culture
Cops, Robbers, and Mojito Fiends: TIFF Shines a Light on Michael Mann’s Neon Nights
TIFF Cinematheque's showcase of the auteur's career highlights his contributions to the procedural thriller and his shift to digital cinema.
Still from Miami Vice.
Neon Nights: The Films of Michael Mann
TIFF Bell Lightbox (350 King Street West)
February 5 – March 26
$13
“Am I being tangible?” Viola Davis’s no-nonsense detective sarcastically asks a colleague in Blackhat, Michael Mann’s newest star-gilded, big budget curio to quietly disappear at the box office while lingering in the minds of his devoted fanbase. Mann’s films are famous for their long afterlives, and soon enough, Blackhat will surely find its way into loving retrospectives like Neon Nights: The Films of Michael Mann, TIFF Cinematheque’s selected showcase for the American auteur renowned for his distant cool, unabashed romanticism, and, yes, tangibility.
Still from Thief.
After cutting his teeth on television (most fruitfully on Crime Story and the Folsom Prison-set TV movie The Jericho Mile) Mann made his theatrical debut with 1981’s Thief. Thief is something of a cheat sheet for Mann’s filmography, introducing both his distinct aesthetic sensibility — a pulsing electronic score, courtesy of the band Tangerine Dream, and an equal penchant for rough hands hard at work and fast cars racing through big cities in gorgeous nocturnal tableaus — and his thematic predilection for hardened male lawbreakers with rigid moral codes. An endlessly cribbed template for filmmakers as diverse as Nicolas Winding Refn (in Drive) and Christopher Nolan (in Inception), Thief is the rare ‘80s crime thriller that still feels contemporary over thirty years on.
Still from Manhunter.
If Thief sets up Mann’s interest in the criminal with a code, films like Manhunter and Heat nicely establish Mann’s preoccupation with the other side of the law. Adapted from Thomas Harris’s novel Red Dragon, Manhunter introduced cannibal psychiatrist Hannibal Lektor (played this time, under that slight spelling variation, by Brian Cox) years before Jonathan Demme’s The Silence of the Lambs. Though the latter film would be more popular, Mann’s Harris adaptation would prove more influential, its obsession with the procedural details involved in FBI profiler Will Graham’s search for serial killer The Tooth Fairy unofficially inaugurating a new kind of forensic thriller, whose lead William Petersen would go on to anchor as the star of CSI. Heat takes that attention to procedure and method to a new height, while also serving as Mann’s first proper star vehicle, putting Al Pacino and Robert DeNiro onscreen together for the first time as, respectively, a haggard detective and a big-time bank robber out for one last job.
Still from Public Enemies.
Heat’s relative quiet and deferral of gunfire to existential brooding — at least until the inevitable, explosive heist set piece, another authorial staple — would become a hallmark of Mann’s cinema. Though Mann has long been contented to work within the studio system, the resulting films have always been a curious step away from the mainstream. His two cracks at the awards-baiting biopic, The Insider and Ali, are as formally idiosyncratic as Manhunter, similarly profiling difficult men with unusual systems of honour. (It’s a wonder both films’ prickly leads, Russell Crowe and Will Smith, respectively, landed Oscar nominations for their fantastic but standoffish performances.) You could also file an ostensibly straitlaced film like Public Enemies under that offbeat sensibility. Mann’s first film shot entirely in high-definition digital, it’s arguably the most radical visual experiment released into commercial cinemas this decade, the video aesthetic granting a strange immediacy and tactility to the 1930s period setting.
Mann’s experimentation with digital has always sat on the edge of ugliness and breathtaking beauty, never more pronounced than in Miami Vice, his 2006 riff on the television series he executive produced. Where Thief is a perfect primer to Mann, Miami Vice is a concordance to his recent films’ seemingly infinite contradictions. It’s a commercial picture with big stars (Jamie Foxx and Colin Farrell) that has no interest in holding its viewer’s hand. It’s as romantic and woozy as it aesthetically chilly, telling a goofy but sincere transnational love story between an oily undercover American (Farrell’s Sony Crockett) and a drug kingpin’s Chinese financial planner and lover (Gong Li) with total earnestness and conviction. Finally, it’s as vulgar as it is philosophical, celebrating its heroes’ taste for mojitos and fast boats in about the same tone as it delivers his serious belief in axioms like “Time is luck.” In short, it’s a Michael Mann film.