Heat

Right up there with The Godfather duet, Mulholland Drive, and Spaceballs, Heat is hands-down one of my all-time favorite movies, and I would easily rank it up there with one of the greatest movies ever made.

I remember when it first came onto the scene in 1995, and I don’t recall it getting a lot of publicity, save for its pairing of Al Pacino and Robert De Niro and the mega firefight that took place about halfway through the film. For many years, that was all I knew about Heat, until I finally got around to seeing it in the spring of 2003. Believe it or not, after my first viewing, I wasn’t all that impressed . . . but then I decided to give it a second viewing, and after I was finished, I was absolutely stunned, because all these characters stayed with me after the final credits were done rolling. I couldn’t shake them. I kept thinking of Val Kilmer exiting the white Camaro and finding Ashley Judd (his on-screen wife) on the balcony across the street, her subtle wave to cue him in that he was being set up by the LAPD, their husband-wife fight earlier in the film, Danny Trejo frantically calling up Robert De Niro telling him that the cops were onto him, and of course the explosive gunfight right after the bank robbery.

At just under 3 hours in length, it’s a task to get through it all, but after umpteen viewings, I find it well worth it. I would call this movie one of the best character dramas ever put to film, as well as one of the best-made movies ever created. And when I say “best-made”, I mean all the details of the movie—the editing, the realism, etc. It’s like director Michael Mann (my favorite director, as I stated in my review of Miami Vice) is clubbing you over the head with perceptive reality and not resorting to cinematic techniques to make a single moment draw out forever. He takes you there as quick as an eye-blink, the event passes just as quickly, and after it's over, you’re standing there in shock, trying to mentally process it all. In real life, I believe that’s really how it is. I have yet to encounter something in real life that has happened in slow-mo, or at least in a timeframe long enough for me to let it all sink in and react appropriately. Mann catches you off-guard, just as life itself catches you off-guard, and I laud that realism.

Furthering that realism is the fact that Mann shot the entire film on location; not a single scene was filmed inside a studio. You can tell it’s a location shoot whenever you hear a gun go off. You want to know why?

Because you hear the echo!

The very first heist in the movie, with De Niro’s crew hitting the armored car underneath the highway overpass, the machine-gun fire literally shatters the air. And when the last shot is fired, the echo is still rattling off into the distance. That’s something you almost never hear in a movie—something as small as an echo, a natural sound in an outdoor setting. And it lends such incredible believability to those scenes.

To this day, I’d still love to know how Mann shot the street fight after the bank robbery. That had to have been some of the most intense, minutely-detailed filming ever executed. The entire gunfight couldn’t have lasted more than 4 minutes, but the carnage is unfathomable, and I think Mann again hits you over the head with realistic perception—that something as monumental and show-stopping as a large-scale machine-gun fight in the street between an entire police division and a crew of bank robbers can be over and done with in a matter of mere minutes. It comes at you fast—and it ends even faster, before you even know what’s happening.

The acting was spectacular all around! This, I feel, was Robert De Niro’s best film role, and I’m still upset that Heat was completely snubbed by the Academy in 1995, because I can think of at least 7 nominations it should have received. You could feel De Niro’s self-imposed isolation for the sake of his work, his discipline and sensibility when pulling each job (like walking off the platinum job when he heard the bang from the truck across the street), even his perfect mannerisms. Pacino, as always, played Pacino, but his dedication to his own job was just as real—giving up his home and family life for the sake of chasing down De Niro. Diane Venora was much better in this movie as the neglected wife than she was in The Insider. I don’t know if it’s because her respective characters were drawn differently, but as wife to Pacino in Heat, her rejection and neglect are palpable, real, and not at all annoying (like they were in The Insider). Even a young Natalie Portman stood out as the neglected, rejected daughter (not by Pacino, but by her biological father).

Now we go back to Michael Mann’s creative vision for this movie, his trademark “cool” style, which is really at its best here (though some would argue that it peaked with The Insider). One of my favorite scenes is when De Niro, the disciplined loner, meets a lady at a coffee shop and they make a connection—awkwardly at first, but gradually the walls came down. The scene of them having drinks on the balcony overlooking Los Angeles at night, the soft music in the background, ever so subtle, is magic. The personal things said, the longings and desires that went unsaid but still understood by the other, it's all pitch-perfect.

During the infamous coffee shop scene, I noticed right away that you didn’t see Pacino and De Niro in the same shot. You only saw the front of one’s face and the back of the other’s head at a time. But in this small scene, I think we have the epicenter of the entire movie: a detective and a professional thief, two men very much alike in their dedication to their work and in their superlative abilities to do their jobs, both feeling the personal loss for the choices they each make, and knowing that this is the only moment they’ll have in non-violent, non-threatening circumstances. Because the job dictates that Pacino (detective) must take down De Niro (professional thief), or that De Niro must put down Pacino for getting in his way.

I give this movie a perfect 10. Perfect direction, perfect acting, perfect execution, perfect everything. My personal favorite. Just for your enjoyment, I've included this video clip of the coffee shop scene, preceded by Pacino tailing De Niro down the highway (I love this highway scene, with the music and lightning-quick editing).