The New York Times recently said that director Michael Mann’s chief theme is male professionalism, and this is a good way in to his new movie, Collateral. Jamie Foxx (otherwise a comedian) is the taxi driver who takes pride in getting people to their destinations in good time; Tom Cruise is the professional hit man who is determined to finish his night’s roster of assassinations on schedule.
The basic plot idea is the clash between these two professionals — Mann is also fond of the big macho clash, as his Heat made clear. The clash here is on less of a grandiose level, but it is still the motor of the plot. Cab-driver Max (Foxx) picks up Vincent (Cruise) in his cab and soon discovers what Vincent is doing for the evening: killing people. Max of course wants out of this arrangement, and Vincent naturally wants Max to keep driving him from hit to hit — why change horses in midstream?
Out of this donnée Mann and scriptwriter Stuart Beattie spin a fairly engrossing movie. It helps that it is imaginatively, but not too fancily shot (by Dion Beebe and Paul Cameron). In its oblique framing and rhythmic editing it shows a Los Angeles very different to, say, that of David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive. In the Lynch movie, LA is either overexposed exteriors featuring lots of grey rectangles or interiors of baroque kitschiness. (Something to do with Lynch’s obsession with outer appearances versus tormented inner life, maybe?) Collateral takes place mostly on one or other road, and at night; its characters are always in motion between two indeterminate points. Here, LA is dark but glittering, a place of multicoloured neon flashing past mysteriously in the background — signs stripped of their meaning and turned into abstract arabesques.
Much more so than superstar Cruise, Foxx is undoubtedly the star of the show. His character, Max, is likeable; he also carries the burden of being the ”moral centre” of the piece. In other words, he’s the nice guy; that much is pretty standard Hollywood morality-play construction, but he’s also a character with a character. Max is the one with dreams and aspirations, and with a palpable desire to serve others.
Vincent, by comparison, is a blank: a grey-haired man (though of course he’s glamorously grey-haired) in a neat grey suit, with an expensive laptop and an impressive range of killing skills. We get no real idea of who Vincent is, beyond the suit, the hair, the guns and the laptop; he is the sum of his appearances and accessories. There are some uncertain details of an unhappy childhood thrown in at a certain point, as the discussion with the distressed Max continues, but they don’t give us much to go on. The battle of sympathies is not a real battle — it is completely one-sided, because the Foxx character is filled out well for us, while we are not given any real sense of Vincent as a character. Either it’s because he’s a hit man, or because Cruise is a one-dimensional actor — |or both.
One wonders about the characterisation in Collateral because the movie all but asks one to wonder about it. This is not your average genre thriller, whizzing from bloodbath to bloodbath, how ever stylishly. It’s a Michael Mann movie, and Mann usually manages to invest his movies with what he probably thinks of as gravitas and others are at liberty to see as something ponderous and self-important. This is machismo that wants to be deep. Perhaps it’s just the fact that Mann paces Collateral so deliberately, giving in to whiz-bang cutting only occasionally. It’s as though he wants to give the viewer space for contemplation, which may or may not be a good idea.
If Collateral were just a genre piece, I daresay one would feel that the odd nugget of profundity is added value, and be glad of it. But it seems to be pushing for more — a moral lesson of some kind, even. It is not entirely happy to be simply a well-made thriller. So, naturally, the viewer asks what that ”more” is … and finds the question hard to answer.