There are people who claim that Michael Mann is a genius, as well as the most brilliant and assured maker of passages of pure film now working in America. That's the chief reason why so many film enthusiasts are waiting for Public Enemies. Watching Mann at work, in his natural noir element, is to behold greatness and the serenity of mastered style in a medium where style means less and less. It's like watching Astaire dance on film. Or seeing Johann Cruyff change a silly game of soccer. These are scenes to be relished over and over again.
Take the moment in Heat when the cop (Al Pacino) decides it's time to meet the leader of the gang (Robert De Niro) planning a major take-down in Los Angeles. It's night in LA (probably Mann's favourite time and place to be). The cop, Vincent, has authority and the means to have a helicopter drop him on a busy freeway where he knows the villain, Neal, is driving. He shifts to a car and quickly finds Neal in the traffic. He pulls him over, and they agree to have a cup of coffee together. Cut to coffee shop. Two men at a table. Cross-cut medium shots as they talk - in other words, it's never absolutely clear that the two men were together at the same time.
They talk, and this is where it's up to us - up to you - to decide whether what you're hearing is genius or rubbish. Not that the talk is less than lovely. Not that the acting is other than Pacino and De Niro mano a mano. What they say amounts to this: that cops and crooks are alike - they have their jobs to do, dangerous and exacting; they have guns and cars; they may respect each other, but in the last analysis it's life and death. So they salute each other (the actors and their roles), and we have to be pretty tough-minded to resist the seductiveness of comradeship and the beguiling nonsense in what they say.
Let me remind you: cops and crooks are not alike. Now, I'm not challenging the weary fatalism that says some cops are corrupt, and some crooks noble. It may be so. But in their attitudes to society and in their ambitions, they should not be deceived by fleeting and superficial resemblances. If in your life you have ever been on the receiving end of criminals, you know there is a difference, no matter the cinema's ability to make it seem as if these are just two types of samurai locked in a spectacular contest; no matter Michael Mann's self-induced giddiness at having to tell one guy from another.
So Mann is 66 now, and the best kid film-maker in the world. He went through the University of Wisconsin and the London Film School. He worked a good deal with crime/police material on TV: he was executive producer on Miami Vice, a crucial step in the gloss of style and stylisation being spread across urban violence.
He has had his departures - The Last of the Mohicans (maybe his most accomplished picture in that it has an old-fashioned scheme of heroes and villains) and The Insider, a subtle account of principle and compromise in big business and the media. But he keeps coming back to the classic confrontation of law and disorder, and the riddle of whether it is really just one type of manhood gazing in the mirror: Thief; Manhunter; Heat; Collateral; Miami Vice; Public Enemies. He has made only one picture - Ali - that strikes me as fundamentally uninteresting. He hasn't made a movie without scenes I can watch over and over again. At the same time, the slippage from passion to silliness, from power to posturing, in the shift from Thief to Miami Vice is hard to avoid.
Of course, he works in a genre that sells, and he may attribute the emphasis in his films to that more than to adolescent thinking. So, he is a master, not a genius, and this imbalance says a great deal about the state of the movies now. Let me end with this: at 66, he might think of a movie about ageing (so many of his characters die young) as well as one in which women share the lustrous light.
