Classic Movie Review: Manhunter (1986)

Manhunter (1986) 
Directed by: Michael Mann.
Written by: Michael Mann based on the novel by Thomas Harris.
Starring: William Petersen (Will Graham), Kim Greist (Molly Graham), Joan Allen (Reba McClane), Brian Cox (Dr. Hannibal Lecktor), Dennis Farina (Jack Crawford), Tom Noonan (Francis Dollarhyde), Stephen Lang (Freddy Lounds), David Seaman (Kevin Graham), Benjamin Hendrickson (Dr. Frederick Chilton), Michael Talbott (Geehan), Dan Butler (Jimmy Price), Michele Shay (Beverly Katz), Robin Moseley (Sarah), Paul Perri (Dr. Sidney Bloom).

Manhunter wasn’t a hit back in 1986 – but its shadow looms large over the genre that it helped to create. Directors on TV shows like CSI, Criminal Minds and all their copycats are basically copying what Mann did in this film – and what, while they all have heroes like Manhunter’s Will Graham – Thomas Harris’ scarred detective from the first “Hannibal Lecter” book, and the Cannibal’s true nemesis. That it wasn’t much of a hit doesn’t surprise me – this is a morose film from the start, where all of the characters are damaged, bitter, angry, mentally disturbed loners. They share a connection – although they all wish they didn’t. Manhunter isn’t fun like its quasi-sequel The Silence of the Lambs (1991) was – but darker and more disturbing. You don’t walk away from it unscarred – which is probably why audiences stayed away in 1986, and yet why it has been in a classic in the decades since.

The movie opens with a shot, not unlike the opening of John Carpenter’s Halloween – as a camera from the POV of a killer enters a dark, suburban house, and goes up the stairs to find a couple sleeping in their bed. Mann cuts the tracking shot – he doesn’t show us the carnage that follows (something we will get flashes of through various crime scene visits and photos). The first shot puts us into the POV of Francis Dollarhyde (Tom Noonan) – a serial killer who slaughters whole families, and a character we won’t properly meet until hour two. It also thrusts us into the POV of Graham (William Peterson) – who was once an FBI Agent, whose gift/curse was to be able to get into the mind of the killer to see and feel what he sees and feels (that has become a tired cliché in 2015 – it wasn’t 29 years ago). Graham’s old boss, Jack Crawford (Dennis Farina) coaxes Graham out of retirement. This killer – who they have nicknamed “The Tooth Fairy” works on a lunar cycle. They have a few weeks before he kills family #3 – and no way to track him. Graham doesn’t want to come out of retirement – but, of course, he does.

The other major character is Hannibal Lector himself – here played by Brian Cox. Lector only has a few scenes in the movie – but his presence hangs over every frame (much more than it did in Brent Ratner’s remake, Red Dragon, which was made to cash in on Lector’s popularity – especially as played by Anthony Hopkins). Any actor playing Lector now has to contend with Hopkins’ brilliant, creepy, iconic performance in The Silence of the Lambs (less so in Hannibal or Red Dragon), but Cox did his five years before Hopkins, so he was free to have his own interpretation. Much like the movie itself, Cox’s Lector is colder, harsher, crueler more morose than Hopkins.  He clearly hates Graham – who comes to see him in an early scene. Lector doesn’t toy with Graham they way Hopkins’ Lector did with Clarice Starling. He tries to unnerve him – scare him – by pointing out how similar the two of them are. But Graham already knows this. Graham was scarred by Lecter when he arrested him – when Lecter tried to gut him to get away – but his psychological scars go deeper. Although he’s married, and trying to be a father, he has become a shell of a man. Gene Siskel described Peterson’s brilliant work here as a “non-performance” – and that just about gets it right. Graham is no longer a real person – just a shell of one. The same can be said of Brian Cox’s Hannibal and Tom Noonan’s utterly creepy Dollarhyde. They are all too similar to each other.

When he made Manhunter, Mann had one of the biggest hits on TV – with Miami Vice. Audiences expected the glossly entertainment of that show were surely disappointed. The movie certainly does have some of the trappings of Miami Vice – the expensive, but (now) horribly dated 1980s suit and haircuts, the techno pop score by The Reds. But it’s stripped down to its core essentials – to find the disturbing core of the genre. That is why Manhunter has become a classic.

Classic Movie Review: The Keep (1983)

The Keep (1983)
Directed by: Michael Mann.
Written by: Michael Mann based on the novel by F. Paul Wilson.
Starring: Scott Glenn (Glaeken), Alberta Watson (Eva Cuza), Ian McKellen (Dr. Cuza / Dr. Theodore Cuza),  Jürgen Prochnow (Woermann), Robert Prosky (Father Fonescu), Gabriel Byrne (Kaempffer), William Morgan Sheppard (Alexandru), Royston Tickner (Tomescu), Michael Carter (Radu Molasar), Phillip Joseph (Oster), John Vine (Lutz), Jona Jones (Otto), Wolf Kahler (S.S. Adjutant), Rosalie Crutchley (Josefa).

You can find someone out there to champion any Michael Mann film – to tell you that this one really is Mann’s masterpiece. Well, every film Mann has made except for The Keep from 1983 that is. No one likes The Keep. Hell, no one even watches The Keep any more – it has never even been released on DVD (for the record, iTunes Canada had it for a rental). For a director as great as Mann, who has only made 11 films, having one of them unavailable for so long is unthinkable – or so I thought before watching The Keep. Having now seen it, all I can say is that unless you are a Mann completest, there really isn’t any reason to watch the film.

Okay, perhaps that is a little unfair. The score by Tangerine Dream is, like all of their work, bizarre, mechanical, strange and memorable – none of those terms means good (per se), but it’s something. And, for the most part, The Keep does look good (if you watch the film, remember I said “for the most part” when the presence in the keep takes a physical form). These elements may not immediately identify the film as a Michael Mann film – but if you squint, it comes close.

The problem with The Keep is that basically the entire storyline is incoherent. This is what happens when a fairly new director makes a larger budget film for a studio, and reportedly delivered a three and a half hour cut of a film that was probably meant to be a goofy lark of a fantasy film, not a strange, existential treatise on good and evil, featuring a hero playing by Scott Glenn with glowing eyes, who rides his motorcycle deep into Romania to stop the evil force that Nazis have released from its ancient tomb (he can sense this, by the way, from Greece). The Nazis don’t know what they have done – so they call in a Jewish doctor (Ian McKellan), who was born in the tiny village by the keep, and his daughter (Alberta Watson) to help them. There are good Nazis – some who are sympathetic and don’t much care for this Hitler fellow, and there are bad Nazis – who show up in town, and immediately shoot a bunch of the villagers because, well, that’s what bad Nazis do, right? There is a priest in town (Robert Prosky), but other than yell a lot in the early going, he doesn’t do much.

For the most part, the plot doesn’t make a lot of sense. Basically, Ian McKellan’s Jewish doctor makes a deal with the spirit inside The Keep that he will bring a talisman outside that will allow the spirit to flourish outside of the walls that it has been imprisoned in for who knows how long. To McKellan, this doesn’t sound so bad – and he has a point. After all, this spirit or presence or whatever has, indeed, melted some Nazis, and has given him back his youth energy that had all but left him. But then, why would the glowing eyed Scott Glenn – with the great character name of Glaeken – show up to put a stop to it? (Why Glaeken stops on the way to have a psychedelic sex scene with McKellan’s daughter is another unanswered question).

 
You can see glimpses of what Michael Mann was going for in The Keep. In the score, in some of the visuals, in the portrait of good and evil, both trapped in the same cycle, etc. Who knows, maybe if the original three and half hour long cut ever surfaces, what we will discover is a lost masterpiece (I wouldn’t bet on either of those things – that it will resurface, or that it would a masterpiece if it did, but who knows?). But ultimately The Keep is a failure – an ambitious movie that never comes together to form a cohesive whole. A lumbering movie that flies off the rails in the last third. Simply put, it’s probably the worst film Michael Mann will ever make.

Classic Movie Review: Thief

Thief (1981)

Directed by: Michael Mann.

Written by: Michael Mann based on the novel The Home Invaders by Frank Hohimer.

Starring: James Caan (Frank), Tuesday Weld (Jessie), Willie Nelson (Okla), James Belushi (Barry), Robert Prosky (Leo), Tom Signorelli (Attaglia), Dennis Farina (Carl), Nick Nickeas (Nick), W.R. Brown (Mitch), Norm Tobin (Guido), John Santucci (Urizzi), Gavin MacFadyen (Boreksco).

 

Some directors take their time finding their voice – spending a few films making what will look like rough drafts of their later, better films the first (and second) times out. Martin Scorsese was like that. And then there are filmmakers like Michael Mann – who with his debut film Thief made what is perhaps the purest representation of what we consider a “Michael Mann” film to be. From the first frames of Thief, there is no doubt who is behind the camera. The film opens with a near wordless heist – as Frank (James Caan) and his crew, break into a safe, ignore or discard everything, except for the diamonds – which they take and are out of there quickly. These guys are pros – know what they are looking for, and where to get it. It will be only be during the course of the movie that we’ll get to know Frank as a person at all – his troubled history as a child raised by the system, how a 2 year stint in prison as a 19 year old for stealing $40 became a 12 year stretch, when he had to defend himself against a potential gang rape, and ended up with a manslaughter charge. How his marriage has fallen apart – because she didn’t knew what he did for a living, buying his lie about selling cars (ok, he does have a car lot, but it’s a front more than anything). His relationship mentor and friend Okla (Willie Nelson), still on the inside. Or his new relationship with Jessie (Tuesday Weld), a waitress he meets, and in a brilliant, lengthy sequence in a diner, lays out his life for her to see – no secrets, no lies, and she agrees to be with him from then on. Like all Mann films, Thief doesn’t really stop to make time for this exposition – but just crams it all in on the fly. Every scene is packed with detail – so much so, that you are surprised by just how much he crams into one movie.

 

Early in the film, Frank makes a mistake that will eventually come back to haunt him – we know at the time it’s a mistake, and Frank is pretty sure it is as well, but he cannot help himself. When he gives the diamonds from that first heist to his regular fence – who ends up dead before giving Frank his money – Frank goes to the people he knows has it. They give him the money no problem – but the boss, Leo (Robert Prosky) wants Frank to come and work for him. He knows how good Frank is – and he convinces Frank that by coming to work for him, he’ll be able to take down bigger scores, with less risk. Frank doesn’t like it – he likes working for himself – but when Leo starts throwing around some insane numbers, Frank cannot say no. He’ll do one deal, it will make them all millionaires, then he will retire with Jessie – and their newly adopted son (one that Leo gets for him when more “official” channels do not work out).

 

Mann has often made movies about characters are caught up in a system that is larger than they are – most of the time, they don’t even realize it. In films like Heat (1995), The Insider (1999), Collateral (2004), Public Enemies (2009) and even his latest, Blackhat (2015) he often has two characters – on opposite sides, in a constant struggle with each other’s, even though in reality they are both cogs in the same machine. Thief is a little bit different as Frank doesn’t have the same kind of antagonist as the other man characters do – Leo is really the only supporting character who leaves much of a lasting impression, but even he is kind of one note. Frank likes to think of himself as free – but he really isn’t. And even if he operates outside the law, outside the system so to speak, he is still very much a part of it, as he discovers there is a class system even among thieves. Leo doesn’t want a partner – he doesn’t even want an employee – he wants someone he can control, make money off of their hard work, while he takes little risk, and sits at home in his fancy house – with a wife who seemingly hates him (there is a great moment, late in the film, near the climax where Frank comes to Leo’s house with a gun, a woman, presumably Leo’s wife, sees Frank, barely reacts, and then goes back to watching TV). Frank is very much a part of the capitalist system – even if it is a system that has mainly rejected him – and he it.

 

The film is built around two heist sequences – the opening one, and the one near the end – the one they spend most of the movie planning, and is one of the only robberies in movie history that actually goes according to plan. Mann doesn’t use much, if any dialogue, in these two sequences – but unlike Jules Dassin in Riffifi (an obvious influence) – he does use music – in this case the techno score by Tangerine Dream, which while not my favorite piece of music, works well here – as Frank is using technology to pull off his heists, and it fits with the music. Much of the visuals of the film are dark – literally, black skies, black waters, black Chicago streets that envelope the characters, giving them no way out. The film, in many ways, is the missing link that connects the gritty, nihilistic crime films of the 1970s, with the more gloss and glamour of the 1980s crime films – something Mann himself would become known for (albeit on TV, with Miami Vice).

 

There are two moments in the films where Frank sits completely silently for a few minutes – and seems utterly content with himself, and his life. The first is at a Chinese restaurant, with Jessie and their new son – who they hadn’t even named yet. They decide on a name, David (great choice!) and call the waiter back over to tell him – and then Frank simply sits there, and looks off into space. He gets a similar look late in the film – as his cohorts are loading the loot from the unbreakable safe that he just broke. The job done, he sits there – utterly contented. Those two moments have haunted me since seeing Thief. What is Frank thinking in those moments? Does he know that everything is about to come crashing down around him, so he’s taking a moment to savor a job well down? Thief is perhaps not Mann’s best film – and it certainly isn’t his most ambitious. But it’s one that takes his lead character seriously – and all the other stuff in the movie, as brilliant as it is, basically boils down to a character study. It’s a great performance by Caan – perhaps the best in any Mann film, because while Frank is certainly a cog in the machine, as many Mann characters are, he remains – first and foremost – a person, who Mann takes seriously. This is why Thief is a masterwork – when of the greatest debut films of all time.

Movie Review: Blackhat

Blackhat
Directed by: Michael Mann.
Written by: Morgan Davis Foehl.
Starring: Chris Hemsworth (Nick Hathaway), Leehom Wang (Chen Dawai), Wei Tang (Chen Lien), Viola Davis (Carol Barrett), Andy On (Alex Trang), Christian Borle (Jeff Robichaud), Danny Burstein (Assistant Warden Jeffries), Abhi Sinha (Daniels), Jason Butler Harner (George Reinker), Siu-Fai Cheung (Chow), Tommy Wong (Johnny Li), Ivan Ngan (Yang Lin), Courtney Wu (Samuel Wu), Adrian Pang (Keith Yan), William Mapother (Rich Donahue), Archie Kao (Shum), John Ortiz (Henry Pollack ), Mark Jessup (Holt McCallany), Elias (Ritchie Coster)

Michael Mann has always been a visual filmmaker first and foremost – a director whose style is instantly identifiable as his own. He makes films about men – and they are almost all men – who are defined by their jobs, but are often in existential crisis. His films can be viscerally thrilling but have a lot of intellectual ideas running beneath their flashy surfaces. He bridges the gap between Hollywood style action and European style art films in ways that no one else even attempts, let alone achieves.

The movie has a very busy plot – that takes its characters from Chicago to L.A. to Hong Kong to Jakarta in a worldwide chase of computer hackers. But Mann doesn’t seem much interested in that plot – only in using it to set up his philosophical musings. The opening scene marries the virtual world and the real world – showing how a hacker using nothing but a computer and code to cause real world physical damage. A hacker uses his virus to infiltrate a Chinese nuclear plant, and shut down the cooling fans, while fooling the system into thinking everything is okay. Everything gets hotter and hotter, until there is an explosion. Mann cuts between the virtual world – a series of lights, travelling through virtual space, and the real world damage. It is just one of many virtuoso sequences in the film, and immediately defines what the movie is about. Mann will later go farther than that, comparing the world his main character, Nick Hathaway (Chris Hemsworth) is in when we first meet him – Federal Prison – to the one he enters when he gets out – the real world with the rest of us, and finding them not very different at all. There is more space in our world that prison – and Mann pauses at times to let us see that – but we are still trapped, still monitored, still controlled.

If Mann isn’t really interested in the plot of Blackhat, except to make his larger points, that extends to his characters as well. Chris Hemsworth seems to have been cast – much like Colin Farrell in Miami Vice – for his physicality more than his acting ability. Hemsworth looks like a Mann character – he is looks great staring off in the sunset in sunglasses, or in post coital bliss with his love interest (the equally beautiful Wei Tang). To be fair to Hemsworth, his character is underwritten – a collection of cool characteristics than a real character. And that extends to every other character in the movie as well. Everyone in Blackhat looks great – but really only Viola Davis delivers a great performance (Is that tangible enough for you, Gary).

The screenplay for Blackhat is fairly ridiculous. The dialogue is often flat or on the nose – and Mann seems to know this as well (watch how he plays with the sound levels through the movie, including fading out of a dramatic speech by Hemsworth about his childhood). The main character is a hacker – although he does more as kicking than hacking.

So all in all, is Blackhat a good movie? I’m honestly not sure. I know I was fascinated by it from beginning to end, and marvelled at many of the visuals, the action sequences, the lonely cars cruising on empty highways, the dark purple night skies, the close-ups on the beautiful people. Every inch of this movie is constructed for visual impact – perhaps a little too constructed, as if Mann is obsessing a little too much on all these wonderful visuals at the expense of everything else in the movie. It certainly ranks lower for me than practically any other Mann film I can think of. But I know I want to see the film again. That’s something.

Movie Review: Public Enemies

Public Enemies ****
Directed by: Michael Mann.
Written By: Ronan Bennett and Michael Mann & Ann Biderman based on the book by Bryan Burrough.
Starring: Johnny Depp (John Dillinger), Christian Bale (Melvin Purvis), Marion Cotillard (Billie Frechette), Billy Crudup (J. Edgar Hoover), Stephen Graham (Baby Face Nelson), Giovanni Ribisi (Alvin Karpis), James Russo (Walter Dietrich), Jason Clarke (John 'Red' Hamilton), Stephen Dorff (Homer Van Meter), Branka Katic (Anna Sage), Rory Cochrane (Agent Carter Baum), Bill Camp (Frank Nitti), John Ortiz (Phil D'Andrea), Richard Short (Agent Sam Cowley), Lili Taylor (Sheriff Lillian Holley), Leelee Sobieski (Polly Hamilton), Channing Tatum (Pretty Boy Floyd).

No one makes action movies quite like Michael Mann does. Although he is probably better at directing action than any other director working right now, his films always concentrate more on plot, character and atmosphere than he does on the action. In Public Enemies, his epic movie about bank robber John Dillinger (Johnny Depp) and the manhunt for him in the 1930s led my Melvin Pervis (Christian Bale), he has many action sequences that are expertly choreographed, photographed and edited, but we walk out of the theater talking about the characters, not just the action. The action is quick and violent - when someone in this movie gets shot, there is blood, and it feels like it hurts. But the action is just a small, though brilliant element, of this movie.

The movie opens as Dillinger has just got out of jail after serving 9 years for an armed robbery of a grocery store. But Dillinger does not stay out of jail for long - he daringly goes back in and breaks out his friends - real bank robbers - and together they will start their crime spree. Dillinger quickly becomes a household name in the great depression. Hardly a Robin Hood - he doesn’t give money to the poor after stealing from the rich - people still like him. He is polite, he doesn’t get violent unless he has to, and he refuses to steal money from the bank patrons. He isn’t after their money, he wants the bank’s money.

Dillinger, and bank robbers like him, present an opportunity for J. Edgar Hoover (Billy Crudup), head of the Bureau of Investigation. The problem is that all the bank robbers have to do is cross state lines, and the police cannot chase them. Hoover wants to set up a Federal police force to catch these criminals, and wants them to have different image for his men - he wants clean cut, respectable young men. When Melvin Purvis (Christian Bale) kills Pretty Boy Floyd, he becomes a national figure, and so Hoover promotes him, and puts him in charge of catching Dillinger.

Much like Mann’s earlier film Heat, where Robert DeNiro played a bank robber and Al Pacino was the cop chasing him, Public Enemies essentially looks at the two sides of the investigation - Dillinger staying one step ahead of the police, and Purvis trying to catch up. Also like that film, the two main figures in the film only have one conversation in the film. After Dillinger is arrested (he will escape again), Purvis comes to visit him. The showdown between the two men is one of the best scenes in the film.

But the central relationship in the film, the one that makes Public Enemies a great film and the one we remember, is between Dillinger and his girl Billie Frenchette (Marion Cotillard). I was not as big a fan of Cotillard’s Oscar winning performance in La Vie En Rose, but she is sensational in this film. She has the most gorgeous eyes of anyone on the planet, and Mann makes great use of them in her multiple close-ups. Often her performances hinges on slight changes in her eyes, that convey more genuine emotion than any amount of dialogue would. Depp and Cotillard have terrific chemistry together right from their opening scene, where he picks her up in a bar. She is the emotional heartbeat of the film, and she certainly deserves another Oscar nomination for the film at least.

Mann is one of the best directors working right now, and he shows us why in this film. Not only does he draw great performances from his leads, he fills the supporting cast with great actors - Giovanni Ribisi, James Russo, Brank Katvic, John Ortiz, Rory Cochrane and Leelee Sobieski are just a few. I loved Crudup as Hoover, who plays him as slightly effemenite, as well as bitter and spiteful, hunting at the man that he would become. And Stephen Grahmm is great as crazy Baby Face Nelson, Dillinger’s opposite, who is quick tempered, and opens fire at the slightest provocation. But the visual look is also tremendous. Working with cinematographer Dante Spinotti, Mann avoids the usual clichéd sepia tone of depression era films, and instead goes for a crisper cleaner look, shot mostly in shades of grey. So while this movie is certainly an homage to the old Warner Brothers gangster movies, as well as later films like Bonnie and Clyde, it is not beholden to them. It has a look and feel all of its own. While the camera moves in this film almost as much as it does in Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen, Mann actually knows what he’s doing, something that I’m not sure Michael Bay did. The camera work, not to mention the great production design by Nathan Crowley, and a wonderful score by Elliot Goldenthal, all combine to make this one of the great technical achievements of the year.

Public Enemies is not quite the rip roaring action movie that I think some audiences will be expecting. While it is certainly true that the movie spends more time on character than on action, when the action sequences are wonderful. Mann knows that one of the most important things about action sequences is to orient the audience to ensure they know what precisely is going on. Unlike some many directors who mistake shaky camera work and rapid fire editing for exciting filmmaking, Mann concentrates more on movement within the frame. No one does it better than Mann does, and Public Enemies is one his best films, and one of the best films of the year so far.