In "A Clean, Well-Lighted Place," one of the most perfectly crafted of short stories, Ernest Hemingway visualizes an old man in a bar, quietly, carefully, drinking the night away. A youthful waiter, impatient to go home to his wife, wonders why the solitary patron lingers so long. The other, older barman tries to explain the nature of despair, when what's left of life and dignity contracts down to small, lonely rituals performed in mundane sanctuaries - islands that keep the hungry dark at bay.
Hemingway's story works as a key to the kind of ultracool nightworlds director Michael Mann has consistently dreamed up and populated, from TV shows "Miami Vice," "Crime Story" and the short-lived, lamented "Robbery Homicide Division" to films like "Manhunter," "Last of the Mohicans," "Heat," "The Insider" and now "Collateral." Rich with corruption, eroding every form of law, meaning, identity, the very air in Mann's movies saps the souls of his conflicted loners. Their defense, like the "losers" in Hemingway's fiction, is to claim some ground, however insignificant, on which they might make meaning, however illusory or transient.
In "Collateral," a cynical cop (Bruce McGill) stuck on a boring stake-out describes the aimless activity he surveils: people sleeping, waking up, driving around in cars, the air moving. The phrase recalls Phil Collins' outer-space-y "In the Air Tonight," which perfectly evoked the pastel-hued melancholia of Mann's "Miami Vice." Lyrics - "I can feel it coming in the air tonight" - and melody were the musical equivalent of the destructive element in which Mann has always immersed his old-school heroes: cops, gangsters, whistleblowers, boxers and, yes, even James Fenimore Cooper's Mohicans. Breathing this atmosphere thins or toughens a man's sense of self; the threat is that you could disappear, just another speck swallowed up by indifferent slipstreams of light and color.
Mann fills his films with panes and layers of glass, which trick and misdirect the eye on the lookout for something solid to rest on. The soft, dissolving air that moves through the otherworldly streets of "Collateral"'s Los Angeles can harden into transparent partitions, smears and streaks of neon light, distorting lenses. A bright grid or ganglion of gorgeous design, Mann's nighttown seems to pulse beyond human reference or recognition.
Appropriately, "Collateral"'s "hero" (Jamie Foxx) is a taxi driver, a guy who navigates the city's street-streams for a living. Once, Max thought of himself as a man in motion toward some satisfying end: driving cab to save enough money to start a limousine business. That dream has faded; now Max's spotless car is where he lives, his clean, well-lighted place. The man who takes other people places keeps a picture of a tiny tropical island clipped behind his sun visor; when things get dark, he imagines himself safe in that sunny circle. Drowning in time, Max measures - as though it mattered - his every itinerary to the minute; he's sharp as a tack on fastest routes, least traffic.
Chatting up a smart, good-looking DA (Jada Pinkett Smith), Max looks strangely dim, out of focus, as though his flesh is losing form behind his glasses, the cab's windshield, in the rectangle of a rearview mirror, turning to glance back at his passenger, so defined in her professional identity. But even the hotshot attorney's soon confessing to her own dark nights of the soul, times when the bottom drops out of any sense of who, where and why she is.
From a god's-eye view, we watch Max's cab slide through empty streets, as though navigating some alien bloodstream. A sad, silky jazz track goes with the flow, underscoring the voluptuous loneliness of driving through the late night, the sweet intimacy of a brief connection between strangers. For Max, that connection must be exquisite pain, putting him in touch with what-might-have-been. But here's another fare after all, with another destination, and so he drives on.
Max's new passenger isn't in the least dim. Sporting a salt-and-pepper brushcut, he's gray as tempered steel, a hard mechanic of death who "works up" his hits in a laptop, hiring hapless cabbies to drive him from murder to murder. Vincent will break into Max's neatly buried life as surely as his first victim, falling out of the sky, shatters the cab's windshield.
Tom Cruise, who is best when bad, plays Vincent as a sociopathic ferret, an invisible man who shapes up for periodic homicidal roadtrips. At a penultimate moment in the movie, he trades gunfire with Max, screaming "I do this for a living!" You believe it: killing makes Vincent tick, gives this dead man walking a reason to breathe. It's unimaginable that he's in any kind of motion between jobs.
Frequently in Michael Mann's movies, two men bond for some risky trip into self-knowledge - or because, hero or villain, they share a bleak sense of the futility of the quest. In "Collateral," the milquetoast and the hardcase mirror each other in their fundamental failure of faith against which they raise commitment to professional competence.
At one point, Vincent forces Max to impersonate him, bearding the Colombian who's hired the hitman (a superbly saurian Javier Bardem) in his very den. With the druglord's minions at his back, Max racks into sudden focus, assuming Vincent's style and dialogue with dead-on accuracy. Eventually Max takes fire from Vincent's terrible nihilism, while inspiring something like empathy to spasm in the hitman's dead soul.
Mann takes pleasure in faces - mostly, but not always, masculine - seasoned and shaped by existential hard time that distills itself into cool, that most difficult of words to define. But you know it when you see it. His pantheon of cool includes Dennis Farina, Stephen Lang, Bill Smitrovich, Robert De Niro, Val Kilmer, Russell Crowe, Tom Sizemore and a pride of multi-ethnic actors he casts in film after film. The black trumpet player in the jazz club Vincent convinces Max to visit is played by Barry Shabaka Henley, whose idiosyncratic physog I first learned to love on the Mann-produced TV show "Robbery Homicide Division."
The flesh of Henley's distinctive face droops like a basset hound's, as though weighted down by the taste of too much reality. His heavy lids curtain a gaze dark with the expectation of bad cess. And, sitting across the table from Vincent the jazz aficionado, trading anecdotes with a monster, Henley's old soul hardly blinks as he slowly takes in his fate. Mann's a master of such nerve-wracking tete-a-tetes; in part, the frisson they generate comes from our being seduced by the arresting stylistic signatures of unconventionally "beautiful" men and women.
In "Collateral," Mann mines Cruise's ordinary good looks to somehow discover a starveling nastiness hard to get out of your head. And Mark Ruffalo shines, too, almost unrecognizable as a dogged cop decked out in black duds, silver jewelry and slicked-back coiffure.
Both "Collateral"'s nightclub shootout - a vertiginous but never confused tour de force of cutting and choreographed action - and the hunting down of Vincent's last victim through a Chinese box of glass doors and walls show Mann at the top of his game. In such compositions, Mann makes you feel that humans - dancing, fleeing, frozen in place - are one-down; the dynamics of movement, light, spatial design dominate.
Similarly, in the strangely glowing streets of Los Angeles, passers-by look more ghost than flesh. The mystery and power of place, sans earthlings, is "Collateral"'s real story. From a shadowed street, look up to see a silver plane trace across the backlit blue-pink sky. Elsewhere, a moonlit nightscape is bracketed by silhouetted palms, as still as alien sentinels. A helicopter hovers, its shining belly alive with candy-colored reflections of the jewelbox city below. The bright ribbon of a subway, bearing its dead, streaks toward a dark maze of metal scaffolding.
And, of course, there's that moment of surreal perfection when Vincent and Max, urban outlaw and castoff, pause for a fellow traveler, a rangy coyote, to drift across the street, its eyes molten gold in the irradiated light of the City of Angels.
"Collateral" feasts the eyes. The hallucinatory beauty of Mann's clean, well-lighted place seems to have left humankind behind, mere shades in an urban kaleidoscope that dances and shines in a design of its own making.[[In-content Ad]]
