Heat (1995)

HEAT (1995)

Dir: Michael Mann

Overly bloated masterwork of misogyny and hetero-normative masculinity while masquerading as a heist film. At its near three hours of runtime we can keep the action scenes as they are an adrenaline pumping good time. We can keep all the scenes between the men of the two acting crews: the thieves and the police. What we can get rid of is any semblance of heterosexual home-lives. If we cut out Pacino trying to keep his third marriage together, DeNiro attempting to woo an artist, Kilmer’s sanity breaking around his wife and child, and the *sshole killing prostitutes we have a homoerotic tale of men in a d*ck measuring contest. I would never actually suggest we have a film with no women, but when the women are only used as pawns to move the male characters in the story, you’ve done no service to them by keeping them in. In the end Natalie Portman attempting suicide, Ashley Judd’s subtle nod to keep her husband from getting caught, Diane Venora bringing home Ralph to flaunt her infidelity, or Amy Brenneman making the difficult decision to let her old life go to run away with DeNiro, you’ll remember none of these contributions. What you will remember is the diner scene, when DeNiro and Pacino finally meet. Rightfully so, the film is built around the parallels and connections of these two characters and when they finally meet it’s a celluloid goldmine. Nothing else matters but the build up to them meeting, the meeting, and the resolution of that meeting. This is shown later with some hand holding you into the end credits. I’ve never been against Heat, it is a masterwork. It’s flawed on many fundamental levels when it comes to the inclusion of characters, but it succeeds more than it fails. In the end, if you view the women in the film as the ones with the agency – a behind the scenes agency – that propels each male character into their own undoing or success, maybe they aren’t the pawns they appear to be on the surface.

Sidenote: The cast in this film is beyond compare. Michael Mann has two Thomas Harris villains: Buffalo Bill and Francis Dollarhyde, one plays a cop and the other a thief. The parallels in the plot run deep.