Crime Thriller with Heart and Brains

Rating: 10/10 (17 October 2007)

Agree with all the other comments about its greatness, this might be my favorite film ever. But aside from that I'd just like to offer a comment that I didn't immediately come across in my perusal of the others, but one that seems pretty obvious to me upon viewing this movie recently for the 5th time: above all this is a movie about meaningful human connection.
****SPOILERS**** Is there any scene in the movie that doesn't pertain to this theme? You have the domestic scenes with Pacino, his wife and their daughter which are the most obvious. The woman just wants some attention from Pacino and because she doesn't get it, gets too stoned on prozac to realize her daughter is desperate for the same love. None of them can even have real meaningful conversations. The same goes with Kilmer and Judd. DeNiro is missing a connection of this sort and only now beginning to realize it, evident in the dinner-celebration scene in which he calls Edie. Edie herself is a naive and sincere midwesterner getting eaten alive by the disconnect running rampant in L.A. She's starved for some sort of meaningful interaction which makes her primed for even a dysfunctional relationship, one that she finds with McCauley.
Even the smallest scenes run rampant with this theme. You have Tom Sizemore with his apparent bimbo, a "relationship" that he's willing to sacrifice in the end probably because there's nothing real about it. He receives his due. There are the 2 or 3 scenes with the new-guy driver and his girl, which seem superfluous until the part where DeNiro approaches him in the diner and the viewer can witness exactly the torture that this character is going through as he sacrifices the one good thing in his life.
The end only makes sense when viewed through the lens of human connection. Otherwise the lingering shots on Edie as her heart is broken mean nothing, nor the pained indecision on Deniro's face as he has to drop everything in 30 seconds. The hand clasp at the end, is both characters' fulfillment of this need for a true companion. They are, after all, the two most similar characters in the entire movie, the only true compatriots, two men who sacrificed everything that matters to satisfy the needs of their careers. Goddamn this is a good movie.