The reverence accorded Michael Mann as one of Hollywood’s most dynamic film-makers is unlikely to be diminished by his decision to follow the 2004 Tom Cruise vehicle Collateral with what, on paper, sounds like another thematically unambitious crime entry. For all the pulp beauty, stylistic delirium and MTV vibe of the fanatically detailed and hugely influential 1984-89 Miami Vice series—as much a high-stakes morality play as a buddy cop show—the idea of Mann updating it as a movie does not seem like an advance. Both in film and television, he has expanded the definition of the police procedural with his galvanized portraits of dedicated professionals, law-enforcers and felons alike, performing at the top of their game in gleaming post-noir cityscapes. But a more challenging ninth theatrical feature might have been expected from Mann than a fresh outing for Sonny Crockett and Rico Tubbs. We can, at least, be thankful that Michael Bay wasn’t subcontracted to direct and that Owen Wilson and Chris Rock weren’t asked to model anew the pastels-and-stubble chic made famous by Don Johnson and Philip Michael Thomas. Colin Farrell’s offscreen reputation as a roué makes him a natural Crockett, while no one better than Jamie Foxx could have been cast as the ineffably cool Tubbs.
Mann occasionally steps away from his milieu of cops and criminals fighting the narcotics wars in America’s architectural jungles. The Keep (1983) is a disarming neo-gothic subversion of the Grail legend set in Nazi-occupied Romania. The Last of the Mohicans (1992) superbly transforms James Fenimore Cooper’s mythic romance of the French and Indian War into a bloody struggle between three distinct cultures in the eastern woodlands. But when I interviewed him about it on the set in the Blue Ridge Mountains of North Carolina, he said that shooting en plein air held no appeal for him when the sun went in: “What was staggeringly beautiful is nothing, so after a while you think, ‘Get me on to a city street under a sodium vapor lamp.’” The quote is indicative of Mann’s reluctance to refuse the call of the urban. Accordingly, his next movie was Heat (1995), which drew on the iconography of its stars Robert De Niro and Al Pacino in bringing a mythicized underworld Los Angeles to critical mass at fin de siècle.
After that masterpiece Mann sprang the genre trap again, directing a pair of urgent adult dramas with strong social and political themes: The Insider (1999) is a conspiracy thriller about a corporate whistleblower and a broadcast news journalist fighting corruption and Mob-like menace in the American tobacco industry; Ali (2001) is a biopic of the boxing legend that contextualizes his peak years against the backdrop of the Civil Rights movement. These were bold, invigorating choices, which is why a Miami Vice movie seems an intellectual and artistic retrenchment. It may be a commercial gambit. Mann needs a hit, and Miami Vice—boasting explosions, enough hi-tech equipment to make James Bond salivate, and an ear-splitting shoot-out—has the potential to become his first blockbuster, as well as the mainstream apotheosis of his hyper-real esthetic.
One suspects there are pressing creative reasons, too, why Mann has retreated into genre – primarily his insistent formal rigor. Like John Ford and Dennis Potter, he is a constant recycler of motifs, images, bits of dialogue and dramatic situations in his work. Ford was lazy, however, and Potter was cannibalistic in adapting some of his finest television dramas into weaker movies. Mann, by contrast, obsessively refines or reimagines his ideas, visual and otherwise, in a spirit of Kubrickian perfectionism: just as Heat originated in the pilot for Mann’s aborted L.A. Takedown (1989), Miami Vice is loosely based on the series pilot written by Anthony Yerkovich.
There is much to admire in the movie, which includes some of the most kinetic sequences Mann has filmed, and some of the talkiest. They are meshed together seamlessly in the blistering first 45 minutes. Typically for Mann, the opening sequence has little to do with the narrative that evolves; its function is to illustrate what screenwriting gurus call the “ethical habit of action” – for instance, Hawkeye, Chingachgook and Uncas running to ground a deer in The Last of the Mohicans, or Lowell Bergman’s dangerous pursuit of an interview with a Mullah in The Insider. In ironic contrast, Crockett and Tubbs seem to be botching a stakeout in a disco when we first meet them. Following an opening shot of a girl in a silver outfit gyrating to the surging Linkin Park/Jay Z anthem “Numb/Encore,” the camera weaves among the dancers, picking out Crockett—who flirts with a foxy bartender—Tubbs, his tough-talking intelligence-analyst girlfriend Trudy (Naomie Harris), poker-faced Detective Gina Calabrese (Elizabeth Rodriguez), and others on their team. Mann cuts in a grainy shot of an Aryan Brotherhood thug who is conducting surveillance. An SUV pulling up outside the club disgorges a drug baron who swaggeringly confronts an opposite number.
The montage, as yet inexplicable, continues with police informer Alonzo (John Hawkes) driving a car. Crockett and Tubbs are now on a roof, the nocturnal jewel box of Miami glittering behind them, making frantic calls on their cell phones to high-ranking FBI agent Fujima (Ciarán Hinds) in his operations room. Something more urgent than the stakeout is going down. A wasteland drug deal between two heavily armed crews leaves one of them decimated—a foretaste of the ferocious Götterdämmerung that culminates the movie. The victims are undercover Feds who were sold out by Alonzo. Crockett and Tubbs corner him beside a freeway where they reveal that his family has been executed. A wavering handheld reaction shot of the anguished little man invites us to look at the left of the frame, where the road is. The roar of an approaching juggernaut announces a shot of the space where Alonzo had stood; as it passes into the distance, we see the smear of blood left in its wake.
Mann isn’t ready to slacken the pace yet, even if talk supplants action. We see a lurid city vista and hear the snarl of revved engines and a rumble of thunder. Backlit by the radium glow of a horizontally lit office block, Tubbs, Crockett, their Miami-Dade PD commander Castillo (Barry Shabaka Henley) and Fujima thrash out a plan in which the duo agrees to go undercover with a cartel that’s transporting heroin and cocaine from Columbia into south Florida aided by state-of-the-art counter-surveillance. The urgency of this expository conversation – a hubbub of jargon-laden intel-speak that may leave the listener mystified but thrilled to have eavesdropped – is emphasized by a kaleidoscopic flurry of dolly shots, low-angle shots, wobbling close-ups, reaction shots and a cutaway to a laptop screen showing the “go fast boats” that Crockett wants to drive as part of his cover. This scene is an exemplary illustration of Mann’s hectic formalism, which dispenses with the placid, archaic grammar of scene-setting master shots and medium-length two-shots. The objective correlative to this choreographed chaos is noise – traffic, rustling clothes, footsteps on gravel, the metallic clunk and clatter of rifles and automatics being loaded, and cacophonous gunfire.
Still Mann provides no punctuation as Crockett and Tubbs smash through the metal doors of a Biscayne waterfront warehouse containing a huge stash of coke, then blow up the boats in front of it. Finally, some relief: a quick cut to them driving to Miami Beach, where they shakedown a supplier (East Ender Eddie Marsan, a million miles from Vera Drake) with Trudy’s barbed input. His place is one of those clean, cool-blue pads seen in Manhunter (1986) and Heat. As in those films, the vertical bars of a picture window—a frame within a frame that turns the owner into a lonely and passive spectator—suggest entrapment. “Why is this happening to me?” the Marsan character complains. “Because you live a life of crime,” Trudy deadpans, but the exchange is a pre-echo of the moral quandary Crockett will face. He’s shown here leaning against one of the window bars as he gazes out at the sea, beyond which lies Cuba, where his integrity as a cop will be tested. What is he thinking about? His position at the edge of the frame and his obliviousness of the other people in the room make it clear he’s distracted. Is he contemplating the absence of a woman in his life? It’s not impossible, given that the next sequence shows Tubbs and Trudy showering together, having sex and being in love—a shot of her hand tenderly coming to rest on the plane of his back is a rare dab of romantic intimacy from Mann. What’s clear is that Crockett’s moment of reflection—which finally breathes some air into the film—augurs the existential crisis all Mann’s male protagonists go through.
There’s nothing accidental about these images, scenes, sounds and sequences or the way they are knitted together rhythmically through abrupt cutting, John Murphy and Klaus Badelt’s ominous score, and the rock and dancefloor soundtrack. Even if we didn’t know from interviews that Mann is a perfectionist, it’s self-evident that his films are calibrated with maximum precision: there’s not an ounce of visual or aural fat in them. If, however, he has done more than any other auteur to reinvent classical American cinema through his radical brand of heightened realism, it’s a feat that has been accomplished within the framework of the crime genre, no matter that he’s queasy about the term. When I interviewed him about Heat in 1995, he described it as “a drama not a genre piece. The crime story is initially discrete…then it fuses with the personal studies in the fateful and sometimes doom-laden decisions each person has to make.” Nonetheless, Mann’s films are designed on familiar genre lines: an initiating crime, the cops’ resolution to pursue the perpetrators, the pursuit itself, the threat to the cops’ families, reversals and complications that are often caused by a romance with a woman involved with the criminals, the showdown. It’s as if genre provides Mann with an airtight container that permits him to put style in the service of meaning.
How does Miami Vice measure up to Mann’s schema for Heat? In the thick of the film’s frenetic action it becomes apparent that this is a character study of Crockett and Tubbs. Posing as outlaw smugglers, they wind through the pullulating slums and rotting post-imperial outposts of Ciudad del Este, Cali, Barranquilla and Port-au-Prince to a meeting in a dungeon – tinted in Mann’s ubiquitous blue – that might have been designed by Goya. There they sign up to run Columbian coke and heroin for Jose “Cochi Loco” Yero (John Ortiz), the main distributor for the transnational drug lord and arms dealer Montoya, played as a polite monster by Luis Tosar. Although the ostensible focus is on the macho sparring between Crockett and Tubbs on one side and Yero and his heavies on the other, it is the impassive Isabella (Gong Li), Montoya’s Chinese-Cuban girlfriend, sitting alone off to the right, who catches our attention – and Crockett’s. Their exchange of significant glances sets in motion a clandestine affair that begins when they speed across the Straits of Florida to Havana on a date. Romance is not Mann’s forte and the scenes of the couple dancing in a nightclub and making love suck the energy from the film during its middle act.
Mann is making a bigger point, however. The sentimental tone of this passage is at odds with the tenacity and ruthlessness that define Crockett and Tubbs – indeed, Crockett’s involvement with Isabella calls into question his grasp of his own identity. After he and Tubbs complete their first drop for Yero, Crockett urges Fujima and Castillo to let them embark on another – because he believes he can bring Montoya and Yero down, or so he can stay close to Isabella? Tubbs is suspicious: “There’s undercover and there’s which way is up,” he warns Crockett. This echoes a skeptical remark made by Trudy earlier in the film. In a scene set in her and Tubbs’ kitchen, she is irked when Crockett quips “Who are we?” “It’s the same fabricated fundamentals as before,” she sardonically observes, citing their successes and fuck-ups. “You’re presumably too smart and too fast to get jacked again.”
When she makes this last remark, in which she is expressing concern for their safety, Trudy’s head occupies the foreground, on the right side of the frame. We see her full face at a slight angle as she looks at the unseen screen of her laptop, to her right. Behind her, just out of focus, Crockett and Tubbs are sitting opposite each other at the kitchen table, their feet almost touching beneath it. Trudy is alienated from them—and specifically from her lover—by virtue of her position in relation to theirs, by their physical proximity to each other, and by their sheer “buddiness.” Mann repeatedly turns to this mise en scène in order to show his characters isolated in doubt or desire (Isabella checking out Crockett in Yero’s bunker), shock (Alonzo just before he commits suicide), suspicion or jealousy (Montoya wondering if Isabella has fallen in love with Crockett, Yero watching Crockett and Isabella disappear in his boat) and other emotions redolent of the fatalism Mann refers to. Crockett and Tubbs are also depicted thus: the nature of their undercover work and the self-fabrication it requires are at the core of the film’s existential questing.
Tubbs may be concerned that Crockett’s motives for working with the cartel will bring down their mission, but it’s his love for Trudy that nearly scuppers it. Yero sets out to destroy the two detectives by having Trudy kidnapped by the white supremacist group and wired up to a bomb that will be detonated if Crockett and Tubbs fail to divert a drug load to them. This gambit echoes the killing of Alonzo’s family and the threat implicit in Montoya’s words: “I extend my best wishes to your families.” Organized crime’s threat to domesticity is a genre staple depicted in Lang’s The Big Heat (1953) and Mann’s The Insider, though Mann’s use of it in The Last of the Mohicans—the slaughter of the pioneer family by Magua, whose own family was murdered by the whites—reminds us that violence is a foundation stone of American life.
If Crockett’s love of Isabella mires him in an ethical dilemma, Tubbs clearly has no choice but to set aside his professional duty to rescue his woman. He and Calabrese launch a vigilante attack on the thugs’ Paradise Park prefab, delivering them not drugs but pizza and high-velocity bullets in the film’s most exciting sequence. “So tell me sport, do you like that or not?” Calabrese says, aiming her rifle at Trudy’s captor and explaining what will happen to him if he presses the detonator. Self-consciously invoking Dirty Harry, this audience-pleasing line has a whiff of postmodernism that emphasizes Miami Vice’s status as a pop-cultural icon, but it fleetingly undercuts the films’ verisimilitude.
Miami Vice ends not with a bang but another romantic paean. After the cops obliterate their foes, as the crime genre dictates they must, Crockett drives Isabella to a coastal safehouse at dawn, the gentle language of dissolves replacing the hard, fast cutting of the preceding mayhem. Facing the prison of loneliness again, Crockett looks between the bars of a window out to sea; Isabella repeats a fatalistic platitude and sails away. There’s a pleasing forlornness in their parting, but also a hint of ambiguity. Does Crockett let Isabella go because destiny demands it or because Mann’s masculine professionalism dictates it? The brisk final shot implies the latter. Crockett returns to the hospital where Tubbs is anxiously attending Trudy’s recovery from her ordeal – but it’s the buddy act that is being restored. We must hope that Mann will again apply his extraordinary acumen to more serious subject matter in the future, but if not there’s always Miami Vice 2.
Sight & Sound, September 2006
