Mann Men (For a Livin’)

Friend of the Blog Jaime recently forwarded me a Los Angeles Review of Books piece from March by Clayton Purdom dissecting the oeuvre of Michael Mann, the greatest living American filmmaker, and the work-obsessed men who dominate it. Mann Men, Purdom deems them, tracing them and their professional dedication from James Cann’s titular “Thief” (1981) all the way up to Adam Driver’s eponymous Enzo “Ferrari” (2023). I especially appreciated the latter. Maybe because “Ferrari” was a movie of an all but extinct breed, one in which Mann specializes, the big budget Hollywood art film, it seemed to get lost in the year-end shuffle with so many other releases but was deserving of the rigorous analysis Purdom provides. Indeed, the whole piece is exhilarating, and electrically written, and exhaustive. And yet, in devoting over 4,000 words to Mann’s oeuvre, it never once mentions not just my personal favorite Mann movie but my favorite movie period, “Last of the Mohicans” (1992).

Purdom might reference “Collateral” (2004) as a popcorn movie, but “Last of the Mohicans” is by far Mann’s poppiest movie. It is vintage Hollywood, as Charles Taylor put in his definitive take on the film for Salon, reduced to the most primal of emotions which is, perhaps, why it doesn’t lend itself as readily to academic-styled analysis. Based as it is on James Fenimore Cooper’s novel, in a colonial America where indolence, to paraphrase the memoirs of Margaret Moncrieffe Coghlan, was totally discouraged, Mann’s film adaptation, based in part on the 1936 film adaptation, is in its way about industrious men in pre-industrial America. The two Mohican Indians, Chingachgook (Russell Means) and Uncas (Eric Schweig), and their adopted son Hawkeye (Daniel Day-Lewis), are hunters and trappers and you’re telling me that ain’t work? Living in 1757 by trapping is harder than cracking safes and winning the Mille Miglia put together.

“Last of the Mohicans” begins, in fact, with the three men hunting an elk. In Native American culture, the killing of an animal is something sacred, which we see in how the three men honor and give thanks to the vanquished beast, and which we see even more in how Mann evokes the hunt itself, venerating these men and their work with a sweeping visual and musical grandeur. Mann conveys their cooperative effort with nary a word, merely the instinctual understanding of a hundred similar hunts, foreshadowing so many ensuing workmanlike scenes, like when they track a Huron war party and rescue a British regiment, chasing off the enemy with a practiced, reverential ease. When Hawkeye dispatches one Huron warrior in hatchet-to-hatchet combat, you sense the choreography of the movie giving way to the choreography of the character, like our hero knows the moves of his opponent in advance. In these moments Day-Lewis exudes Jada Pinkett Smith’s line from “Collateral” that Purdum quotes: “Take pride in being good at what you do?” Indeed, the famed commitment DDL brings to all his roles effortlessly blends with the commitment Hawkeye brings to what he does and the climactic moment when Hawkeye shoots two muskets at once feels less like an exclamation than a variation of Purdum’s cited Mann Men creed: act like you’ve simultaneously shot two muskets before. 

Of course, the Mohicans also help rescue the Munro sisters, Cora (Madeleine Stowe) and Alice (Jodhi May), with whom Hawkeye and Uncas, respectively, will fall in love. They might have intended to trap during the fall and winter in Kentucky, but something happens, to quote Susan Sarandon in (forgive me) “Elizabethtown” that is not part of the plan. And maybe that’s why after all these years, “Last of the Mohicans” is still my number one Mann movie. It’s a significant irony, after all, that a guy hung up on what people do is my favorite filmmaker when few things matter less to me than what I or people at a dinner party do. (Tell me your favorite color, your favorite regional barbecue, your favorite Canadian province, anything else!) And so, rather than maintain discipline of a rigid professional code in the manner of most Mann men, Hawkeye eschews his work’s strictures to throw himself headfirst feet-first over the falls of passion. Sometimes, brother, those beaver pelts can wait.