Caught on Digital Video
Lean, stylish Collateral benefits from gritty look and compelling characters
by Noel Murray
Collateral
Dir.: Michael Mann
R, 119 min.
Opening Friday at
area theaters
On his commentary track for the Ali special-edition DVD, director Michael Mann explains his decision to use digital video for a handful of the film's night scenes, saying it made the characters look "suspended above the city." Now, after experimenting with DV again on the failed TV series Robbery Homicide Division, Mann returns to the medium for Collateral, a lean, stylish crime thriller that's low on thrills but heavy with character beats. Collateral contains a mix of DV and traditional film footage, and it's a tribute to Mann that the film has a largely unified look—a kind of grainy, luminescent haze that locks the urban landscape and the people within it in a translucent plastic cell.
The urban landscape in question is Los Angeles, and people who enjoy the rarely recognized cinema subgenre known as "the L.A. movie" will be riveted by Collateral even before the plot kicks in. Jamie Foxx plays conscientious cabbie Max, who we get to see crisscrossing the city for a good while—with plenty of glorious location shooting—before the movie's first significant character gets into his taxi. Annie, a stressed-out prosecutor played by Jada Pinkett Smith, gabs with Max about dreams and goals for a few minutes before he drops her off downtown and picks up his next passenger, Vincent, played by Tom Cruise. Vincent offers $500 if Max will drive him around all night—an offer Max accepts and then regrets, once he finds out that Vincent's plan is to spend the night assassinating witnesses in a high-profile racketeering trial.
From the moment of the first murder, Collateral simultaneously opens up and tightens. The center of the movie remains Max's attempts to stop and/or escape Vincent, but Mann and screenwriter Stuart Beattie sprinkle compelling characters (and actors) along the periphery: Mark Ruffalo as an undercover cop, Bruce McGill as an FBI agent, Javier Bardem as a crime lord, Irma P. Hall as Max's hospitalized mother, Barry Shabaka Henley as a jazz saxophonist. Like the best crime stories, Collateral is more about the interactions of fascinating people than it is about crime, and at times the movie resembles the gritty, deftly woven novels of Michael Connelly. (A recent documentary about Connelly's work is titled Blue Neon Night, which is a good description of how Collateral looks.)
Mann and Beattie don't knock this one completely out of the park. The movie sports some clunker dialogue at times, the final chase is a whole lot of nothing, and Tom Cruise runs like Ben Stiller imitating Tom Cruise running. But there's a chilly charm in the way Cruise's Vincent fires his gun at people as a symptom of his virulent misanthropy, and Collateral hints that the killer's long monologues about moral relativism were programmed into him by Uncle Sam. (When asked how long he's been a hired gun, Vincent says, "In the private sector? Six years.") And with its emphasis on modern technology—from the characters' reliance on cell phones and WiFi, to the way the movie is shot—Collateral is the kind of diverting genre piece that people will want to watch decades hence to get the flavor of how life was lived circa 2004.
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