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08 Dec 96
The Criminal Life
CASINO, Directed by Martin Scorsese (Universal; 179:00), 1995.
HEAT, Written and Directed by Michael Mann (Warner Bros.; 171:00), 1995.The "cops 'n' robbers" film genre must be as old as the film medium itself. Early on in the genesis of Hollywood, train robbers, desperadoes and damsels-in-distress were exciting characters that audiences loved to watch. Warfare and romance followed close behind in popularity, and clever writers have found ways to work even those motifs into stories about criminals. (Prohibition, with its clearly defined battle lines between gangs of bootleggers and regimented "G-men," provided a treasure-trove of material for contemporary "gangster" films.)
Today, gangsters have been supplanted by more notorious threats to community norms. Ian Fleming saw the Cold War paradigm shaping up: super-criminals could remain far more solvent than any world superpower, and so it was natural that his lone wolf hired gun for her majesty, James Bond, found himself battling global super-criminals like Ernst Stavro Blofeld, who in turn terrorized and ransomed the superpowers. These fiends had grown in such scope of power and ambition that local communities would no longer support their grandest schemes; they had to break the law on an international scale. Fleming posed them robbing Fort Knox, and extorting the world powers over a stolen nuclear warhead ... operations that would require the cooperation of a consortium of super-criminals and the victimization of no less than the world.
In fact, you can find the essential story of THUNDERBALL in most "terrorists with super-weapon" films, such as EXECUTIVE DECISION. The DIE HARD films, particularly the first and third, are the direct descendants of the Bond novels, wherein a single, icy-calm professional battles to interfere with the outrageous schemes of crooks. The central myth may date back to the Arthurian legends, but the criminal element is relatively new, dating back I'd say to the Nineteenth Century, give or take a few hundred years.
The soul of the ruthless gangster remains alive in the front page fanaticism of terrorists, bombers, and assassins. But the motives of these outlaws aren't as coherent as your old- fashioned crook. He, or she, wants money. Your basic crook is an entrepreneur to an extreme: opportunistic, sly, and scheming, with few ambitions beyond either getting bigger and bigger (usually portrayed as a tragic path), or simply getting out ("retiring"). Your basic crook has to respond swiftly and decisively, has to watch the money very carefully (paper trails and large expenditures can trip up a crook like a silent alarm), and can't afford a social life too far removed from the business. Failures in any of these, human failures to be sure,... mean the eventual demise of the career criminal.
What fascinates modern audiences about the criminal world? Can you wonder? It's exciting, fast-paced and filled with the stuff of The American Dream. This is what seems to interest Martin Scorsese. The crooks of his films are like you and I: they have friendships that mean more to them than anything, they like to fill their houses with nice things, they love family life, they drive around at night to talk things out (or get a cuppa coffee somewhere).
This is what made GOODFELLAS so compelling. The contrast of friendships, family life, and "belonging," ... with drugs, extortion, and murder, allows Scorsese to illuminate what it is that makes suburban American life such a fascinating landscape -- and makes the criminal elements stand out in shocking relief. These people aren't really so different from us, they're just in a different business. A business in which, when a friend turns against you or screws you out of a deal, murder and vengeance may follow. But these people still shop at the same stores, love the same television shows, and like to cook almost constantly for company. Children frolic and are hugged as if nothing were out of place.
Scorsese's villains (if you could call them that) feel the same drives, concerns and wants that we do. "Connecting." Scorsese shows family life as the single most important thing that a "management-level" gangster can have, because it provides stability, a base, a reason for it all. CASINO (starring Robert De Niro, Sharon Stone and Joe Pesci) is the perfect follow-up to GOODFELLAS. Like THE GODFATHER PART II, it depicts the pioneering journey for the Eastern crime syndicates to the new promised land of Las Vegas. The bulk of the tale orbits around the lead character's romance and marriage to a woman who nearly brings him down with her faults and indulgences. All the details about the gambling business, the mob, the way that money was skimmed off the top and passed back east ... they're all just dressing, details of the business. The film is really about how love and friendship can grow and twist over time.
The story is told in rapid-fire manner, with matter of fact narration from several of the characters. Does it explain away any shade of subtlety, as "Irving the Explainer" did in BLADE RUNNER? Not at all. It's an integral part of the story. The amazing thing about Ray Liotta's monologues in GOODFELLAS was that they were a like a melodic strain in the whole symphony, at times becoming the very action that we normally expect to see onscreen. Here, characters explain their motives, their feelings, their values, giving us an articulate comprehension of the slow collapse and crash of the casino operation. De Niro and Pesci walk up to the film and speak to us as if they're chatting with us at a diner at 2:00 am. It brings you into the film, involves you with the characters, until you simply can't escape the story. Scorsese does that in all his films. He's a master of lyrical, filmic storytelling. Unique to American film, he can be eloquent for 15 minutes, showing the breakup of a marriage -- then bring the perspective into stark focus, when you watch a brutal Mafia slaying in a remote corn field.
I can't break loose from his most violent moments ... because he puts it into a context that is entirely American. He shows this hot-blooded gangsters living outside the law, outside conventional life, but clinging to the ideals and trappings of Middle America. Home life isn't all I LOVE LUCY; there's anger, denial, violence, jealousy, abuse. He shows it all, bare and nonjudgmental, luring us in with a brash tale of Mafia crime and sudden death ... but holding us with a vivid portrayal of domestic life gone awry. Typically, it's home life that crashes the business ... or the business that destroys the home.
Since his days as a writer for POLICE STORY and other TV cop shows, Michael Mann has been a genuine voice in the modern genre of crime drama. Despite anyone's personal dislikes of those series' embellishments, his later successes with MIAMI VICE and CRIME STORY can't be denied. They both brought fresh, compelling styles to the hackneyed form of cops 'n robbers as later day folk heroes. The spare dialog, slick music and stylish window-dressing make Michael Mann productions both mythic, and immediately authentic, a spicy combination.
His films have been just as compelling. In THIEF, a hardened, professional safecracker's dream is to have a house, with a wife,... a home. He even carries a picture of his vision that he shows to his new girlfriend. In MANHUNTER (based on Thomas Harris' dark thriller, RED DRAGON), a troubled, expert FBI forensics expert comes out of retirement to help catch a maniacal serial killer who stalks and massacres picture-book families during the full moon. In the hunt, he bonds psychically with the killer's delusions. In the end, the affinity between the killer and his hunter becomes terrifying, and threatens to supplant the agent's commitment to his own family.
HEAT details the efforts of a "Major Crimes Unit," as did CRIME STORY. As portrayed by Al Pacino, the detective who commands the MCU is a driven, career cop obsessed with identifying and catching the criminal "crews" that travel the underside of our smooth, consumerist culture. Like a military intelligence specialist, he hoards details and facts, nuances and hunches, and filters them into a coherent understanding of his quarry. Robert De Niro plays his latest target, the leader of a notorious crew. A hardened professional, he's malevolent and paternal all at once. A lesser storyteller would've cartoon-ized his character, but Mann takes us into his skin. We begin to see the developments of policemen stalking criminals stalking a big score ... against a backdrop of personal problems, family strife, domestic screaming matches.
And therein lies the true conflict. The cat-and-mouse battle between the hunter and hunted is methodical, dependent more upon preparation and discipline than tactics. But all of the players have personal journeys that distract from their professions. As the leader of the crew reiterates, time and again, "Don't get involved in anything that you can't walk away from in thirty seconds." They all do, of course.
Mann unfolds the story at its own pace, luxuriating in the details that make up the lifestyle of each side of the battle. The pagers, the clues, the plans, the maneuvers, each is depicted with infinite sensitivity. Mann can even show the deaths and mutilations of loved ones with a certain svelte dignity, avoiding the blunt revulsion that Scorsese indulges in.
Mann's central themes do more than make the viewer's heart pound. The immediacy of his characters' desires make his stories vivid, humane. You begin to feel for the criminals' dedication to a "use, then discard" attitude to everything in their lives, an ethic that must have descended directly from the Western gunslinger myth. But, just as the good guy gunfighter might be tamed, or fatally distracted, by a good woman, so too are these criminals caught up and housebroken (to an extent) by their commitment to women, children and each other. Even when they leave each other, and their families, the longing and the devotion to the people in their lives is complete.
In a quietly arresting scene, the "top cop" and the crime boss meet for coffee, and adroitly come to a consensus that, when push comes to shove, one of them will go down. Neither will budge or flinch from the necessity to kill the other. But in reaching this consensus, Michael Mann makes clear that even individualists on opposite sides of the law are bound up in a very real, and very personal union. The film's finale hinges on the clear bond that these two men form. The tension in HEAT comes not from gunplay, or death-defying stunts, but from the human texture of the most dangerous, and high stakes, games that cops 'n robbers play.
-- D.B. Spalding
D.B. Spalding is a cross-media “infopreneur”: columnist, reviewer, producer, consultant and online content developer. He writes frequently about music, film, computing and the mass- and multimedia. Many of his articles can be found on the World Wide Web at http://www.korova.com.
