their crew. The rest of the team—Val Kilmer’s Chris, Tom Sizemore’s Michael Cherrito, and Danny Trejo’s, well, Trejo—are capable enough to adapt, but Waingro will only continue to be a thorn in their side.
Al Pacino’s Vincent leads the hunt for McCauley’s crew. With him are Bosko (Ted Levine), Casals (Wes Studi), and Drucker (Williamson). If at times they seem a little less formidable than McCauley’s crew, it is only by a fraction. This stalemate drives the cat and mouse nature of Heat, never knowing what small decision or lucky break will change the tide for good.
Mann brings a sense of realism and mundane focus to every aspect of Heat. Preparing for a job includes making purchases at a hardware store. A sting is foiled because one careless cop knocks against the side of a van too loudly.
The heists themselves carry the specificity of Rififi, focusing on the minutiae of noises and the crucial nature of seconds ticking by. As Neil says, “Life is short. The time we get is luck.” In fact, there’s a lot of French crime influence in Heat, particularly that of Jean-Pierre Melville’s films. (If you enjoy Heat, seek out Le Cercle Rouge and Le Samourai. And if you want to trace the lineage farther back, go check out Kurosawa’s High and Low.) The tension between Vincent and Neil’s competing expertise is the cinematic inheritance of Melville’s chess matches between suave criminals and the cops who plot to foil them.
That realism attunes our senses to the little details until absolutely shattering them once the gunfire erupts. Never before or since has gunfire felt so visceral. Mann drops all score from the crucial shootout, allowing the barrage of machine gun fire and shotgun bursts to decimate the audience’s coherence. Most gun fights aim to be thrilling, few aim to be exhausting—and Heat’s action scenes are all the better for it.
The true thrill at the heart of Heat is watching experts do what they do best, and do it competitively. It’s a chess match, but it’s also just their job. In a way, that’s what Heat is all about: work. The jobs that suck up all our time, making it hard to preserve the relationships we hold so dear. Or perhaps the ones that make us realize we don’t really value those relationships the way we once thought. There are jobs that demand from us, exploit us, wear us thin when all we want is to establish a better life; jobs that entice our passions, that we’ll willingly give our time and heart and life to.
Regardless of our feelings, these jobs demand an incredibly high price, but it’s hard to separate that cost from the sense of purpose those very jobs give us. Inevitably, other people can only remain close for so long before they become collateral damage.
The detritus of relationships actually identifies Heat’s prime flaw. It cares obsessively about these men doing their jobs, but it gives little worth to the other people—women, specifically—in their lives. Diane Venora, Amy Brenneman, Ashley Judd, and an adolescent Natalie Portman all give supporting turns, but they primarily exist as crises for the men.
To be clear, there’s a difference between how the main characters treat these women and how the movie does. The collateral damage of relationships is one of Heat’s primary themes, and as such, the movie actively critiques their behavior. Vincent ignores Justine’s emotional needs out of a false sense of heroic burden. Neil has neglected any romance for the sake of his pursuit, until he meets Brenneman’s Eady and quickly asks her to abandon her job and travel with him. Chris lashes out in anger at his wife, Charlene (Judd), resorting to violence before confessing to Neil that “for me, the sun rises and sets with her.”
Heat is aware of, interested in, the fracturing caused all around these men. But while the central characters recursively cast these women aside, the movie instrumentalizes them. They are not given lives so much as problems to cast as obstacles that tempt Vincent and Neil and Chris away from the jobs they want to be focused on. This is never more apparent than a late shock when Vincent discovers Portman’s Lauren after a suicide attempt. For such a heavy moment that deserves consideration—a young girl being so distraught that she would choose self-harm—the movie mainly uses it to add tension by distracting Vincent as Neil is on the verge of escape. A more human, enfleshed dignity of women would make Heat a better film. I believe there’s a way to display and critique the characters’ failures without instrumentalizing every woman.
Despite this flaw, Mann’s film is an undeniable heavyweight in the canon of crime and noir genres. It’s an alchemical mix of earthy rigidity and cathartic transcendence, transmuting minutiae into something allegorical, while delivering hours of tension and thrills. Tracing out its historical reference points from M to High and Low through Rififi reveals an exciting cinematic lineage. Watching Heat continue to shape its own descendents will be an equal treat in the decades to come.
