(S P
O I L
E R S)
This is the story of a film that
you probably haven’t seen. And another
film that you probably haven’t seen because you pigeonholed it into a prison of
mediocrity. And a director who everyone
wants to be one thing, when he’s clearly something else. And maybe what all of this says about the
modern state of moviegoing…and life…and all of that other stuff.
The creation story of Jason Staebler is Dead, the erratically
updated literary e-venture that you’re feasting your eyes on right now, claims
Michael Mann’s Miami Vice as its
Genesis Chapter 1. Like many would be
authors, I felt like I needed a tangible prompt to motivate any kind of regular
output from my quill. And being a
confirmed teetotaler, following in the decadent, self-abusing footsteps of
Fitzgerald and Burroughs was sorta out of the picture. Instead, in the late summer of 2006 I turned
to the nascent services of Blogger.com for this here free web home. As most of you faithful readers can see, that
prompt hasn’t quite worked out as I intended.
But hey, it’s a start.
The prime impetus for the timing
of this blog’s creation was that August’s release of the Miami Vice film. Like many,
when I first heard the pitch of Mann rebooting the tv show that he famously
helped to shepherd along, that 80’s paean to feathered hair and pastel suits,
that seemingly outdated cultural chestnut…well, yeah, of course I followed
along with the opinion that most people with TASTE held. Seriously, was Colin Farrell with a mullet
supposed to be taken seriously? Weren’t
we as a culture waaaay past the electrosynthetic allure of Vice’s cokey noir?
Being a confirmed Mann
enthusiast, I still went to see Vice
on opening day. And what I saw convinced
me to start this blog. Because here was
a major work of art, an expressionist take on the crime film that was probably
going to flop at the box office and be ridiculed by the commentariat. And who was going to preserve any
conversation of its worth? Yep, that’s
right: this guy. Hey, it was 2006. I had only been online fulltime for three
years.
Thus, in my maiden essay for the
blog(which you can read here…it’s pretty decent, but a bit dry and shallowly
informed) I asked the question “Is Michael Mann the Terrence Malick of
Testosterone?” I was pretty proud of
myself for that one. Here and there, I
still envision meeting Mann and addressing him as such. Obviously, I’ve watched too many films about
Hollywood parties. But all joking aside,
I still think that there’s worth in that neophytic essay’s philosophical
thrust.
And that philosophy is even more
in the foreground with last week’s release of Mann’s newest crime epic Blackhat. Starring part-time Norse god Chris Hemsworth
as Nick Hathaway, the MIT schooled super hacked who’s furloughed by FBI to
assist in a joint U.S.-China hunt for another super hacker hellbent on
disrupting the world, Blackhat is
ostensibly a globe-trotting techno thriller.
Now by this point, you’ve probably ingested the general boilerplate judgments
that the film has received. “It doesn’t
make much sense.” “The computer science
is wrong” “Hemsworth is toootaly
miscast! The hacker with muscles! HA!”
It doesn’t help that Universal dumped the film into the mid-January
wasteland, essentially leaving it for dead with a dodgy series of pre-release
trailers and almost no major print advertising leading up to its opening
day. In some ways, I can understand this
stance, because for almost ten years, the studios and the moviegoing public
have been pining for a Michael Mann who doesn’t really exist anymore, only to
be disappointed at every turn by the director he’s become…or, maybe more
appropriately, the director he was all along.
In many ways, Mann is a victim of
his own success. With his 90’s run of The Last of the Mohicans, Heat, The Insider, and Ali, he
garnered much acclaim for his deft melding of critical examinations of codes of
masculinity with classical narrative structure.
It didn’t hurt that he was working with members of the Hollywood acting
pantheon. I mean come on, this is the
guy who followed up directing Method master Daniel Day-Lewis by bringing Al
Pacino and Robert De Niro together in one scene for the first time. True, in its time Heat didn’t possess the critical status that it has today, but its
signature long form action sequences have always been regarded as genre
landmarks.
2004’s Collateral marked a major turning point for Mann. The contemporary press marveled at Tom Cruise
playing a villain (gasp!...although to give him his due, his feral Vincent is a
marvelous turn…and remember, this was when Cruise could still lay claim to the
status of biggest box office star in the world) in a tense two character voyage
through the existential darkness of one Los Angeles evening. But more important to the arc of Mann’s
career was his full embrace of the possibility of digital cinematography. Although he had begun experimenting with
digital on Ali, Collateral was where he and co-DPs Dion Beebe and Paul Cameron pushed
a technology that was still the exception to its fullest limit. As Beebe notes in an insightful ASC interview, “With Collateral, we suddenly saw on the screen the night
sky that we could see with our eyes, and that was revolutionary. Nobody had
captured that in that way before.” Such a daring representation of the urban
nightscape was complemented by the burnt ash lighting of the nocturnal Los
Angeles streetlights, a stark visual scheme that seemed shocking at the time,
but that would prove to be a roadmap for where Mann was going.
Miami
Vice
and 2009’s Public Enemies followed a
similar digital strategy, but both were met with critical and audience
apathy. There are notable visual
differences between the two films, the former luxuriating in quasi-Brakhageian impressionism
(I still love A.O. Scott’s line about Vice
being "an action film for people who dig experimental art films, and vice
versa”) while the latter embraces the pinpoint resolution of the RED
camera. The bigger point of commonality,
though, is how cinematic style becomes a character in and of itself, possibly
the lead character. There’s pleasure to
be had in watching Farrell, Jamie Foxx, Gong Li, Christian Bale, Johnny Depp,
and Marion Cotillard smolder, but Mann’s prevailing concerns are with exploring
the limits of archetype and form. And
that’s not necessarily a popular concept in the modern big budget film
landscape.
That preoccupation with the
abstract continues in Blackhat. After all, a film whose most visually dynamic
action sequence is a CG-rendered flight through the interior workings of a
hacked computer that occurs in the first five minutes probably isn’t going to
win over many current action fans (who, let’s face it, are the target
demographic that Blackhat was being
pitched to.) Most modern action films
give the audience the pomp and violence that they’ve been trained to expect
from decades of the genre’s dominance, but here Mann makes the daring choice of
presenting the true action film of the modern world, a world where ground wars
are losing their currency and cyberattacks are the wave of the future (he’s
admitted that the Stuxnet attack on Iran’s nuclear system was an inspiration). The infamous North Korean Sony hack was, in
many ways, cataclysmically damaging, but the most readily accessible drama
involved leaked celeb nude pics, barbed and dishy e-mails, and the temporary
cancellation of The Interview. No Audie Murphys to be found in this
conflict.
And that’s an off putting concept
for a film supposedly built on suspense and intrigue (cue this response). But Mann seems to be hinting at something
bigger than the labyrinthine techno-plotting.
Indeed, he’s once again gone back to his wheelhouse: cool studies of
conflicted masculinity. The audiences
who grew to love the Michael Mann of the ‘90s could be lulled into forgetting
his deeply lyrical duet of Thief and Manhunter from the ‘80s. Those two thrillers are also ostensibly about
hyper-talented professionals driven to the brink, but they’re also loving tributes
to the noir loners of the ‘30s and ‘40s.
And both are ultimately oblique tone poems to the radical nihilism of
classic masculinity, thrilling and sleek in their form, gorgeous in their
visual audacity.
The Michael Mann of today has
simply come full circle in his artistic obsessions and ambitions. This time working with DP Stuart Dryburgh
(who also lensed the pilot of Mann’s late, lamented HBO existential racing
drama Luck) he continues to explore
the beauty in the mundanity of the urban environment. Blackhat’s
Hong Kong is alternately a sterile architectural battleground and a neon
jungle, the perfect embodiment of the conflicting nature of our world.
Those who criticize Hemsworth as
being miscast sorta miss the whole point, the one that Hathaway lays out when
he tells Chen Lien that surviving prison is a matter of making their time your
time to devote to your mission: improvement of the mind and the body. Nick Hathaway is nothing less than a modern
day samurai, operating in a digital world but still driven by a timeless code
of honor. His physical prowess is the
armor that he needs to guard his nimble mind.
And make no mistake, it’s his story and his alone. Devious as the chief villains may be, they don’t
possess the charisma of a classic Mann villain…which may be the whole point,
the encapsulation of an encroaching computer-driven threat that is so often
anonymous.
Much of the film’s charms, then,
lie in the very zen concept of removing the ego form the viewing experience,
dropping the classic dramatic expectations to bask in the pure cinematic
possibilities of the form. After all of
the convoluted cyberplotting, Hathaway’s story ultimately concludes with a very
analog standoff, as he confronts the main villain and his henchmen with but a
knife and his own will. This visually
stunning sequence, set amidst a densely populated night parade in Jakarta’s
Papua Square, engulfs the three principles in a sea of torches, their battle
reduced to its most primal form. When
Hathaway finally confronts his enemy, his motivation for following through on
the kill is not any hope of regaining the promised commutation of his prison
sentence, but in avenging the murder of his friends. In a world bound by Silicon Valley-inspired
naked self-interest, the super hacker turns out to be the most moral and honor
bound character in the film.
Not that Mann's art film aspirations are for everyone. But it would be a shame if his late career excursions into the deep recesses of the form continue to quickly fade out of the theaters. In a tentpole driven cinematic landscape, they're ever more vital and important markers of a still rewarding filmic past combined with the exciting technological possibilities of the future.
