Al Pacino and Robert De Niro had been friends for decades, but they had never shared the screen together until Heat. Yeah, they were both in The Godfather Part II, where De Niro won his first Oscar, but as characters separated by several decades they never crossed paths. It took fifteen years after the end of the decade they both dominated for them to actually meet on screen for a gritty Michael Mann crime drama about an extremely clever career criminal and the obsessed LAPD officer determined to take him down.
Heat is one of those movies that has an incredibly high reputation in certain film circles that I’ve known about for years. For some it is the main or only reason to know of and revere Michael Mann as a filmmaker -it’s the movie that most often comes up whenever he’s referenced, thus pigeonholing him to some degree in spite of his more versatile work on films like The Last of the Mohicans or Ali. Heat is known for being rough and brutal and “realistic” and therefore cool; and yet also for being one of Pacino’s most memorably over-the-top performances. A cornucopia of things that endear it to the standard “movie bro” crowd perhaps a bit too much for my general confidence. And maybe that’s why it took me so long to get around to watching it.
But I had assumed Heat was an action movie. I didn’t expect it to be a stirring character drama. Everything else I had heard about it is correct, though those elements I feared might be unbearable really weren’t (except for maybe the overwhelming copaganda), and the appeal of the film clicked for me. Heat is a very good movie.
The crux of the plot is essentially the same as that from Les Miserables, but if Javert had been right about Valjean –and if Javert was also really high on drugs while pursuing his target. It’s this intense and elaborate game of cat-and-mouse between Pacino’s unorthodox cop Vincent Hanna and De Niro’s evasive robbery mastermind Neil McCauley, on paper very simple –quite classical in structure. And yet it’s a story based in real-life, and a real LAPD officer who relentlessly fought to bring down a specific criminal (also called McCauley) back in the 60s. It was even the basis for a television pilot that Mann wrote and directed six years earlier. I can see how this story might have worked on television, but considering that didn’t work out, it was a smart move of Mann to adapt it to a feature, and to give it a contemporary setting. A lot of the effect of the films’ mood comes from its’ particular 90s brand of dank L.A. noir –the griminess informing and supporting a decent chunk of the films’ tension.
What might be lost among this gritty atmosphere though is the strength of the script and of Manns’ storytelling capabilities. Indeed, Heat is actually a really interesting character study beneath its’ routine cop movie exterior, and I sense that is why it is liked so much. The parallels between the two lead characters is enticing, that old trick of them both being a little more like the other than they’d like -Hanna can be violent and unstable, while McCauley can be just and aspire to an escape from his lifestyle. There’s a curious level of obsessiveness and immorality behind Hanna and his efforts to apprehend McCauley, he’s far too willing to betray orders and “get dirty” as it goes; but it’s the outlaw who is on the more interesting journey. McCauley has been doing this a long time, he grows impatient, and understands consequences -hence why he’s been able to evade them. His anger with impulsive new recruit Waingro (Brian Gage) for needlessly killing the drivers they were robbing early in the film is the first real sign of his humanity that we see. And from there, he begins what appears to be a redemption arc of sorts, beginning a relationship with Amy Brenneman’s Eady, a humble graphic designer, and looking for a way to get out of the business.
Yet he keeps being pulled into it and falling victim to the temptations of revenge and violence, and also the need to get one over on the police, who he very quickly figures out are tailing him. It’s exciting to watch, engenders empathy, and is even thought-provoking -especially in how it all ends for him. The pathos of this is reflected in De Niro’s performance, which being a De Niro performance before the 2000s, is very good. He’s catching all of this and conveying it with the subtlety and gravity it needs -while also being a damn sight imposing in that goatee. And I also suspect in this portrait of a character wanting to leave a world of crime that is too embedded in his life for him to ever do so successfully, De Niro is channeling another famous movie character thrice played by his charismatic co-star.
While De Niro carries the weight of greater drama in this movie, it’s Al Pacino who ultimately stands out more -perhaps aware of this fact and thus doing all he can to make up for it. This is famously one of Pacino’s most outrageous performances -or at least it is on occasion in perhaps a conscious choice to evoke the characters’ more unhinged attributes (nevertheless that “great ass” bit is a surefire classic, and I doubt Pacino has been as purely entertaining anywhere else in his career). However Hanna can indeed be taken seriously, and there are interesting sides to the character, interesting choices that Pacino makes. I find it fascinating after having watched Serpico earlier this year, to see Pacino playing nearly the kind of cop his character in the earlier film was fighting so hard against. Hanna isn’t corrupt, nor does he operate intentionally outside of the law, but he does rely on his own personal methods and intuition too much, and he’s also an asshole -a character at least in the spirit of some of those that Serpico was a response to. Yet I do believe this is conscious on Manns’ part, to showcase Hanna’s susceptibility and the adverse effects of his unrelenting compulsion towards this case. It hurts his marriage and his already poor relationship with his step-daughter -as well as his mental health. Pacino’s record of excelling at this kind of character drama speaks for itself, to the point you’d almost think the script was written with him in mind. And here, it nicely offsets his bombastic tendencies.
It's not until late in the film that he and De Niro meet on screen, and Mann does an excellent job building to it in the knowledge of both its’ significance to the story and just pop culture in general. Fittingly, it’s a conversation at a café, that doesn’t quite make sense for the plot, but does work in favour of the drama. Both actors get some of their best lines during this exchange, and they bounce off each other with the immediate chemistry of old friends, while in-narrative still being clearly enemies. The scene manages to play the “we’re not too different” routine in a fresh way as both characters compare their commitment to their work and their personal failings alike. They seem to acknowledge that in other circumstances they would get along, but if push comes to shove, they will kill each other to protect themselves and the ones they love. And that’s exactly what they try to do in their next meeting in the final climactic shoot-out.
Before getting to that though it should be noted that while Pacino and De Niro sell the movie, they are far from the only figures in play. In fact, the supporting cast for Heat is absolutely stacked! Hanna has a highly trained squad at his disposal that consists of Ted Levine, Mykelti Williamson, and Wes Studi -who is just so damn cool in every scene he appears in! McCauley’s loyal crew on the other hand is made up of Tom Sizemore, Danny Trejo, and right-hand man Val Kilmer in a role that though significant, feels rather small for where Kilmers’ star status was in 1995 (this was the same year he played Batman and he’s got no more screen-time or plot relevance than Sizemore). William Fichtner plays a corrupt businessman, with Henry Rollins as his enforcer, Ashley Judd features as Kilmers’ wife while Hank Azaria is the scumbag she’s having an affair with; a teenage Natalie Portman plays Hannas’ step-daughter, Tom Noonan and Dennis Haysbert make appearances, and an unfortunate Jon Voight even shows up once in a while as McCauleys’ fence. The size and talent of this cast really compliments the films’ narrative complexities, as broad and basic as the story is, and fills out Manns’ bleak illustration of L.A., in every frame a stark and foreboding character in its own right, very well with memorable personalities and faces.
But Mann would be perfectly capable of relating his world without, he is adept enough as a technical filmmaker to pull it off. He sets a mood incredibly well –within the first five minutes I knew exactly what the tone was and how Mann wanted to portray this dreary world. I love his use of lighting both as an amplifier of this mood (the film is often dark without being quite so literally) and as a suspense technique, particularly in that final showdown. He works well with muted colours and picks his long takes and rapid cuts alike with careful intent. His direction is not very showy, but it demonstrates a sharpness of technique and an acute noir-influenced sensibility; and it’s quite clear the effect it has had on the likes of David Fincher and Christopher Nolan –whose own Gotham City owes a lot to Mann’s L.A.
So yeah, Heat is a very good movie in addition to being a distinctly 90s time capsule and a long-awaited pairing of two giants of American cinema. It is crazy and corny, but balances it out with genuinely engaging character drama and some very skilful filmmaking from Michael Mann at the height of his abilities. It’s also pretty fun, enough so to warrant a repeat viewing or two, and apart from a couple spots where it drags, it doesn’t feel like the nearly three hours that it is. Pacino and De Niro would cross paths two more times, in the barely remembered Righteous Kill (another cop movie), and of course in Scorsese’s The Irishman. But Heat saw them both still relatively in their prime, and there is something special about it being their first collaboration in over twenty years, and their first ever time interacting on-screen. Between the two of them and Michael Mann, it doesn’t take much for things get pretty heated.
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