Consider the hype leading into Heat when it hit theatres 30 years ago today. Here was Al Pacino and Robert De Niro, two legends the movie’s trailers flexed by their rhyming last names only, both masters of their craft who, much like their characters, had been watching each other from a distance (maybe competitively, maybe with respect and admiration), sharing the screen for the very first time. The pent-up anticipation was built right into the narrative, which patiently delays the onscreen face-off between Pacino’s dogged homicide detective Vincent Hanna and De Niro’s career criminal Neil McCauley for almost 90 textured and intense minutes.
Imagine the surprise then, and the comic relief, when the moment finally arrives, and these two opposing forces collide (as the trailers would say) … for a warm and exceptionally civil cup of coffee.
That calling card scene, inspired by a 1964 exchange between Detective Chuck Adamson and the real-life Neil McCauley, may not have delivered the fireworks we would have expected in a high stakes cat-and-mouse thriller with a mounting body count. But there are fireworks to be sure: two larger-than-life performances of men left alienated and melancholic by their chosen careers. They ever so briefly set their differences aside, let their tough guy demeanor slide, and simply see each other’s vulnerability.
Michael Mann’s masterpiece, a sprawling, epic beast of a movie, may be remembered and celebrated by most film bros, 30 years on, for its centrepiece bank robbery. Those thunderous claps of a mid-day shootout and Val Kilmer’s tactical maneuvering as he rains down gunfire, which is said to be studied by Marines, are unparalleled to this day. But what really stands out is the way Mann loosens up the cops-and-robbers formula and lays out a tapestry of lost souls in LA, its remarkable tenderness and lyrical beauty transcending the genre tropes.
Steely determination keeps these characters at opposite ends of a gun and a badge. Heat is constantly searching for the cracks that expose their yearning for human connection, even in their foes. The book McCauley is reading in preparation for a heist, Stress Fractures in Titanium, is a clever little nod to who these people are and what this movie is about. It would have made a cool movie title too, but the current one is just fine.
Heat is the movie Mann had been slowly building towards, expanding the LA noir style and labour-intensive ethos in his previous heist thriller Thief (in which the real Adamson appears and worked as a consultant), not to mention his earlier stab at the same story in the abandoned pilot turned TV movie LA Takedown. His return to the crime genre in Collateral and Miami Vice, while towering works on their own, largely live in Heat’s shadow. They’re in good company. The Dark Knight, Den of Thieves and HBO’s acclaimed new crime series Task don’t just share that space, with their eagerness to channel Heat’s gravitas, they proudly wear it as a badge of honor.
Heat ticks along on the dueling performances from Pacino and De Niro, the former’s blustery swagger a stark contrast to the cool, carefully curated composure of the latter. Those kinds of competing notes could be found and savoured across the movie. There’s the luxurious and seductive sheen in Mann’s images capturing industrialized landscapes, and the ugly violence that erupts from within; the airtight control that McCauley and Hanna (and Mann) exert over their work, compromised by the mess that comes with their attempts at having relationships (which the former, for the most part, resists); the grandiose and mythical qualities the movie lends to characters who might wax philosophical but go about their jobs with a blue-collar rigor, as if the movie is constantly riding a fine line between neorealist drama and opulent Greek tragedy.
The tragedy in Heat ultimately boils down to work-life balance. If the thrills can be found in the execution of its heists and takedowns, the despair comes from how long it lingers over what these characters sacrifice to pull those off. What this work takes, as McCauley repeatedly and so memorably puts it, is to “allow nothing in your life that you cannot walk out on in 30 seconds flat if you spot the heat around the corner”.
More than Thief, Heat is about labour. The movie opens with a shot of a light rail train, ushering people to their jobs in the early hours, and spends a lot of its time in warehouses and scrap yards. McCauley’s crew, including Kilmer’s Chris Shiherlis and Tom Sizemore’s Michael Cheritto, have high thread counts at home but seem more in their element when slipping into coveralls to drive garbage trucks or rewire electrical panels, all part of the job.
In slick and subversive ways, Mann romanticizes an honest day’s work, yes even among thieves. There’s valor in the professionalism that McCauley lives by and expects from all his colleagues and business partners. The movie’s villains cross moral codes. But perhaps what’s more important to McCauley is their lack of professional integrity, when Kevin Gage’s serial killer Waingro lets his depraved urges compromise the spectacular armored car robbery that opens the movie, and William Fichtner’s slithering money launderer Van Zant, the only character in this movie occupying a high-rise white collar office space, reneges on a deal. These betrayals come with bullets.
There’s also exploitation in this labour, a fissure in all that idealised integrity, which grows more troubling; from McCauley’s attempts to patch up Chris’s marital problems, if only to make sure he’s not distracted before an upcoming score, to the moment his story crosses paths with Dennis Haysbert’s Breedan.
The latter is on parole, forced to grind it out in a kitchen for a sleazy employer who docks his pay, refuses his breaks and threatens to send him back to prison. Breedan’s fighting hard to hold onto his dignity, with the affectionate support of his partner Lillian (Kim Staunton). It’s in these trying moments that McCauley swoops in, seizing on an opportunity. He needs a getaway driver for the movie’s big robbery. Breedan obliges and becomes the first in McCauley’s crew to be killed.
We can’t ignore the trope where the Black character always dies first. Heat doesn’t either. Instead, Mann leans into the unceremonious ruthlessness of it, and Haysbert’s performance refuses to be limited by such tropes. His immense presence throughout Heat makes sure we feel the loss when his character’s death is reduced to an afterthought in a news bulletin, witnessed by Lillian, whose anguished face in that moment is quite simply haunting.
She, alongside the neglected wives and girlfriends played by Ashley Judd, Diane Venora, and Amy Brenneman, occupy thankless roles, bent helplessly in the direction of the men they orbit. But in that space, they don’t just leave an impression, they carry the sadness their men don’t often have the capacity to express.
The confined nature of these roles, and the grace afforded the women and people of color within them, is just another one of those conflicting notes that makes Heat so compelling. I’m not sure a movie today could pull that off (critically unscathed at least). I would also say you couldn’t get away with making a movie like Heat today.
But then, Michael Mann’s already hard at work on Heat 2.
