Alien Superstars

Currently on display at the Norton Simon Museum

Michael Mann recently released a sequel to his second of four magnum opuses “Heat” (1995) in novel form. Among other storylines, “Heat 2” apparently details what transpired after Chris Shiherlis’s initial escape from authorities in the wake of his gang’s big bank robbery gone wrong as well as what led to his and Charlene’s marriage in the first place. And, I don’t know, reader, I just don’t know. The image of Charlene (Ashley Judd) from her balcony waving Chris (Val Kilmer) away, and that breath Judd breathlessly takes in the moment, like she’s taking in their whole existence one last time, isn’t that a perfect final image? Why do we need to expand on it? Never mind that they are Mann’s characters and he can do what he wants with them, I’m the “Before Sunrise” fan, one of the originals with his “Before Sunrise” VHS tape bought at Suncoast Motion Picture Company, who thought the 2004 “Before Sunset” sequel showing what Jesse and Celine were up to 9 years later was an atrocious idea, an insult, how dare they. Then I saw the movie in the theater and swooned so hard I went back to the theater a week later and saw it again. So, really, what do I know? I will probably read “Heat 2” and I will probably love it.

But I’m not here to talk about “Heat 2.” No, I’m here to talk about a Tweet from Michael Mann himself about “Heat 2” including an image from “Heat.” This Tweet.

That Tweet stopped me short. I was going through Twitter like the Joker of Tim Burton’s “Batman” going through Vicki Vale’s portfolio – “Crap, crap, crap, crap, crap” – until he gets to the good stuff. I saw that photo of Judd and Kilmer as Charlene and Chris and I just looked at it like the time I looked at Monet’s Regatta at Argenteuil at the Musée d’Orsay and tried for, like, 15 minutes to walk away and just…couldn’t. I mean, look at it! I know part of this stems from the youth and beauty of Ashley and Val given the former’s severe injuries from falling in the Congo and the latter’s health issues, including losing his voice, so severe they seem to suggest his recent nigh wordless appearance in the “Top Gun” sequel was his movie swan song.

Let’s set aside youth, however, and just focus on beauty. I don’t mean to be shallow here but…they’re beautiful. They are the mystical Beautiful People. They’re the kind of couple you ogle as a couple yourself from across the way, saying things like, “Now that is a beautiful couple.” They’re like Beyoncé and Jay-Z that time at the NBA Finals where the second half had already started but America’s Royals got shepherded to their courtside seats anyway and for a minute there you couldn’t even pay attention to the best athletes in the world because these Beautiful People had just wandered on to your screen. They’re like the chorus of Beyoncé’s “Alien Superstar”...“too classy for this world.”  “Heat” deserves an NPA rating because of this image. No Puritans Allowed. Mann dresses them both in black, emphasizing their features which in the scene’s 35mm lighting seems to coat them in the patina of their beauty. Some people glow and Charlene and Chris glow.

But. But! Chris’s lips are ever so slightly apart, suggesting he is speaking, yet looking slightly past her, as if uninterested in her reaction to whatever he’s saying. But her reaction makes the frame. Her face is quizzical, her eyes in a squint that might be confusion or might be disbelief, giving the frame an unexpected tension. Her posture is relaxed, rhyming with the spaghetti strap of her era-appropriate dress tumbling off her shoulder, but the relaxation taken in tandem with the expression transforms it into something more akin to boredom, a bored dissatisfaction, whatever he’s saying an unwitting metaphor for everything that even their beauty cannot cover up. 

The Perfect Phone Call

Over the weekend, the ostensible President of the United States, King Big Brain I, placed a phone call to Georgia’s Secretary of State in which he explained, more or less, that he had been beamed up to a UFO in the middle of the night by aliens who proceeded to show him tremendous evidence of voter fraud the likes of which you have never seen before. In a normal administration this might have caused a multiple-alarm fire; in this administration it was just another day at the office with the classy gold drapes. Why this wasn’t even His Imbecility’s first election fraud phone call! He’d made one of those in 2019 to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, proffering a quid pro quo in his typical crude manner, leading directly to his impeachment and causing him to deem the phone call “perfect.” 

He has yet to deem the second phone call perfect, at least so far as I can discern, but I assume he thinks it is perfect because he assumes everything he does and says is perfect. And I suspect he labeled that first phone call perfect because his limited vocabulary prevented him from describing what he meant by perfect, leaving behind the most crucial question: what makes a phone call perfect? Is it content? Is it length? Is it tone of voice? Is it verbiage? Is it honest back and forth? Is it getting to the bottom of the something? Is it beginning the call the right way; is it ending the call the right way? Is it convincing the customer service rep to waive the late fee? Is it getting that stooge on the other end of the line to purchase a subscription to Better Homes and Gardens? Is it the phone lines going down and not having to make the call in the first place?

You might not immediately think of the phone call between master thief Neil McCauley (Robert DeNiro) and the businessman cum money launderer Roger van Zant (William Fichtner) in Michael Mann’s “Heat” (1995) as The Perfect Phone Call. After all, the phone call is nothing less than McCauley threatening van Zant’s life – nay, telling van Zant in so many words that he’s “a dead man.” That doesn’t sound so perfect. But as King Big Brain I goes to show, who says a phone call needs be humane or within the law to achieve perfection? 

Let us now recount the call in full...

McCauley: “Roger van Zant?” 

van Zant: “Yeah, who’s this?” 

McCauley: “You know who this is.” 

van Zant: “Yes I do, yes I do. I sent a guy to deliver the package. He didn’t call, is everything all right?”

McCauley: “Tell you what, forget the money.”

van Zant: “What?” 

McCauley: “Forget the money.” 

van Zant: “It’s a lot of money. What are you doing? What do you mean, forget the money?” 

McCauley: “What am I doing? I’m talking to an empty telephone.”

van Zant: “I don’t understand.” 

McCauley: ‘“Cause there is a dead man on the other end of this fuckin’ line.”

To begin with, while McCauley’s phone call to van Zant might well be, in its own way, a business call, it is simultaneously the spiritual antecedent to the most dreaded of all phone calls – the sales call. McCauley is not pitching van Zant anything; in point of fact, he’s telling van Zant to “forget the money.” This alone, this admirable, even heroic, refusal to sell something, puts the call on the road to perfect, personal, in its way, rather than transactional. 

What’s more, McCauley, aided greatly by the esteemed actor playing him, forgoes chit-chat or any annoying pretense of aggravating pleasantries. He confirms the person on the other end of the line is the person he’s trying to reach, avoiding the insultingly superfluous Start-Talking-Only-To-Realize-This-Isn’t-The-Right-Person red herring. From there he does not so much deflect as commendably reject van Zant’s attempts to stall and make the phone call unnecessarily interminable before, upon van Zant trying to butter him up with a little small talk before they get to the brass tacks, shutting him down by inserting the brass tacks a mere five exchanges in, keeping the phone call on schedule. And at that point, rather than hanging around, wasting his time and van Zant’s (after all, van Zant’s a dead man so he better get to living while he still has time!), McCauley states the phone call’s ultimate intent and then, once he does, eschews a banal have a good day, nice talking to you, etc., to simply hang up, ensuring the phone call is all of, what, forty seconds? 

If McCauley famously espoused the philosophy that one must be willing to walk out on anyone or anything in 30 seconds flat if he/she feels the heat around the corner, he might have been just as smart to espouse a similar philosophy about making a phone call. Never make a phone call you are not willing to hang up on in 40 seconds flat if basic intelligence suggests there is no reason for it to continue. 

Heat, the Original Face/Off

I originally intended to write another in my Shout-Out to the Extra series. The extra I wanted to write about was featured in Michael Mann's "Heat", which was in my mind after reading about the film's anniversary screening in Los Angeles last week. The extra appeared in one of the film's diner sequences, when Neil (Robert DeNiro) and his regular bank robbing crew, Chris (Val Kilmer) and Michael (Tom Sizemore), meet up with the extra member of the crew, the illustriously monikered Waingro (Kevin Gage), who was along for one robbery and went semi-rogue. The extra is this guy...

He hears a noise, which is Neil slamming Waingro's head against the table, and so he looks up and toward the area of disturbance. And he gives his look an air of concern, as if he might tend to the matter if he needs to. 

Except as soon as he looks up, Sizemore has Michael throw the guy this look in return.

And the extra looks right back down. Sizemore's expression is memorably fierce, sure, but its ferocity is understood through the way in which the extra reacts. He seems to be thinking: "Nope, not gonna get my skull cracked open today." And I like to imagine him reading the same paragraph in the paper about the Lakers, over and over, trying to act like he's paying attention to what it says and not just thinking "Don't look up. Don't look up."

And in thinking about that sequence, I thought about how "Heat" is actually filled to the brim with moments like these, these face-offs between characters. "Heat" is a lot of things, of course. It is the quintessential Cops & Robbers saga; it is Michael Mann's second of three masterpieces in the 90s; it is the movie that finally brought Pacino & DeNiro together on screen; it is the movie that made many brooding males want to go to Fiji to see iridescent algae. But, I realize now, it pre-dated "Face/Off" by two years. Not, of course, in that Pacino and DeNiro literally changed faces, though wouldn't that have been something, but in Mann, maestro of machismo, taking dudes (and maybe not just dudes!), orchestrating Face Offs between his myriad characters, so many Face Offs, a litany of Face Offs, and Face Offs of different varieties.

I mean, you've got your basically famous Face Offs, the Face Offs between not just Cop & Robber but Pacino & DeNiro. You've got the Face Off in the diner......  

And then you've got the nicely conceived, thinking-outside-the-box Face Off when they aren't in the same room.

But there are Face Offs that go beyond Pacino & DeNiro. Here, for instance, we have your classic Face Off That Isn't Really A Face Off. Michael says "Stop talking, okay slick" which leads Waingro to remove his sunglasses in the manner of a man about to throw down. Michael, however, doesn't turn to stare back at Waingro until Waingro has finally looked away, two men who fancy their balls as being made of brass and are each waiting to see if the other looks first. 

Here we have a Face Off Between Friends. This is when Chris is telling Neil that he loves Charlene (Ashley Judd), his wife, which prompts Neil to provide the Pop Culture Manifesto that is The 30 Second Rule about being willing to walk out on anything in 30 seconds flat if you feel the heat from the around the corner, including the woman you love. And Kilmer......well, Kilmer has become a punchline these days and what a tragedy, because man, that dude could act. Kilmer doesn't have Chris make up his mind in the moment; he decides that Chris has long since made up his mind about Charlene. That's why his "For me the sun rises and sets with her, man" is so effing romantic. Because he just, like, says it. Like, it's ingrained truth. And that leads to the Bro just re-affirming what the other Bro has said which is just austerity at its most heartrending which is just Mann at his most breathtaking.

"Yeah?"

 "Yeah."

Here's a three person Face Off, crispy edited, as Van Zant (William Fichtner), the archetypal money launderer, in conversation with Waingro who has offered his services to dispense with Van Zant's Neil problem, looks at Waingro, then at his bodyguard (Henry Rollins), and the bodyguard looks back, and Waingro at the bodyguard before looking back to Van Zant with a look that says "Hombre, I got all day." (These successive screen shots also reveal a continuity error where Henry Rollins is looking but that's for people who aren't me to complain about.)

Here's the Face Off that requisitely brings Neil face to face with his own beloved 30 Second Rule, which he will adhere to, because he has to, and becomes searing for the way Amy Brenneman has Eady's bewilderment melt into pain and for the way DeNiro plays the moment in a kind of "Wow, I really am about to walk out on this woman in 30 seconds because I feel the heat around the corner."  

This is actually my favorite Face Off in the movie, when Neil approaches Don (Dennis Haysbert), an ex-con once housed in the same prison as Neil, and pitches him a job as a getaway driver. "One answer. Right now. Yes or no." Then, Neil waits. He looks at Don. Don looks back. Don looks around, not like someone is going to overhear them but like he's wondering if someone will stop him from doing what he knows he's going to do. Because that's what this Face Off is - it is a Fatalistic Face Off. Neil isn't there to recruit him; Neil is there to re-claim him.

This is an incredibly underrated Face Off, and it's a single shot Face Off because Mann captures DeNiro's expression in the mirror, though Ashley Judd's expression trumps DeNiro's. This is in the midst of Charlene cheating on Chris, which is fairly understandable in the film's context, and Neil turns up to lecture her on how she will give Chris another chance. And Judd does not play it obediently. Like, DeNiro is something of a master of the "Can you believe this fucking guy?" reaction shot, but in this moment Judd unleashes one helluva "Can you believe this fucking guy?" reaction shot herself. Ashley isn't allowed a lot of heavyweight roles, because of Hollywood and all that, but here she went toe-to-toe with a former Heavyweight Champion of the World, and brother, she hit back.

We conclude on this Face Off, the Face Off That Isn't Really Even A Face Off. This is Chris buying explosives for a job, a seemingly nothing moment that, in fact, is so infamous that "Rushmore", of all things, kinda parodied it. And it's so infamous because of, again, Kilmer's quirky brilliance, where he shows his fake ID with a look that is at once vacant and intimidating, as if he's telepathically communicating to the guy, "Don't look up at me. Because if you do, it won't end well."

 

Wistfully '95: Heat

Since I could finally both drive and get into R-rated movies in 1995, it doubled as the year in which I fell head over heels in love for the experience of Going To The Movies. And so, here in the future in 2015, we will periodically re-visit a handful of the offerings to which I first paid homage in various multiplex cathedrals of Des Moines, Iowa. 

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A semi truck resting beneath a freeway overpass barrels out from its hiding spot, directly toward an unsuspecting armored car that has stopped in the middle of the road for a stolen ambulance. The semi truck rams the armored car and sends it toppling onto its side and skidding into a line of cars at a nearby dealership. Finally, the armored car comes to a stop and as it does the festive blue ribbon that had been displayed above the gleaming automobiles softly falls to the cement. That’s the moment. The ribbon falling ever so softly. People are about to get shot, bearer bonds are about to be stolen and, of course, an armored car just got jacked up, but Michael Mann, writer and director, still pays attention to the tiniest of details, over and over, throughout, the way one seemingly random word can mean all the difference, the way a pair of sunglasses removed translates that someone is not to be trifled with, the way Val Kilmer looks at the explosives salesman in the almost-opening scene that implicitly communicates he is not on the up and up, and turns them into poetry. None of his contemporaries and few of his predecessors, if I may be so bold, capture the intimate, intricate details quite like Mann, nor shape their stories so not even the slightest indispensable stroke is missing. Is it any wonder then that “Heat”, this sprawling saga of Cops and Robbers, focuses on two protagonists who are obsessed with the details?

The Robber is Neil McCauley (Robert DeNiro) whose attitudes toward female companionship and home furniture are identical (“When I get around to it”). He sees mostly everything, misses much of nothing, and adheres to a rigorous personal code so infamous that the James Franco character in “Date Night” actually quoted it. Neil can be gentlemanly, so gentlemanly that in the midst of a robbery he declares “We want to hurt no one”, but he can he also be ruthless, so ruthless that only seconds after proclaiming they want to hurt no one he smashes a bank employee’s jaw. The Cop is Vincent Hanna, demonstrative, a bit vulgar, compulsive gum chewer, played by Al Pacino so bewilderingly full tilt that his character could have only been addicted to cocaine (which he was, until Mann deleted the scene and left Pacino hung out to dry as an over-actor he would not truly become until later), passing his third wife Justine (Diane Venora) on the “downslope” of their marriage partly because he says – actually says to his wife – that he needs his angst.

McCauley’s crew is high-tech and tight-knit but admits a fifth man for the armored car take down that does not go down quite right and results in three murders that results in Hanna and his team taking the case. They seem nearly as high-tech and tight-knit and just as obsessive which, of course, yields an epic tug-of-war. In one breathless passage of time about an hour in, the film reverses its tracks three times. As Hanna closes in on his target to make the bust of the century one minor slip-up causes McCauley to pull the plug on a particular heist – leading to the most dramatic face off in cinematic history in which the two men facing off are not in the same room – which reverses when McCauley and crew cleverly unmask the identity of their pursuers which reverses when Hanna tracks down McCauley on the L.A. freeway and asks, gun nestled firmly in hand, in that memorable Pacino-an, “What do ya say I buy ya a cup of coffee?”

From the opening credits revealing the actors’ names the audience knows all along that Cop and Robber must come face to face, not simply because they are Cop and Robber but because they are Pacino and DeNiro, perhaps the two greatest actors of their era (and at the time of the film’s release not recognized as the ex-heavyweight champs they are now), and this is the first time they had ever shared the screen in the same film. Mann sets the scene in an entirely ordinary coffee shop because, as he would explain, there could be nothing to distract from the simple fact these two were squaring off on the cinematic hardwood. And it is spellbinding, both in acting and in writing and in the way the larger message becomes apparent, the fact that these two men are the same and need one another as badly as they need to eliminate one another.

But what might most be telling about this unforgettable passage is that while just about any other filmmaker, established or not, Oscar winner or never nominated, would have made it the point, the whole point and nothing but the point, Michael Mann presents it as but one more detail – however monumental – in the narrative. For such two larger-than-life figures at the core, “Heat” is about so much more than just hard-headed guys on the prowl.

McCauley’s crew includes Chris Shiherlis (Val Kilmer), a gambling junkie, married to Charlene (Ashley Judd), who have a young son, Dominic, who at times, sadly, disturbingly, seems more like a chip on a gaming table than an actual living, breathing human being. Their first scene transitions, jarringly, from lovey-dovey to full-blown argument as Chris breaks household items just to break household items and storms out. But in his next scene with McCauley, functioning as mentor, Chris says, quietly but firmly, in those of those majestic Mann lines that is age-old but so relevant: “For me the sun rises and sets with her, man.” And that’s it. That’s all we need to know. That’s why in the end, after it’s all gone terribly wrong, after he has a chance to make a clean escape, Chris goes after Charlene anyway, which leads to Charlene on a balcony and, in an instant, even after all the shit he’s put her through, waving Chris away. It’s an astonishing moment, one content with emotional truth versus logical (all that law enforcement and they can’t nab him?); it’s also miniscule, barely there, wouldn’t even register to most guys wearing the headphones and watching the dailies and sending interns for lattes, but in “Heat” this lone wave of the hand, coupled with Judd’s and Kilmer's expressive pain, wrenches your gut like real life.

Michael Churrido (Tom Sizemore) might be the most emblematic at all, the endless ex-con, in and out of prison, who has settled into the most normal life possible under the guidance of McCauley, finding a potential wife with a couple kids he seems to love, putting away money, but upon finding himself with a chance to walk away – in Sizemore’s 30 greatest seconds of screen time ‘ever’, including everything in Saving Private Ryan – declaring instead, “For me, the action is the juice.”

Is the action the juice for McCauley? Well, he does finally get around to female companionship when he hooks up with the polite but incredibly shy Eady (Amy Brenneman) who approaches him at a coffee shop, trying to Meet Cute with him even though, in her own words, “I’m not very good at meeting people.” They make a strange but strangely appealing couple, two kindred spirits in the terrifying realm of lonliness, a fact which will eventually pit McCauley one on one with his personal code.

Even then there are two more characters perhaps generally described as minor, or even extraneous, who are anything but. Don Breeman (Dennis Haysbert) is another ex-con, out on parole and taking a job as a line cook for a thankless, crooked taskmaster (Bud Cort) whose connection to the rest of the film’s mammoth story seems uncertain but will eventually fall into place. This subplot could have been forced, existing solely out of necessity, but instead in a manner of four scenes becomes a full-fledged, tragic arc that crystallizes Who We Are is What We Will Always Be and comes to a head in a sequence with no music score between Haysbert and DeNiro – “One answer. Right now. Yes or no.” – in which the camera captures a multitude of angles of the two men as it all hangs in the balance. A nothing moment becomes absolutely everything.

And then there is Lauren Gustafson (Natalie Portman), Justine’s teenage daughter, the Alice Munro of “Heat”, needy and edgy, primarily because she is neglected by her real father, who we never see, as well as neglected by Justine and by Vincent, too, as she sinks further and further into this abyss no one seems to recognize is there until her stepfather sees her sitting all alone on a bus bench in the middle of nowhere, rocking back and forth, and picks her up. The expression on Pacino’s face is only for a second but in that second we realize he is the only one able to recognize what is going and what might be about to happen except, of course, all he has is “what I’m going after” and Lauren is forgotten until it is nearly too late.

Yes, yes, yes, Hanna and McCauley will stalk each other with guns (notice how Mann’s script makes mention of the hotel as being the Airport Marquis – details, details, details), yet I can’t help but feel there is so much more to that climactic moment of the Conqueror taking the Vanquished’s hand as the stately music score swells. He got what he was going after but you hope and pray that what he’s really thinking of is that little girl back at the hospital who might survive but still needs help to live and, thus, that when he lets go of the other guy’s hand maybe, just maybe, he will let go of his angst, too.

Eleven years after “Heat” Michael Mann made the cinematic version of “Miami Vice” and in it there is a shot where the Colin Farrell character, a vice detective on the verge of going undercover, and his associates are talking with an informant and as they do, Farrell, briefly, looks out the informant’s condo window at the ocean which is just out there, you know, being the ocean. His eyes narrow as if he’s looking really hard at something and then he turns away.

In “Heat” there is a shot where McCauley, after he has met with his main man (Jon Voight, Method to the max), returns home and goes to the window and the camera focuses, intensely, on the right side of his face before the focus flips and we realize he is staring out at the ocean which is just out there, you know, being the ocean. Essentially it is the same shot in two different films. What’s out there? What do they see? I don’t think we’re meant to know. I think it’s something we can’t see, something we could never hope to see, something we wouldn’t understand if we could see.

I think it’s something only Michael Mann can see.

WHAT'S OUT THERE?!

The Ultimate Danny Trejo Moment

It is perhaps the most pivotal moment in “Heat”, Michael Mann’s 1995 masterpiece positively brimming with pivotal moments. Our quartet of hella good bank robbers have just been made by the L.A. police and now must decide whether they should walk away or stay and take the score. Mann shoots the sequence almost exclusively in close-ups and medium shots of three of the four men, Neil McCauley (Robert DeNiro), the man in charge, Chris Shiherlis (Val Kilmer) and Michael Churrido (Tom Sizemore). It all hangs in the balance, their livelihood and their lives. Chris needs the money (“the bank is worth the risk”). For Michael, “the action is the juice”. Neil is their brother in arms. Thus, he will not dissent. But wait……what about the fourth man of the group? The man literally billed in the credits as……Trejo? What does he want to do?

Image from And So It Begins....

Danny Trejo kind of comes across as random and at ease as Michael Mann does meticulous and self-serious. Mann, after all, spent his formative years earning an undergraduate degree in English at Wisconsin and a graduate degree from the London Film School. Danny Trejo, on the other hand, spent his formative years in and out of prisons and boxing at freaking San Quentin. Thus, it goes without saying that these two men view the cinema in different lights. In an interview Mann once indicated “I wasn't really interested in cinema until I saw 'Dr. Strangelove', alongside a set of films by F.W. Murnau and G.W. Pabst for a college course.” In an interview Trejo once relayed that the film “Runaway Train” was “…the first time I’d been on a movie set. It was the cutest thing I’d ever seen because all these youngsters were dressed like little convicts and I kept smearing their tattoos. … A guy came up to me and said, ‘Can you act like a convict?’ I said, ‘I’ve been in every penitentiary in the State of California, I’ll give it a shot.’”

I’ll give it a shot. That he did, and he’s done it well. He never really doesn’t play Danny Trejo. He knows it, he’s okay with it, and it’s what Michael Mann plays straight to by literally naming the character “Trejo”. And Trejo himself seems very in tune to and grateful for his good fortune. He had a rough life, pulled himself together, showed up on a movie set, and stumbled into Hollywood, ultimately choosing to remain apart from so many in the business with egos and chips on their shoulders and an insatiable need to be taken more seriously.

Which brings me back to that scene in “Heat.” Everything Michael Mann does comes armed with intent, and so while it might appear as if Mann just didn’t have proper coverage or didn’t get a good close-up of Trejo, it’s actually the exact opposite. He sticks to single shots of Neil and Chris and Michael because their decision to stay and take the bank down is everything, a moment when who they are as MEN hangs in the balance. Then, finally, Neil turns to Trejo, who has been there all along, off to the side, cooling his heels, not a care in the world. Neil wonders if he’s in too. “Yeah,” he says with all the excitement of a man asking for butter on his toast. “Sure.”

Trejo. He’s just happy to be there.

Heat

A semi truck resting beneath a freeway overpass barrels out from its hiding spot, directly toward an unsuspecting armored car that has stopped in the middle of the road for a stolen ambulance. The semi truck rams the armored car and sends it toppling onto its side and skidding into a line of cars at a nearby dealership. Finally, the armored car comes to a stop and as it does the festive blue ribbon that had been displayed above the gleaming automobiles softly falls to the cement. That’s the moment. The ribbon falling ever so softly. People are about to get shot, bearer bonds are about to be stolen and, of course, an armored car just got jacked up, but Michael Mann, writer and director, still pays attention to the tiniest of details, over and over, throughout, the way one seemingly random word can mean all the difference, the way a pair of sunglasses removed translates that someone is not to be trifled with, and turns them into poetry. None of his contemporaries and few of his predecessors, if I may be so bold, capture the intimate, intricate details quite like Mann, nor shape their stories so not even the slightest indispensable stroke is missing. Is it any wonder then that this sprawling saga of Cops and Robbers focuses on two protagonists who are obsessed with the details?

The Robber is Neil McCauley (Robert DeNiro) whose attitudes toward female companionship and home furniture are identical (“When I get around to it”). He sees mostly everything, misses much of nothing, and adheres to a rigorous personal code so infamous that the James Franco character in Date Night actually quoted it. He can be gentlemanly, so gentlemanly that in the midst of a robbery he declares “We want to hurt no one” but he can he also be ruthless, so ruthless that only seconds after proclaiming they want to hurt no one he smashes a bank employee’s jaw. The Cop is Vincent Hanna (Al Pacino), demonstrative, a bit vulgar, compulsive gum chewer, and passing his third wife Justine (Diane Venora) on the “downslope” of their marriage partly because he says – actually says to his wife – that he needs his angst.

McCauley’s crew is high-tech and tight-knit but admits a fifth man for the armored car take down that does not go down quite right and results in three murders that results in Hanna and his team taking the case. They seem nearly as high-tech and tight-knit and just as obsessive which, of course, yields an epic tug-of-war. In one breathless passage of time about an hour in, the film reverses its tracks three times. As Hanna closes in on his target to make the bust of the century one minor slip-up causes McCauley to pull the plug on a particular heist – leading to the most dramatic face off in cinematic history in which the two men facing off are not in the same room – which reverses when McCauley and crew cleverly unmask the identity of their pursuers which reverses when Hanna tracks down McCauley on the L.A. freeway and asks, gun nestled firmly in hand, in that memorable Pacino-an, “What do ya say I buy ya a cup of coffee?”

From the opening credits revealing the actors’ names the audience knows all along that Cop and Robber must come face to face, not simply because they are Cop and Robber but because they are Pacino and DeNiro, perhaps the two greatest actors of their era (and at the time of the film’s release not recognized as the slumming ex-heavyweight champs they are now), and this is the first time they had ever shared the screen in the same film. Mann sets the scene in an entirely ordinary coffee shop because, as he would explain, there could be nothing to distract from the simple fact these two were squaring off on the cinematic hardwood. And it is spellbinding, both in acting and in writing and in the way the larger message becomes apparent, the fact that these two men are the same and need one another as badly as they need to eliminate one another.

But what might most be telling about this unforgettable passage is that while just about any other filmmaker, established or not, Oscar winner or never nominated, would have made it the point, the whole point and nothing but the point, Michael Mann presents it as but one more detail – however monumental – in the narrative. For such two larger-than-life figures at the core, "Heat" is about so much more than just hard-headed guys on the prowl.

McCauley’s crew includes Chris Shiherlis (Val Kilmer), a gambling junkie, married to Charlene (Ashley Judd), who have a young son, Dominic, who at times, sadly, disturbingly, seems more like a chip on a gaming table than an actual living, breathing human being. Their first scene transitions, jarringly, from lovey-dovey to full-blown argument as Chris breaks household items just to break household items and storms out. But in his next scene with McCauley, functioning as mentor, Chris says, quietly but firmly, in those of those majestic Mann lines that is age-old but so relevant: “For me the sun rises and sets with her, man.” And that’s it. That’s all we need to know. That’s why in the end, after it’s all gone terribly wrong, after he has a chance to make a clean escape, Chris goes after Charlene anyway, which leads to Charlene on a balcony and, in an instant, even after all the shit he’s put her through, waving Chris away. It’s miniscule, barely there, wouldn’t even register to most guys wearing the headphones and watching the dailies and sending interns for lattes, but in "Heat" this lone wave of the hand, coupled with Judd’s and Kilmer's expressive pain, wrenches your gut like real life.

Michael Churrido (Tom Sizemore) might be the most emblematic at all, the endless ex-con, in and out of prison, who has settled into the most normal life possible under the guidance of McCauley, finding a potential wife with a couple kids he seems to love, putting away money, but upon finding himself with a chance to walk away – in Sizemore’s 30 greatest seconds of screen time ‘ever’, including everything in Saving Private Ryan – declaring instead, “For me, the action is the juice.”

Is the action the juice for McCauley? Well, he does finally get around to female companionship when he hooks up with the polite but incredibly shy Eady (Amy Brenneman) who approaches him at a coffee shop, trying to Meet Cute with him even though, in her own words, “I’m not very good at meeting people.” They make a strange but strangely appealing couple, two kindred spirits in the terrifying realm of lonliness, a fact which will eventually pit McCauley one on one with his personal code.

Even then there are two more characters perhaps generally described as minor who are anything but. Don Breeman (Dennis Haysbert) is another ex-con, out on parole and taking a job as a line cook for a thankless, crooked taskmaster (Bud Cort) whose connection to the rest of the film’s mammoth story seems uncertain but will eventually fall into place. This subplot could have been forced, existing solely out of necessity, but instead in a manner of four scenes becomes a full-fledged, tragic arc that crystallizes Who We Are is What We Will Always Be and comes to a head in a sequence with no music score between Haysbert and DeNiro – “One answer. Right now. Yes or no.” – in which the camera captures a multitude of angles of the two men as it all hangs in the balance. A nothing moment becomes absolutely everything.

And then there is Lauren Gustafson (Natalie Portman), Justine’s teenage daughter, the Alice Munro of Heat, needy and edgy, primarily because she is neglected by her real father, who we never see, as well as neglected by Justine and by Vincent, too, as she sinks further and further into this abyss no one seems to recognize is there until her stepfather sees her sitting all alone on a bus bench in the middle of nowhere, rocking back and forth, and picks her up. The expression on Pacino’s face is only for a second but in that second we realize he is the only one able to recognize what is going and what might be about to happen except, of course, all he has is “what I’m going after” and Lauren is forgotten until it is nearly too late.

Yes, yes, yes, Hanna and McCauley will stalk each other with guns (notice how Mann’s script makes mention of the hotel as being the Airport Marquis – details, details, details), yet I can’t help but feel there is so much more to that climactic moment of the Conqueror taking the Vanquished’s hand as the stately music score swells. He got what he was going after but you hope and pray that what he’s really thinking of is that little girl back at the hospital who might survive but still needs help to live and, thus, that when he lets go of the other guy’s hand maybe, just maybe, he will let go of his angst, too.

Eleven years after "Heat" Michael Mann made the cinematic version of "Miami Vice" and in it there is a shot where the Colin Farrell character, a vice detective on the verge of going undercover, and his associates are talking with an informant and as they do, Farrell, briefly, looks out the informant’s condo window at the ocean which is just out there, you know, being the ocean. His eyes narrow as if he’s looking really hard at something and then he turns away.

In "Heat" there is a shot where McCauley, after he has met with his main man (Jon Voight, Method to the max), returns home and goes to the window and the camera focuses, intensely, on the right side of his face before the focus flips and we realize he is staring out at the ocean which is just out there, you know, being the ocean. Essentially it is the same shot in two different films. What’s out there? What do they see? I don’t think we’re meant to know. I think it’s something we can’t see, something we could never hope to see, something we wouldn’t understand if we could see.

I think it’s something only Michael Mann can see.