MICHAEL MANN

REALIST FILMS CREATED WITH THE UNIQUE LANGUAGE OF FILMMAKER

By PETER THOMAS BUSCH

C

inema rises out of the culture fabricated for a civilization by humanity. The realist filmmaker therefore first constructs the culture from which the film then seamlessly emerges from that compelling inertia.

The truth being told from the inside serves as a mantra for the realists behind the camera lens. 

Director Michael Mann tells those stories about life with more of a language than a series of photographs after discovering why those stories exist in the first place.

Mann depicts in his films the complicated tale of humanity unfolding from several layers like a fabricated miniature under a glass dome: so obviously art but at the same time real and entertaining and often quite visceral.

One of the better realist filmmakers in Hollywood also blends elements of realism with humanism to create a world within a world without the morality play. Joy and heartbreak in the same scene sequence provides sufficient cause without someone having to point out right and wrong.

In Thief (1981), the criminal underworld is created with dark shadows so compelling as to immerse the viewer into the atmosphere rather than have them just guess the outcome of how the shadows move on screen.

This technique of a purposeful camera focused on the character in a distinct light is revisited in other films. In this crime drama, the true story of burglary is so murky and untrustworthy that even the protagonist finds playing scores for other criminals a bit trepidatious.

James Caan, in the leading role, plays the dark shadows of crime in contrast to the bright fire of the acetylene torch as a metaphor for his character’s existential being. 

In his trademark style, Mann explores the question of how the thief got to this place in life with the protagonist sitting about and telling his own personal story, one layer removed from the answer, almost as a sidebar to the world in which he has found himself. 

The world has become a complicated place. And so, the realist also uses the camera to show the interplay between machines and humanity in an age of industrialism. 

The characters find identity in operating the machines with great success. This space within the industrial world has been chosen for them despite their criminal intent.

The director also puts the story in play by unabashedly balancing multiple stars along the same narrative.

John Dillinger faces off against Melvin Purvis, while “Red” Hamilton, Baby Face Nelson and Harry ‘Pete’ Pierpont, Homer Van Meter and Pretty Boy Floyd share other parts of the narrative with J. Edgar Hoover in Public Enemies (2009).

For the realist filmmaker, fantasy has little room in film art when reality is so much more interesting watching the characters carve out special places for themselves within the social matrix, and every now and then stumbling about over all the rules one must confront before the end of the day.

The storyline may often be of secondary importance to that of the play of the characters since much that influences outcomes is often not within individual power and control.

In the opening scenes of Heat (1995), the machines accomplish what humans cannot do on their own when the semi-tractor trailer truck upends the armored vehicle. Mann leads off by showing how this transference of kinetic energy will compel the coming scenes.

This inertia of moving objects is as apparent in the forests of the old frontier as in the streets of the modern city.

The smoke and fire from the frontier musket brings down the running deer setting the narrative in motion. The precision from the automatic rifle transfers energy to the homicide detectives after a secondary player recklessly decides on his own the fate of an armored guard. The scientific precision of the heist evaporates in an error of judgment so common in human nature that the lapse recurs throughout the film to haunt the pursuit of perfection.

The protagonist, played by Robert De Niro, intuitively knows that the brazen immoral act will give rise to grave consequences as the anonymous ‘smash and grab’ plan has now been turned around into an escape from a massive city wide manhunt.

The realist filmmaker accepts the universal truths naturally embedded within the story without discussing the morality behind events. The emotions and their consequential acts tell enough of the story.

Mann often also intertwines a love story to offset the internal morality play. Relationships among the players are revealed in separate intertwining layers of familial love and romantic love with love and the consequences thereof remaining a distinctly human story caught up and pushed about within the chaos of human action.

People work and become more powerful because of the machines they operate, but deep inside the human psyche is still the natural need for intimacy and the sharing of tender affections as the sun bends across the sky from one horizon to the next.

This distinct telling of human motivations is no more apparent than in the unique story of life along the American frontier in 1775.

In The Last of the Mohicans (1992), Daniel Day-Lewis became a frontiersman through months of pre-production physical conditioning and intellectually learning about the finality of clashing swords, tomahawks and butts of rifles.

Mann brings the hardships of this earlier life in America home in part by using sound. The stomping of soldier boots seems to enter the 20^th Century world from the 18^th century, just as the zip of the zipper, the click of the camera and the tap of the tape recorder filled the opening scenes of a story about a police investigation into a series of murders in Manhunter (1986).

In Public Enemies (2009) the ratt-a-tatt-tatt of the machine guns mimics the overhead subway in downtown Chicago, while the rumble of bored out car engines drives audiences from film to film.

Mann depicts the frontier as a contrast between the quite solitude of nature and the blood soaked vengeance of humanity.

Rising suspense occurs by transferring an unseen presence to action in front of the camera, like the bank robbers emerging from the bank, the players move from hidden spots in the forest to the common trails found in open fields.

And yet, intimate relationships begin to form just as the characters find themselves physically and psychologically stuck in the chaos.

The force of nature also accentuates feelings of love under the raging waterfall. Daniel Day-Lewis and Madeleine Stowe find the depth of their characters emotional connection at the instance that they are physically torn apart by time, space and circumstance.

To Mann, the psychological accuracy of the film remains as important as the authenticity of the film set. 

While the music score compels scenes, the tools and guns the players use tell the unabashed honest story of masculinity that often dominates clearly defined spaces within society.

In Ali (2001) the camera focusses on the humanity of the broken fighter with close shots in the ring showing nothing pretty about a battered hero who had been masked in celebrity. 

And world heavyweight boxing champion George Foreman is portrayed repeatedly hitting the boxing bag not just like a machine but like an automaton that may eventually be beaten with the love and fire of a human heart.

Mann creates a complicated plot with the athlete narrative mixed with the civil rights narrative that becomes mixed again with biopic characters being brought forward into moments of poignant intimacies.

 What made these particular individual heroes? 

The film is a monumental undertaking that Mann delivers with trademark style involving close portraits full of details about the human spirit. The music score puts the rising action scenes over the top while the essence of the biopic characters is captured in stylized light and camera angles.

Mann eventually abandons the sweeping cultural landscapes for the private worlds introverted characters create for themselves in the films, The Insider (1999) and Collateral (2004).

Mann likes to recast actors in subsequent films and set off big screen stars against each other in the same narrative. Al Pacino is recast from Heat to play 60 Minutes producer Lowell Bergman while Russel Crowe plays informant Jeffrey Wigand.

Mann adds a further dynamic to the play of the characters by casting accomplished actor Christopher Plumber as television anchor Mike Wallace. Diane Venora is also recast from Heat as the wife of Wigand as opposed to the wife of an LA homicide detective played by Pacino. And Bonnie Timmerman has a recurring role as the casting director.

Wigand is a bit of an introverted biochemist who has spent too much time with books and not enough time with the people harmed by the cigarette smoke he helped produce.

Bergman and Wallace do a lot of work behind the scenes as well, working the story but always being true to their own moral code and canon of professional journalistic ethics. And like the police detective Pacino played in Heat that threw his television set out onto the curb of the street, the 60 Minutes producer keeps the existential angst to a minimum by being true to himself and just continuing on through the malady of current events.

In Collateral (2004), Tom Cruise plays a hired hitman, while Jamie Foxx is recast from Ali as a taxi driver. 

The hitman has a code of honor in opposition to the code of the cab driver. The film shows that if the codes are broken on either side, the characters lose the confidence that enables them to do what they do. And then the masculine worlds of self-reliance consequentially begin to deteriorate.

Mann shows the darker side of Los Angeles with tight camera angles around the characters emersed in dark shadows and silhouettes shot mainly at night.

The music score pounds away but the city has become lost to humanity beyond comprehension with even the hitman commenting how sprawled out and disconnected the society is. 

The begrudging relationship between the cab driver and the hitman develops in binary opposition. The contrast of characters accents the sociopathy of the one against the communal nature of the other.

Caan in the Thief finds precision in being more of a machinist than a thief, while De Niro as the crew boss is more of a metallurgist than a murderer in Heat. In Public Enemies the gangsters have become celebrities enabled by the overwhelming power and authority of repeat action guns.

Mann himself finds his identity through the machines by using the equipment of cinema to create a defining style that underscores his expertise as a filmmaker. 

That pride in precision is evident not just in telling a story but in creating masterful portraits of the precise truth evident within the natural order of things.

Heat, by Nick James, London, British Film Institute, 2002.

Michael Mann, Edit. F.X. Feeney and Paul Duncan, London, Taschen, 2006.