To Serve Mann (What Is Every Film Critic’s Highest Calling?)
February 5-16 at BAM
Billed as “New York’s first complete retrospective of the master auteur’s modern take on urban noir,” BAM’s series includes all of Michael Mann’s features, but you won’t find any of his significant work producing, writing and directing television movies like The Jericho Mile and L.A. Takedown, the amateurishly acted shoestring blueprint for the masterpiece Heat. There also isn’t space for his work on shows like Miami Vice, Crime Story (supremely entertaining) and Luck, but I don’t know what’s involved in acquiring such things, and really, beggars oughtn’t be choosers, as this series as it stands is a godsend. It arrives on the heels of 2015’s Blackhat, a box office nonstarter that also took some dings in the press, though I count myself among its fervid cult. Boring gripes about unbelievability and Chris Hemsworth’s inappropriate chiseled-ness and slippery accent seemed to make up much of the criticism, though Mann’s slick and considered digital style (refined since 2004’s Collateral) and balletic open-air action scenes are as strong as anything in Miami Vice (2006). Mann will be toting a special, never-released director’s cut of Blackhat. Details are hazy, but excitement should be tempered by the fact that he’s done this on many of his films, with sometimes less than positive results (Miami Vice added a boat race intro and other unnecessaries, Heat lost a little purple prose). Mann has said his original cut of the eventually two-hour Blackhat had another 45 minutes, so expect to see some of that and a little reshuffling.
At twelve films, BAM’s series is a comparatively light complete retrospective because Mann is a slow worker. An allegiance to authenticity marks his work from this series’s earliest entry, Thief (1981), one of the most soulful heist movies ever made and containing rarely-better work from James Caan, Tuesday Weld and a white-hot Tangerine Dream score. Real thieves served as technical advisers, so you can be confident that every drill bit and saw is authentic, which would mean little if not for the passion the young Mann is already able to convey in even throwaway shots and quiet scenes like the celebrated Caan-Weld coffeeshop talk. “I don’t care how it looks; I care about how it feels,” is one of my favorite of the director’s quotes (from a Miami Vice 2006 DVD extra), because there’s an unmistakable feeling behind Mann and his cinematographers’ pretty pictures, one that can be hard to put into text without sounding blowhard-y, which is one reason why Matt Zoller Seitz’s 2009 video essay series “Zen Pulp” is valuable. If Mann were in fact merely a vacuous “style” fetishist, his films would still be worth seeing, but his pictorial and musical choices are always character- or setting-driven. Silhouetted Robert De Niro placing his gun down on a table in his clean-lined modern house as he looks out into a oceanic void in Heat (1995) is an image beautiful in itself, but made crushing by its evocation of Neil McCauley’s chosen life of loneliness.