The Essentials: Michael Mann’s Best Films

In 33 years of filmmaking, director Michael Mann has only made 10 theatrically-released feature-length films. Averaging one every three years (with two long gaps of about six years—we’re reaching the end of the second now), his un-prolific nature is perhaps due to meticulous and exhausting research processes and character explorations which often lead to completed screenplays … only for him to abandon them when he finds something amiss. “I only do films I truly believe in,” Michael Mann said in a 1990s interview expressing frustration with his somewhat unproductive pace and yet simultaneously articulating the vital quality that makes him the filmmaker we know today. It’s the sort of thing many directors might say, but Mann, more than many others, has the courage of his convictions and the resulting short but blazing filmography to back up his sincerity.

“I don’t work 40 hours a week and come home, take [weekends] off and leave my work at the office. I don’t know how to live like that,” one of the lead detectives says in “L.A. Takedown,” Mann’s 1989 TV movie that he remade faithfully years later as “Heat.” These fixations are as much Mann’s words to live by as they are axioms that could conceivably apply to practically every lead character the filmmaker has ever created. In fact, the central male in the films of Michael Mann (and it’s always a man) is almost always defined by his code of life. His central preoccupation is often professional obsession, even fanaticism, often at the price of ordinary existence, which is perhaps why so many of his men are ascetic, Zen-like students of their own trade; detached to the point where they are able drop everything if things go south and walk away with only the skills they have worked on. Somehow we never doubt those skills will be enough.

Perhaps this ongoing interest in professional zeal is what attracts Mann so often to stories pitting criminals against those who seek to put them behind bars (“Heat,” “Public Enemies,” Thief,” “Collateral,” “Miami Vice” both the TV show—which Mann produced—and the movie). His films frequently suggest that in fact, at the top of their respective games, crooks and cops are not so dissimilar as men: they each live and die by their own codes and they each recognize themselves in the other. There is even a loose honor among between these seeming adversaries, almost a mutual understanding.

But if Mann returns repeatedly to drink from the same thematic well, rarely are the results repetitive or uninspired. His favorite reoccurring motifs—sacrifice, commitment to craft above all things, pre-planned exit strategies, the failure of domestic bliss and what author Nick James calls the “uneasy truce between women and men”—are almost always present, but often he combines these elements with trademark focus and precision in different permutations to yield subtly but undeniably different results. The titular pugilist of “Ali” sacrifices wife after wife for the higher calling of boxing; the detectives of “Miami Vice” live to work; the career criminal of “Collateral” could be a modern day “Le Samouraï”; “The Insider” chronicles the compulsive behavior of two men in search of the truth; while “Manhunter” follows a meticulous cat-and-mouse game in which cat and mouse are evenly matched. These are all focused, professional, tunnel-visioned men but their spheres, and the films they inhabit as as similar but as unique as fingerprints.

With his later-era phase of digital filmmaking, early adopter Mann has somewhat polarized his following in recent years, but even as he’s divided audiences, he’s still often enraptured us with his laser-focused portraits of men following a professional code of honor with such dedication that it renders them exceptional. Not at all unlike the filmmaker himself.

“The Jericho Mile” (1979, TV movie)
It can be unfair to lump a director’s television work in with his theatrical features, especially when it dates from the very start of his career. And at first glance, Michael Mann’s full-length fiction debut (his previous credits comprise a documentary, a short, a documentary short and a single episode of the Angie Dickinson-starring “Police Woman” show), “The Jericho Mile,” which was produced by ABC, fits this mold. With its boxy aspect ratio, low production values and lack of established stars, it’s the kind of film that could now be an embarrassment to a prestige filmmaker of such consummate sophistication as Mann. Except it’s really good. Sure, the trappings are creaky, especially as even the DVD transfer (PAL only, we believe) isn’t the highest quality (and on YouTube the image is occasionally pixelated to the point of incomprehensibility), and a rather insistent instrumental version of “Sympathy for the Devil” is overused as a leitmotif, but the story is brilliantly resonant and compelling even now, and the casting of actual inmates and the use of the actual Folsom Prison as a location gives it a very Mann-esque feeling of authenticity throughout. It’s the surprisingly moving tale of Rain Murphy (Peter Strauss, doing a fine job with a role that in a bigger budget version would have probably gone to Clint Eastwood), a lifer serving out his sentence for murder the only way he knows how—by keeping to himself bar a single interracial friendship, remaining resolutely removed from the ethnic gangs and factions that jostle for power on the inside, and indulging his one hobby and talent: running. In fact, it comes to the attention of the prison authorities that he may be one of the fastest runners in America and could qualify for the Olympic team. What then unfolds builds quietly into something unassumingly epic, a grand yet pessimistic drama (the anti-‘Shawshank’) about the danger of hope in this hopeless place, and the cruelty of dreams that circumstances will always thwart. Oh and the cautionary tale of ever trusting Brian Dennehy. What could easily turn into an inspirational movie-of-the-week-style drama about overcoming insurmountable odds or some such guff instead becomes a bruisingly melancholic parable about the inherent contradictions of a prison system supposedly dedicated to the ideal of rehabilitation in a wider society that doesn’t know or care what that word means. Mann and co-writer Patrick J. Nolan play it as a kind of unfunny cosmic joke: even as Murphy, despite himself, unites the racially divided prison population in support of something noble and decent, the uncaring world outside will always cheat him of his newfound aspirations. To the point that perhaps Murphy was right before, and he never should have hoped in the first place. It’s a sad, intelligent, occasionally angry film that highlights issues that, if you minus the jive talk and the hairstyles, remain to this day, and it’s an early example of Mann’s unsentimental humanism, a trait that is often overlooked in his glossier big-screen outings. [B+]