Parsing Miami Vice: Figurative Screen Shots on the Wall, part 4 (conclusion)

Parsing Miami Vice: Screen Shots on the Figurative Wall is Cinema Romantico’s sporadic pseudo art exhibition in which we peruse frames from Michael Mann’s Miami Vice (2006) like the paintings they pretty much are.

Earlier this year I saw my man Claude’s painting Antibes, 1888 at The Courtauld Gallery in London. The placard quoted Mr. Monet himself: “What I bring back from here,” he said of Antibes in the south of France, “will be sweetness itself, white, pink and blue, all enveloped in this magical air.” Truth. The gallery room bearing the painting was small, empty, and I spent a long time with it. The tree, as are so many other objects in Monet paintings, just a kind of formal specificity in the foreground; the point is everything else.

Not everyone was dismissive of “Miami Vice” upon its release, as this blog can attest, and as, say, the righteous Manohla Dargis review in The New York Times can go to show, but the box office was nevertheless lackadaisical and the grades at that bastion of math, Rotten Tomatoes, were low. But that, as the reappraisals have gleaned over time, stemmed from the movie’s disinterest in narrative and its avant-garde leanings, preferring visual poetry culled from negative space, which is how Steven Hyden put it for Uproxx.

You see this in the dramatic lead-up to the climactic shootout, where the people are just sort of blots against the big blackened sky.

You see this when Justin Theroux’s character is standing guard as his machine gun, enveloped in the darkness, becomes beside the point, deferring to the puffy white clouds.

You see this on a rooftop where the charged nature of the characters’ conversation’s got nothing on the looming mounds of cumulonimbus.

You see this is in a romantic episode down Cuba way where a movie of drug cartels and white supremacists momentarily makes like a damn gallery postcard.

You see this in a speedboat race through Biscayne Bay where we never even find out who wins because none of these go-fast boats can compete with that aerial panorama. 

That, as our sporadic 2018 blogging art show winds up, brings us to the best shot in “Miami Vice.” I have written about the shot before, but that was less a contemplation of the actual frame than a romantic speculation of its genesis. And I suppose I know I loved the shot from the beginning simply because I am a sucker for storm clouds.

But considering this shot in lockstep with Claude, I see now that the jet, while proffering the trigger for the scene, is also just the tree in Antibes, 1888. And what would normally seem the negative space in the frame becomes, in fact, the point. Here, in the space of that sky, lo and behold, Michael Mann, genius evermore, did not just capture a Miami sky on camera; he brought the sweetness of that goddam sky back with him.

Parsing Miami Vice: Screen Shots on the Figurative Wall, Part 3

Parsing Miami Vice: Screen Shots on the Figurative Wall is Cinema Romantico’s sporadic pseudo art exhibition in which we peruse frames from Michael Mann’s Miami Vice (2006) like the paintings they pretty much are.

Back in July, My Beautiful, Perspicacious Wife and I attended the Chicago Art Institute’s John Singer Sargent exhibition, appropriately titled John Singer Sargent and Chicago’s Gilded Age. Sargent was a painter known predominantly for his portraits, though this exhibition encompassed other aspects of his work, and he was often hired by those for whom the Gilded Age was particularly beneficial As such, many of the portraits, I learned, emphasized clothing and accoutrement as much as the sitting person’s expression or visage.

Michael Mann got his start writing the pilot episode for Aaron Spelling’s “Vega$”, a city Mann praised in Lynn Hirschberg’s excellent New York Times 2004 profile of the director, offering it the sort of compliments one might have bestwoed upon Gilded Age Chicago. And the Reagan Years were nothing if not their own sort of Gilded Age, and Mann’s small screen version of “Miami Vice” took flight in the 80s, a show where Mann, as Hirschberg noted, banned earth tones. “He can spot the wrong tie in a sea of extras,” Hirschberg wrote, “and will park a boring white car next to a snazzier baby blue model to enhance the mood. ‘Adding white always makes color burn a little,’ (Mann) has said. '’I got that idea from a 20th-century British painter.’”

Mann’s movie version of “Miami Vice”, shot in high def, was grainier and moodier than the TV show, though Mann still lingered over the benefits, if accompanying dangers, of a different kind of privilege. When the movie’s detectives working deep undercover find themselves face to face with Arcangel de Jesus Montoya (Luis Tosar), kingpin of a vertically integrated multinational drug cartel, and his accountant Isabella (Gong Li), in the back of an SUV, Mann briefly lingers over shots of each character’s wristwatch, a timekeeping emblem of power and wealth. Later, in a sequence at his compound near Iguazu Falls, we glimpse Montoya in his master suite, relaxed in bed, wearing just a pajama top and boxer shorts, smoking a cigar, supremely looking the part of a big shot, which Mann shows in long and medium shots to ensure we get the full picture. Eventually, however, in conversation with Isabella, Mann cuts to a close-up.

My favorite Sargent portrait in the exhibition was that of ‘Miss Priestley’ (c. 1889). The placard indicated that Sargent was as taken with Miss Flora Priestley’s dress, as well as the flowers she was holding, as he was her actual visage. And yet the visage is what struck me. The arched eyebrows, the superciliousness with which she is looking away, the slightly opened lips, as if she is about to say something snide; it’s as if the face is telling you that she could not care less what she is wearing or holding in her hand. As I looked at ‘Miss Priestley’, I kept thinking that if I was in the editing room, I would have been imploring for a cut to a close-up. 

As I looked at ‘Miss Priestley’, I kept thinking of this close-up in “Miami Vice”, and how Montoya is looking away, a la Miss Priestley, though in this case you can feel the fire of his eyes, as if the red-hued backdrop is smoldering coal feeding into his optic furnace, directed at someone rather than dismissing everyone. Tosar was a Spanish actor with whom I was unfamiliar going in, but casting your gaze over this close-up for a good long awhile, it’s not hard not to think he must have been handpicked by Mann simply because of his formidable eyebrows and coronal mass ejection eyes, readymade for a cinematic portrait remodeling gilded as ravenous sin.

Parsing Miami Vice: Screen Shots on the Figurative Wall, part 2

Parsing Miami Vice: Screen Shots on the Figurative Wall is Cinema Romantico’s sporadic pseudo art exhibition in which we peruse frames from Michael Mann’s Miami Vice (2006) like the paintings they pretty much are.

“The film,”  the esteemed Manohla Dargis wrote of “Miami Vice” not long after its release for The New York Times, “shows us a world that seems to stretch on forever, without the standard sense of graphical perspective. When Crockett and Tubbs stand on a Miami roof, it’s as if the world were visible in its entirety, as if all our familiar time-and-space coordinates had dropped away, because they have.”

It’s true. If you see the above screen shot, the one that was most typically utilized as visual accompaniment for reviews, in the context of the movie then you know Crockett (Colin Farrell) and Tubbs (Jamie Foxx) are standing on the roof of a Miami club conversing with an informant by phone. If you see the shot sans that context then you realize how Mann has excised the roof from the frame, and has excised any other buildings too, leaving merely the men, the lights, the clouds, the sky.

It’s not unlike the end of “Contact”, where suddenly Jodie Foster realizes she can reach up and touch the stars because you think that maybe Crockett and Tubbs could reach up and touch the clouds.You stare at this screen shot long enough and Crockett and Tubbs come to resemble something like a more chic Godzilla and King Kong, as if they could turn and start stomping all over all those lights, as if they are somehow standing on the same plain as the cityscape.

There’s this James McMurtry stanza from his 2004 ballad “Lights of Cheyenne” that is, like so many McMurtry stanzas, astonishing. It’s a stanza that crept into the back of my head the longer I looked at this screen shot, not so much to help put the screen shot into context but because the screen shot brings the stanza to life. I would have thought the stanza beyond the grasp of any actual visual, best left to the heightened imagery of McMurtry’s carefully chosen words, but that’s Michael Mann for you, conveyer of the impossible, artist of the silver screen.

“You stand in the sky/
with your feet on the ground/
never suspecting a thing/
But if the sky were to move/
you might never be found/
never be heard from again.”

Michael Mann's Miami Vice as an Art Exhibition, part 1

The DVD version of Michael Mann’s “Miami Vice” (2006) opens with the camera emerging from beneath the water to catch up with a speedboat race already in progress, though its presentation is conspicuously stripped of adrenaline such a scenario might suggest, a prologue as a slow burn. This is in contrast to the theatrical version, which is less of a gradual entry than a chaotic airdrop right into a cacophonous club scene; it’s like forgoing Harold Faltermeyer’s “Top Gun” intro and going straight to Kenny Loggins. When I saw this scene in the theater a dozen years ago, it gobsmacked me, like the “Boogie Nights” “Best of my Love”-fueled intro nearly ten years prior. When I purchased the home video version of “Miami Vice”, I sat there and watched that 90 seconds over and over and over. And of all the shots, the one I most consistently found myself drawn to was this.....

I have thought a lot about that shot over the last dozen years. Why, however, it has frequently popped into my mind is something I have always found difficult to explain. And I thought of that image on a Saturday morning last month in London in attending an exhibition at the National Gallery titled “Monet & Architecture” upon finding myself face to face with Claude’s 1872 outpouring of impressionism The Wooden Bridge. The exhibition illustrated the way in which Claude frequently utilized buildings in his work not as a means to highlight them but to highlight the way they refracted light. He also, however, as the exhibition outlined, sought to juxtapose industry against landscapes, like his Train in the Countryside, which I saw last fall at the Musée d’Orsay, where steam roils from an unseen train engine obscured by a line of lush trees. And in The Wooden Bridge a carriage traverses a bridge built during the Franco Prussian War, signaling progress, though the carriage is simultaneously glimpsed in one of those patented heartstopping Monet reflections in the water below, making it seem as if the manmade and natural worlds are colliding, or perhaps fading almost indecipherably into one another.

And because I bring everything down to movies, what popped into my head as I let The Wooden Bridge wash over me was a shot from my all-time favorite movie, “Last of the Mohicans”, this shot.....

It had kind of occurred to me, I guess, and and has no doubt absolutely occurred to cineastes more advanced than myself, but standing there in the National Gallery in that moment I realized how Michael Mann is so often using cinema as his own canvas, composing frames that could double as paintings.

And so as I gazed at The Wooden Bridge and returned to that shot of “Last of the Mohicans” in my mind, so did my thoughts turn back to the aforementioned shot in “Miami Vice”, which we return to now.

I mean, it loses something, or maybe is just viewed differently, if not seen as a moving picture, the way it begins with the camera gliding right to left behind them and past Naomie Harris’s character and then flips to a shot in front of them just as Naomie Harris turns toward where the camera is set with this incredible, ineffable No Scrubs look on her face that is the whole reason why we should see movies on big screens and not at home. But then, the camera cuts to the above shot from the side.

The two men standing rock still are juxtaposed against the whirring everything-ness in the left of the frame. These are men certain in their worldview, indifferent to the noise, which they have put behind them. Ah, but there is ambiguity in the fact that we cannot see whatever it is they are so intently focused on, and that they are rooted to the frame’s darker section might suggest that whatever it is they are so intently focused on is worthy only of trepidation. Thinking of the shot this way makes me dizzy and giddy. I want to frame it and hang it in the Art Institute and go down there and look at it every day for twenty minutes.

And that is why the Cinema Romantico plan going forward is to return to “Miami Vice” every now and again, maybe monthly, maybe bi-monthly, who knows, whenver the spirit moves us, to call up frames from Mann’s movie and treat them as if they are painted compositions hung in a gallery, our first ever movie blogging art exhibition, Parsing Miami Vice: Screen Shots on the Figurative Wall. It does not even cost extra to get in.