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| Miami Vice |
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 (10/10)
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Runtime: 135 |
| Public Rating: 7.79 (14 votes) |
Director: Michael Mann |
MPAA Rating:  |
| Genre: Crime/Drama |
Year: 2006 |
| Writer(s): Michael Mann, Anthony Yerkovich (TV series) |
| Distributor: Universal Studios |
| Reviewed by: Friday and Saturday Night Critic |
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Additional review(s) by:
Mel Valentin [7/10] (view).
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Starring Jamie Foxx, Colin Farrell, Gong Li, John Ortiz, Barry Shabaka Henley, Luis Tusar, Naomie Harris, Ciarian Hinds, Elizabeth Rodriguez, and Justin Theroux
“Miami Vice” is the first big-budget American video epic that knows what video is about. The work of director Michael Mann (“Heat,” “The Insider,” “Collateral,” “Ali,” “Manhunter,” “Thief,” “The Last of the Mohicans”), it is blurry and grainy, at once gritty and raw yet hauntingly antiseptic, painted in colors so messy that they sometimes bleed into each other. Even the one obviously fake explosion is fake in the right way, like there really was an explosion but it was too bright and too fast for the camera’s auto-exposure to catch anything besides a runny blue-white pool. “Miami Vice” captures the paradox of video: it looks unquestionably less realistic than film, yet—possibly because of its longer history of consumer availablity—we are more prepared to believe what we see on it.
I’m sure there were digital effects all over the place—the two speedboats roaring into the harbor in the middle of the night comes to mind—but, unlike movies with cleaner, more conventional looks, they meld with what was around them. “Miami Vice’s” high-definition video is, finally, video that has little-to-no interest in duplicating film, but video that wants to strike out its own in terms of color, texture, and immediacy. Australian-of-South-African-extraction cinematographer Dion Beebe (“Collateral,” “Chicago”) won the Oscar last year for “Memoirs of a Geisha.” It would be sweet (yet unlikely) to see him up for another this year.
So, yes, in its very dirty way, “Miami Vice” is beautiful. (For the record, I enjoy everything from the most scratchy and blurry 8mm and 16mm all the way to the most polished 70mm, and traditional 35mm in-between.)
But on to the actual content of the picture. “Miami Vice” is the dialogue and characterizations of David Mamet’s “Spartan,” crossed with the hand-held, quick-cutting look of “United 93,” combined seamlessly with a great artist’s eye for compositions and sweeping gestures. Using a style that shifts effortlessly from documentary realism to doomed romanticism, it follows tough, almost machine-like men speaking in a nigh-incomprehensible lingo that we only intermittently understand, leading them to acts of sudden brutality. At its most abstracted, “Miami Vice” is men in sharp suits and bullet-proof vests, carrying assault rifles into the drippy grey underbelly of shadows and steel beams that hold up our culture and, once there, risking their lives to blow away other men for causes they aren’t sure they believe in. The plot will come as a huge, crushing disappointment for those who think movies are about stories. At once mind-bogglingly complex and yet so very, very simple, not a single “event” in the film is original.
And did I mention stuff blows up real, real good? There are three kills that are so criminally satisfying that you may want to go to confession afterwards. For a guy who made the first Hannibal Lector movie and has specialized in people getting gunned down in public places, this is Michael Mann’s bloodiest film yet, with violence sometimes bursting out of nowhere, and sometimes being built up for the film’s entire run-time.
Some of the criticisms against this film are so stupid they make me sick. Hardly any of them have to do with the film itself. “It’s not like the TV show!” As stupid a complaint as “it changed the book,” but even stupider because, come on, it’s a TV show. “The clothes aren’t the same as on the TV show!” Use your brain—the clothes are the same between the TV show and the movie: the height of fashion. It’s just that fashion has changed in twenty years. “It’s too complicated for a summer movie!” That’s a complaint directed at its release date, not the movie itself. “It shouldn’t have cost $140 million dollars!” You never hear someone say “I like this Vermeer, but I would like it more if he hadn’t taken so long to paint it.” So many movie critics hate the movies. “Foxx and Farrell didn’t get along during the shooting!” Um, so what? “I didn’t know what was going on half the time!” Actually kind of a legitimate complaint in that it has to do with the movie itself. But confusion on the part of the audience is as legitimate a mood as exciting or fear. About the only legitimate criticism is against Foxx and Farrell, and how Mann has written their characters. But even this is more of a “what if” then a real criticism. Certainly the movie would be more conventional and more palatable to a mass audience if Foxx and Farrell were wisecracking buddies akin to “Lethal Weapon:” if they had heart-to-hearts about feelings and gave us an opportunity to know them outside of the confines of their work. If they finished each other’s sentences, like “Sahara” or “The Way of the Gun” (I know two friends who have known each other for almost twenty-two years and they do not complete one another’s sentences). But that would be a different movie, using an admittedly enjoyable convention that would undercut “Miami Vice’s” heightened sense of bleakness.
What some viewers might find uncomfortable is that we see Crockett the way Tubbs sees him and Tubbs the way Crockett sees him. The movie is so supremely “in the moment”—perhaps making it Mann’s most consummate film, but that’s an argument for later—that we don’t have the opportunity for seeing “the man in full” as Mann did with Pacino and De Niro in 1995’s “Heat.” Tubbs and Crockett do not say one single word to each other during the entire film that is not related to their work. They “see” things but do not talk; in much the same way that “Miami Vice” is ultimately a silent movie because about 80% of the dialogue doesn’t make sense anyway, these are men who know only by seeing. Tubbs is having an affair with a woman on their vice team (Naomie Harris); she wanders down from the bedroom while Tubbs and Crockett are incoherently mumbling over business. She and Crockett see one another, and she has to force a greeting out of Crockett. Crockett has seen the relationship and that’s enough for him.
"Miami Vice" creates an ambient, self-contained universe with its own language, its own rules, its own look, and its own aura of grandiose fatalism. It is a mood piece, very much like the films of Terrence Malick (“The New World,” “Days of Heaven,” “The Thin Red Line”) and Malick movies are larger than their ideas. To say “this is what the film means” is to shrink it to make it less threatening, less gigantic. “Miami Vice” carved a blue place of loss and beauty in my mind, next to the sun-lit green place of loss that is “The Talented Mr. Ripley” and the black-and-white “things could have been different” of “Raging Bull.”
It’s fascinating to track Michael Mann’s career. “Manhunter” back in 1986 is probably his most formal picture, composed almost entirely of tightly-controlled cameras getting perfectly centered figures to move through artificially sterile environs, often in long shots and long takes. Famously (or infamously), a “prison” exterior is actually the exterior of a museum. Two decades later we come to “Miami Vice” and “Collateral,” with their DV blurs and jitters and quick edits. Mann has loosened the reigns considerably in that time, but he retains a distinctive look. I’d place “Miami Vice” ahead of “Collateral” and “Manhunter” but behind “Heat” and “The Insider.” If it’s a masterpiece, it’s a shallow masterpiece. But it’s also so very, very money.
Finished Thursday, August 3rd, 2006
Copyright © 2006 Friday & Saturday Night
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