Hold Fast

Rating: Null/10 (10 February 2011)

"We can do nothing against gravity." – Sonny (Miami Vice)
Taking place almost entirely within the cramped confines of a taxicab, Michael Mann's "Collateral" stars Jamie Foxx as Max Durocher, a cab driver who, in typical Mann fashion, has given his life entirely over to his job. Dreams and aspirations remain, largely in the form of idyllic photographs and half thought out desires to kick-start a business in the Maldives, but gravity holds Foxx fast. The job has become his identity, Mann's characters all requiring a certain one-dimensionality to stay afloat in the flux.
In a series of low-key, but beautifully atmospheric shots, Mann watches as Max ferries people back and forth across the city. He's burnt out, living for nothing, but must keep moving. "A make believe, a simple existential haven, a retreat where the vita activa is banished," author Olivier Mongin writes in "La Condition Urbaine", referring to the "urban underside where man's heart now lives". In Max's case, this "make believe" is an idyllic photograph taped to his cab mirror, which he periodically uses to zone out from the world, but which we know can never provide solace. The human has dematerialised into the heart of an urban universe governed by speed and constant motion, and like the exhausted package carriers of Olivier Assayas' ("Boarding Gate", "Summer Hours", "Demonlover") urban landscapes, Max can only abide or extricate himself for brief moments, as Sonny does in "Miami Vice", jetting off in a speed boat to the very islands Max naively dreams of.
Max is mirrored to two other characters, both of whom enter his cab. The first is a high profile prosecutor, played by Jada Pinckett Smith. The second is a robotic hit-man, played by an awfuly miscast Tom Cruise. Both exist on either end of a court-case, Smith looking to take down a drug cartel, Cruise hired to keep the cartel alive. Both are also associated with briefcases, smart suits and ice cool greys, the cool chic of business executives mirrored to amoral hit men, both exuding a compulsive professional pride which Max, who demonstrates himself to be a hot hand on the wheel and a master of LA's roads, himself shares. Driver, passenger, employer, employee, prosecutor, defendant...they've all got one another hostage, all collateral, their bodies property under ownership until repayment of some debt which perhaps remains infinite.
Max and Cruise talk: "A guy gets on the MTA here in LA and dies... Think anybody will notice?" The grandfather of the film's existential musings is Nicholas Ray's "On Dangerous Ground", where burnt out cops navigate an impersonal city populated by indifference. Mann replaces the hellish urbanas of Ray, De Toth, Huston and Hawks, though, with their modern equivalents. The film opens at an airport, thousands trapped between destinations, and will spend its running time fixated on people going everywhere but getting nowhere. As Deleuze says, we now live in a control society in which "you never finish anything".
Transience has been a constant theme in Mann's filmography ("You were born in Portugal but got your tan in Miami") so it's no surprise that "Collateral" always seems to be moving. The world today is defined by "non places" in which "transit points and temporary abodes proliferate under luxurious or inhuman conditions...everywhere a bus stop to somewhere else," Anthropologist Marc Auge says. But for all its motion, "Collateral", is also one of the few Mann films to end with a certain hokey rootedness.
"Vice" was about the inability of human connections to be forged in transit, never mind the formation of a stable Self in a global system which now demands incessant masks and collapsible identities, the flux insisting that man become a creature of transience and a tool of functional anonymity. In "Collateral", likewise, it is Max's flexibility, his ability to break free and cease being a carrier, which allows him to defeat the Cruise character, whose professional rigidity - his routine/programmed need to fire a double tap to the chest and one shot to the head – results in his downfall.
"Improvise, adapt to the environment, Darwin, I Ching, whatever man, roll with it," Cruise says throughout the film, but his very death is the result of a failure to adapt (in dying, Cruise saves Max, instigating the driver's own transformation). The film then ends with Foxx and Jada Smith walking off into the night like a traumatised (married) couple. Their bonds will be tested in "Vice", where the film's central black couple, again led by Foxx, struggles to fight gravity while others collapse all around them.
The film is shot in gorgeous digital, Mann's unique nighttime photography punctuated by red braking lights, bleeding fluorescents and the murky glow of midnight LA. Mann replaces the old-school noir aesthetic – see "Crime Wave" and "The Naked City" - with something more modern, lyrical and jazz-inflected, his compositions often unbalanced, with objects and characters spilling off the frame.
On the negative side, Mann, like Edward Hopper, romanticises alienation, dressing it up in slick Armanis and champagne lights, the modern condition rendered dangerously beautiful, glamorous and always against a background of wealth and resources. Of course these noir thrillers have always maintained a certain romanticism - the noir hero a knight heroically battling against the black - but such romance only helps to create and maintain a trendy, psychic distance.
After a masterful first half, the film runs into more problems. The film's existential musings are sophomoric (early 21C existential chic), Mann is unsure whether or not to commit fully to a cat and mouse subplot involving police detectives, his film climaxes with two generic set pieces (cf "Carlito's Way"), and while Foxx and Smith are excellent, Cruise is incompetent. You sensed De Niro's mind at work in "Heat". Here, Cruise just uses energy to mask his own superficiality.
8.5/10 – Ambiance and auteurial flourishes elevate flawed genre piece.