In the Flesh: Heat

Six years ago, I really didn’t like this movie. I don’t know if I was distracted or just in a bad mood, but watching it now I can’t for the life of me understand why I wrote the things I did. This is a stone-cold son of a bitch of a flick, a movie about love and disposability, about living your calling, about what family is and isn’t, and the pain of wanting things we know deep down we’ll only fuck up and destroy. Who knows, maybe I didn’t eat a good breakfast that morning. I’d just seen the director’s first film, Thief, which is both more audacious in its depictions of grand theft and has a particular hallucinatory beauty absent from the relatively visually austere Heat. Maybe that was it, a mismatch between expectations and the movie in front of me. I’ve changed a lot since in how I approach film, particularly as regards walking in without expectations. “I hope it’s good,” has become my new mantra, and brother, Heat is good.

That workmanlike visual approach to crime? It plays like a well-oiled machine, human cogs turning against each other, distance and movement cleanly laid out to give every action or tradecraft scene a clear, smooth sense of forward momentum. We can cut to demolitionist and safecracker Chris Shiheris (Val Kilmer) in the middle of drilling through a concrete wall the moment before Neil McCauley (Robert De Niro) calls the job on a hunch without any kind of setup or preamble because the characters are established, the job already sketched out for us. There’s no need to dot every i when you do the kind of natural legwork Heat excels at. We know why McCauley bugs out because we’ve seen his palatial, empty beachside home, we’ve seen the expansive glass-fronted cupboards with only a few sets of dinnerware. This is not a man who takes chances. This is not a man who throws good money after bad. 

I was rough on Pacino’s performance the first time I watched this, too. This time, I feel like I get it. He’s a piece of shit, obviously, but it’s more than that. He doesn’t want to grow up, doesn’t want to live in a world where he has things to lose. The dream his character, Detective Vincent Hanna, relates to McCauley is the key. Every murder victim he’s ever seen, seated with him at a banquet table, saying nothing, just staring at him with their rotten faces, their bruised and mottled throats, their filmy eyes. That’s the family he can’t fail, the one he can’t leave, the ones he can’t stand up for dinner or neglect until they walk out on him. It’s why Hanna comes out on top, and there’s an incredible poetry to it, a bottomless sense of sadness. For all that he still goes through the motions of normal life that McCauley has eschewed all his career, in reality, there’s nothing left, just empty actions signifying nothing deeper. McCauley opens his heart, just an inch, and Hanna comes in like a knife. 

And the surface street shootout, my God! A ballet! The subtle fisheye, the thundering momentum of each fraction of a block snatched with a shot-up car, the stop and start of gunfire echoing like thunder from the buildings. The unstoppable force hits the immovable object and instead of a tug of war you get something more like waves of molten metal slamming together, cars coming apart in corkscrew tangles of shredded steel and flying glass, bodies opening up to release waterfalls of blood. The whole world breaks, right down to the backyard barbecue Hanna and McCauley both disdained just a few minutes earlier as their gunfight spills over into the parking lot of a hardware store, bullets punching holes in those iconic black grill hoods. Hanna isn't trying to save this world of domesticity and innocence; he hardly cares about it. It's just shadows and dust between the two of them.