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Heat: Never Relents its Painful Intensity

By Sam Moore · August 18, 2013

Heat, Michael Mann’s three hour long, bleak view of Los Angeles, is his undoubted masterpiece and a seminal 90s film. As much about the Californian city as it is the cops and robbers, Mann’s LA is a corrupt dystopia with no redeeming features except for the fact it looks glorious through his lens. Scathing and cynical, Heat possesses a hateful vision of society that is intrinsically corrupt. The consequences of violence are a recurring theme throughout the film, and though the violence is fairly minimal, it is this bloodshed that acts as a device to evolve the plot of the film.

Heat opens with a breathtaking armed robbery that is supposed to go smoothly. Instead it descends into cold-blooded mass murder and allegiances are cut unceremoniously. The consequences of this event we follow throughout the film, and nobody is safe. Wives, girlfriends, children, and unfortunate bystanders get caught up in cinema’s greatest tale of cat and mouse. The leader of the armed robbery gang is Neil McCauley (Robert De Niro) who is played with an assured iciness that is not too far away from De Niro's depiction of Vito Corleone in The Godfather Part II. Obsessively chasing him is Detective Hanna (Al Pacino) who has a frenzy that has become typical of Pacino's characters. As men they are polar opposites, McCauley is entirely professional and always on guard, seemingly too smart for an LAPD detective.

Their relationship is perfectly elaborated on during the famous coffee shop scene. They sit opposite each other and it becomes clear how similar these two men are. They’re around the same age, they have a world weariness that has tired them considerably, and they have the utmost loyalty to their respective professions. They try to figure each other out, and in another life, these men could easily be the best of friends. Heat confirms the eternal truth–cops and robbers need each other. They exist in their own world, away from society, doing battle by their own set of commandments.

The relationship between Hanna and McCauley is strangely intimate. They both struggle to offer affection towards the women in their lives and in the case of Hanna, his wife seems to have an outright hatred of him. During the course of the film, McCauley falls in love, which is strictly against his moral code that has kept him out of jail all these years, and he frequently battles internally between logic and love.

McCauley has a policy where he is never to get involved in anything he can’t walk away from in 30 seconds flat, and the earnest and likeable Eady (Amy Brenneman) violates that. They meet in a restaurant and she hammers him constantly with questions, which unnerves him somewhat and gets him on the defensive. She is a lonely woman looking for love. He denies he is lonely when, in fact, he’s the loneliest man in the world, caught in his own individual universe where there are no consequences to anybody other than himself.

The relationship between the men and women in Heat is complex. In the case of Eady, she is trying to tame McCauley into the retirement he wants but can’t quite go along with. He has all the money in the world, but armed robbery is his life and he can’t refuse another go at an extraordinary sum of money. Hanna’s wife is left demeaned and forgotten. The detective is sleeping with his profession and she is merely an afterthought in his life, a back-up option for when he gets lonely. Hanna’s wife has an unforgiving cruelty and is pushed to the point where she doesn’t even try to hide her affair. Everybody knows he left her with no other option, and when he storms off, he takes the television and nothing else. His daughter is also a mess. She’s a rebel, suffering from an absent father. This, in fact, is Hanna’s biggest crime—the criminals came before his little girl and she ends up in a state that is the thing of every father’s nightmare.

Wrongly thought of as an action picture is some circles, Heat is an incredibly complex drama about men and obsessions. McCauley and Hanna are intrinsically flawed human beings who remain grounded thanks to the performances from De Niro and Pacino, both of whom have not been better since. Of course, the film takes us towards a breathtaking finale, where McCauley and Hanna duel for a final time, leaving only one victor. Michael Mann’s film does away with clichés and even supporting characters—such as the interesting but unsaveable Chris (Val Kilmer) and his wife Charlene (Ashley Judd), who made their decisions early on in life and must face the consequences. Very few people make it out of their universe free of scars, and they know this. Heat exists in a world where affection goes neglected and bravado triumphs. The film is a painful, intense experience that never relents as worlds come crushing down and people accept their fates silently.