Through a Glass Darkly

Rating: 10/10 (13 August 2004)

Take the simplest of stories, say, two guys meeting, at night, in a taxicab, in Los Angeles, and turn this into, not just a mesmerizing visual experience but a poignant unselfpitying portrayal of the metaphysics of alienation in the 21st century, and you have crafted the rarest of the rare, namely a cinematic masterpiece.
Shot entirely at night (mostly with a Thomson Grass Valley's Viper FilmStation digital camera), _Collateral_ pulls the viewer into a dark world, lit as if from inside a black hole of lost dreams, murdered futures and raw fear without losing sight of the possibility for physics-defying change within the main characters of the story, the hit-man Vincent (Tom Cruise) and his accidental chauffeur for the night Max (Jamie Foxx). Each actor underplays his role, and it is via this quiet intensity that the film's director (Michael Mann) moves these two men out of themselves and, however unwittingly, into each other's lives, not unlike the way Al Pacino and Russell Crowe had done in Mr. Mann's equally disquieting previous film, _The Insider_.
Like its predecessor, _Collateral_, too, makes trust and betrayal as palpable (and as explosive) as guns and bullets, and also (again like its predecessor), this film makes you (the viewer) actual care about individuals whom you would most likely in your real life choose to avoid at all costs.
In so doing, this film makes the mere act of living nay, of MAKING a living, an exercise of deepest courage and direst necessity. And it makes us see, through a glass darkly, that every word is a confession, every act a benediction, and every encounter a transfiguration of good and evil, right and wrong, life and death.