Portentous and imposing with a sheer sense of purpose, Miami Vice is nothing like the 80s TV show that spawned it
MIAMI VICE ****
DIRECTED BY Michael Mann
STARRING Colin Farrell, Jamie Foxx, Gong Li50
US 2006 134 mins
There’s one thing the new Miami Vice film does poorly, and that’s being a halfway-decent cop thriller. The pace is too steady, the energy level too low – or just controlled – to be very exciting, and the actual police-work is threadbare. A twist towards the end finds Crockett (Colin Farrell) and Tubbs (Jamie Foxx) searching for the latter’s girlfriend, who’s being held prisoner Somewhere in Miami. A brief message from the girl mentions trailers, Tubbs reckons the background noise must be coming from the airport, and the Chief spots a house in a trailer park near the airport with electronic equipment on the roof – so they go in, knowing they only have one chance to get it right, not even bothering to check if they have the right house, and of course save the day in a barrage of gunshots. Sorry, no.
It’s strange that Vice should be unconvincing in its details, because director Michael Mann cares so much for authenticity – literally in e.g. the period detail of Last of the Mohicans (1992), but also figuratively in the vibe he means to impart. This isn’t just a very stylish film – it’s also a portentous one, imposing itself by sheer sense of purpose. “When someone fires a gun in a Michael Mann movie … you do not question it,” wrote critic Scott Foundas in the Village Voice, and you know what he means; the style is so weighty, one simply assumes that no short-cuts have been taken. Mann’s stock-in-trade – in all his films, but especially Heat (1995) – is a mix of machismo and gravitas; what he does best are sculpted moments, when Time seems to stretch like the surface of a bubble, the moment hanging suspended like a perfect conundrum with no easy answer.
It’s hard to describe the Mann style. Part of it is the look he brings (especially when working on high-definition video rather than celluloid, as in this film and Collateral (2004)), and part of it is his rhythm. Crime flicks are everywhere these days, always seeking to dazzle, but most try and do it by fragmenting the image and cutting as fast as possible; it’s exciting on a surface level, but somehow unconvincing – you feel the middle-class filmmakers are drawn to their scuzzy characters but don’t really know them, trying to disguise their insecurity by making it all go by in a mad rush. Mann does it differently. His people take their time; they eyeball each other. The opening scene in a club has it all – bling-loaded thugs in the background, sinuous club-babies dancing with their arms outstretched, dodgy deals going down in the shadows – but it moves with deliberate care, as if looking around alertly.
Often, deliberation shades into posturing. More than once, Crockett and Tubbs are carefully posed gazing in the same direction, like designer statues. There’s something iconic about them, and about the partnership; they exchange barely a dozen sentences in the whole movie, yet their loyalty to each other is unquestioned and unshakeable (“I will never doubt you,” says Tubbs, and the scene cuts away as if nothing more needs to be said). Only once, when Crockett goes after gangster’s moll Isabella (Gong Li), does Tubbs look doubtful; “I know what I’m doing,” says C., and that’s all it takes – even though he doesn’t really know what he’s doing, unexpectedly falling in love as they speedboat off to Havana for sex and mojitos. (Incidentally, someone should tell the Greek subtitles that “mojito” isn’t the same as “gin and tonic”, just as a Latino man named Jesus doesn’t necessarily translate as “Jesus Christ”.)
Miami Vice has a hushed, pregnant quality. The film clocks in at 130 minutes, but you could shave a good chunk off that running-time just by cutting out the shots of planes landing, crates being unloaded and boats on the blue expanse of ocean. It sounds like dead time, but it adds to the gravitas – and the deeper excitement of emotions held in check, which is what the film is really about. The villains are mask-like, giving nothing away; their chief, a Colombian drug-lord, looks benign as a monk and blandly concludes a meeting with “I extend my best wishes to your families”. Everyone’s too cool to show emotion, yet that’s what really drives them. Almost all the film’s twists, especially in the second hour, may be put down to love and jealousy, those yin-and-yang twin motivators.
For a while, Miami Vice feels stylish but hollow. Street-lamps tremble like fireflies on the film’s fuzzy freeways; the lights of the city glow red, reflected in massive looming clouds tinged rosy-pink. At one point, a night-time conversation is illumined by a distant flash of lightning. The dialogue is sparse, occasionally funny – “Why is this happening to me?” “Because you lead a life of crime” – but seemingly irrelevant. The plot is a flimsy thing, with Crockett and Tubbs going undercover to infiltrate a drug-gang and find an FBI leak.
Some will say it’s pretentious, style in the service of nothing – macho myth-making, like the pompous speeches in Lord of the Rings. But there’s a hidden poignancy in Mann’s work. Crockett and Tubbs are cool, but they’re also lost – and the film (just like Heat) gets its surface pleasures from overplaying the first trait, but its real hidden power from underplaying the second.
“Who are we?” asks Tubbs, meaning who are they this time, what’s their secret identity – echoed in the end by Isabella, when she learns the truth and yells “Who are you?” with betrayal in her eyes. The film strips its heroes of identity, making them iconic, but it’s not just posturing; all the gravitas, all the sculpted moments weigh the world down, pushing against their humanity. One of Mann’s signature shots (here and in Heat) is a man in a fancy apartment – the kind with stark, modernist furniture – sitting or standing by a window with the city lights stretched out below him, a vast urban tapestry dwarfing his life. The world doesn’t know, says that shot, and the world doesn’t care. Vice has another such moment, when Crockett gazes out towards the sea from a high balcony; at first I assumed it was plot-related – maybe a speedboat was about to approach from the horizon – but it isn’t. In fact it’s a moment of existential angst, a man gazing out at the unattainable from the contours of his slick, hollow life. Moments like these show the film’s true melancholy. Posed like male models, the heroes of Vice are in fact closer to trapped insects, with Love as their only hope of rescue.
What will the multiplex audience make of all this? Not much, if box-office abroad is anything to go by; the film opened big but generally flopped, though it’s done better in Europe than America. One thing’s for sure: it has little in common with its ostensible source – the flashy 80s TV show – except perhaps the cover version of Phil Collins’ ‘In the Air Tonight’ over the closing credits. Michael Mann produced that TV show, but times have changed. Maybe there’s a clue in the film’s profusion of screens, from the fuzzy green of surveillance cameras to the slo-mo footage that finally sways the drug-lord – a world of unrealities, or competing realities. Things are losing focus, and Mann’s silent machos hang on grimly. How can we think about cop thrillers at a time like this?
One of the greats?
GLENN FORD, 1916-2006
Glenn Ford, who died last week at the age of 90, had a deceptive career. It’s easy to think of him as one of the greats, at least till one tries (mostly in vain) to find a half-dozen great performances in the 109 films he made over a 50-year career. On the other hand, it’s easy to dismiss him as stodgy, or a lightweig
ht – at least till one realises how many classic films he graced with his presence.
Perhaps the most famous is Gilda (1946), though people remember Rita Hayworth singing “Put the Blame on Mame” more than they recall puppyish Ford looking flustered on the sidelines. Like other leading men of his generation – notably Gregory Peck – he radiated a solidity and steadiness that worked especially well in the conformist 50s; he played a teacher getting tough (but fair) with delinquent youths in The Blackboard Jungle (1955), and was voted the No. 1 box-office attraction in America in 1958.
Yet there was another side to his acting. In 3.10 to Yuma (1957) – one of his finest films – he was a notorious outlaw being escorted to justice by reluctant rancher Van Heflin. Another Western, Cowboy (1958), found him playing a tyrannical trail-boss making life hell for tenderfoot cowboy Jack Lemmon. Above all, in The Big Heat (1953) he was a cop driven to psychosis by a thirst for revenge, a hero right on the edge of likeability. Ford’s face was handsome but a little odd, the features bunched together under a high forehead – and when that face frowned or clouded he could look quite grim, an effect he wasn’t afraid to use.
He wasn’t afraid, full stop. Canadian-born, he fought in WW2 – later awarded the French Legion of Honour medal for his wartime record – and even served in Vietnam, as a reserve officer. He took up hang-gliding in his 60s, and married his fourth wife at the age of 76 (the marriage was dissolved a year later). He could be disagreeable, and director Frank Capra was scathing about their collaboration on A Pocketful of Miracles (1961), made when Ford was a big star and Capra something of a has-been: “When Glenn Ford made me lick his boots, I had lost that precious quality that endows dreams with purport and purpose,” Capra wrote in his memoirs.
Some would say Ford never really had that “precious quality”; he was always a bit too earthbound for dreams. It’s easy to damn him with faint praise, as David Shipman does (in his book The Great Movie Stars), calling him “a good example of that second-string group, the dependable and efficient actor”. But he was real, never phony, a man’s man and a strong personality – and dismissing him means dismissing all the aforementioned films, plus Human Desire (1954), Experiment in Terror (1962), The Courtship of Eddie’s Father (1963) and even his Pa Kent in Superman (1978). A little bit of history died last week.
