Killers

It seems strange that Tom Cruise never worked with Michael Mann until Collateral. The pairing seems just about right. Cruise's range isn't great (to put it mildly), but he's a focused actor and a fine camera subject-sleek and polished, the actor as shiny new car. His demeanor tends toward blankness, and he always runs the risk of seeming glib. But when packaged by the right director-Oliver Stone in Born on the Fourth of July, for instance, or Steven Spielberg in Minority Report-his blankness becomes opacity, a very useful quality for leading men.

Mann is a more daring and accomplished director than Cruise is an actor. No one combines grandiosity and grit with such flair. In his tv series Miami Vice and Crime Story, and in such movies as Thief, Manhunter, The Last of the Mohicans and Heat, he fused epic wide shots, subjective close-ups and camera moves, unpredictable editing rhythms and pulsing, hypnotic music to create a new storytelling mode: Zen pulp.

Mann's last couple of movies-The Insider and Ali-only brushed against that mode. They were biographical dramas done in a highly subjective, even dreamy style, but tethered to reality. Neither did well at the box office, and Ali was a critical disappointment as well. I loved both films and thought the second was among the most egregiously underappreciated movie biographies of recent times-a genuinely cinematic experience that respected the mysteries of Ali's personality, depicted the most crucial period of his career solely through his actions and honorably refused to condescend to Ali by trying to "explain" him. Written by Stuart Beattie, the noirish Collateral is far less original. It's a manly urban fever dream in the mode of Heat and Miami Vice-a brutal, sardonic thriller that depicts the modern city as a dark playground for violent man-children. Cruise plays Vincent, a hit man who takes law-abiding cabbie Max (Jamie Foxx) as a hostage during an all-night killing spree-the actor and the filmmaker play well together. Mann's super-moody visuals and uncluttered design sense lend Cruise qualities we don't often associate with him (menace, maturity, existential weariness). In return, Cruise gives Mann something every director craves: box-office credibility.

You know what you're in for: a tale of unlikely doppelgangers, wherein a meek wage slave develops a fascination with (and respect for) a killer because, hey, at least the killer's free. Max is a bespectacled Nowhere Man who dreams of opening his own limo service. (Like James Caan with his wallet collage in Thief, Max keeps a photo of a tropical island clipped to his visor-Screenwriting 101 shorthand for "little man with big dreams.") Max is fascinated by Vincent, whose sharp suit and close-cropped silver hair evoke Richard Gere's corporate raider in Pretty Woman. Max tells Vincent his cabdriving job is "just temporary." "How long ya been driving?" Vincent asks. "Twelve years," Max answers.

After an early hit goes bad, the surly Vincent dragoons Max into acting as his wheel man. As Max observes his passenger's ruthless efficiency, his horror gives way to reflexive admiration, then moralistic revulsion, then a resolve to thwart the killer's mission. Of the two lead roles, Cruise's is more superficially glamorous. But Foxx's character is more intriguing (and Foxx's performance is more impressive) because the script requires Max to change, imperceptibly but completely, over one long night. The men are quite funny together-Cruise's scary petulance and Foxx's goofball affability mesh well-and the movie allows Max to define Vincent in unflattering terms, as a piece of defective human merchandise, a machine that's missing some crucial part. (This apt description doubles as a summary of Cruise's weird energy as a leading man.)

Collateral is a smartly paced, efficiently edited movie that may seduce even viewers who are determined to resist it. Mann is not a complacent filmmaker. In all his movies, he keeps trying different things just to see if they work. Here he references a host of genre classics, including Jean-Pierre Melville's Le Samourai, Walter Hill's The Driver and Hitchcock's Rear Window. He mixes 35mm film with high-definition video, which allowed him to shoot most of the night exteriors in available light. (You can see city light reflected in low-hanging clouds.)

Some of Mann's compositions are counterintuitive, and effective for just that reason. Pay attention to the scene where Max visits a nightclub to obtain a disc from a crime boss played by Javier Bardem, and gets in touch with a swaggering toughness Max never knew he had. Much of the scene cuts between profile medium close-ups of Foxx and Bardem facing off across a table. Foxx looks screen-left but is placed in the extreme left-hand side of the frame. Bardem looks screen-right but is situated in the extreme right-hand side of his frame. When Mann cuts between the two frames, the effect is disorienting and charged with meaning. The men seem to be passing each other through a mirror-an appropriate suggestion for a scene that finds Max stepping through the looking glass that separates civilization from criminality.

But in the end, the cast's intelligence and Mann's lively direction don't cancel out comic-book images of Vincent mowing down adversaries with Seagal-like ferocity while slack-jawed bystanders (including Max) look on in fear and admiration. Nor do they cancel ^^^ out the starfucking agenda behind some of Vincent's more boastful lines. ("Don't let me get cornered," he warns Max. "You don't have the trunk space.") Worst of all, while it pretends otherwise, Collateral embraces the timeworn Hollywood lie that killers are people who have chosen to embrace a primal notion of freedom that the rest of us are too timid to seize. This same lie is embraced in such superior but equally problematic films as Something Wild, The Wild Bunch and Scarface.

In the name of fairness, one should ask if the fault lies not in filmmakers, but in cinema itself. Perhaps the moving image cannot help but glamorize mayhem, murder and other types of antisocial behavior, no matter how strenuously a screenplay tries to critique or condemn them. But the fault here seems largely Mann's. He has traveled the doppelganger road before-from Thief through Ali, his filmography is strewn with mirror-image adversaries-but he's never endorsed the killer-as-free-spirit myth in such a straightforward (and therefore specious) way. It's as if Mann decided to check his brain at the door because he really needs a hit.

In Collateral, he panders while pretending he's thinking. The result makes one aware that, like Walter Hill and John Woo's testosterone-fogged shoot-'em-ups, Mann's crime pictures are macho daydreams with college degrees, all gussied up in mournful-tragic-existential drag so that middle-class, soft-bellied, college-educated film critics can treat them as pop-art objects rather than masturbatory power fantasies aimed at the teenage boy in everyone. Collateral is another effort in this vein-a criminal-as-liberator movie in which a badass killer helps a worrywart cabdriver seize the day.

Proteus

Directed by John Greyson and Jack Lewis

Most moviegoers won't be willing to follow up Collateral with Proteus, an 18th-century drama about a forbidden gay romance that led to a sodomy prosecution. It's as cheap as Proteus is lavish, and much more obviously an art film. But it's a more uncompromising (and certainly more meaningful) experience. Rouxnet Brow plays Claas Blank, a black man sentenced to hard time at Cape Town's Robben Island, where he charms a sexually repressed English botanist named Virgil (Shaun Smith) by giving him made-up, often vulgar names for plants and flowers.

Claas' alliance with Virgil is purely strategic (at least at first). But his attraction to fellow prisoner Rijkhaart Jacobsz (Neil Sandilands), a white Dutchman and convicted sodomite, seems to be more legitimate and powerful. Claas and Rijkhaart's first sexual encounter has a rough, playful edge that's believable and touching. The three-way tension between Claas, Virgil and Rijkhaart flouts taboos-racial, social, international-and when the Englishman goes to Amsterdam and then returns, bringing his baggage with him, all hell breaks loose. The participants in this furtive drama are forced to hang names on behavior they had previously ignored or hidden. Even if you're not familiar with the history Proteus was based on, you know this tale can't end happily.

Funded over several years and produced on a shoestring, Proteus is a real labor of love. Co-directors Jack Lewis and John Greyson (Zero Patience) shot the movie on digi-Beta-the same format employed for The Fast Runner and most nightly tv newscasts-and danced around budgetary constraints by embracing anachronism. (As in Alex Cox's misunderstood 1987 period piece Walker, Proteus allows the modern world to invade period landscapes; concrete blocks, power boxes and a jeep make prominent appearances.) The effect is fascinating, at times beguiling. Proteus is a didactic movie that sometimes spells out symbolic touches that we could already grasp for ourselves. (An elegant pan along a table arranged with diverse, equally beautiful flower specimens illustrates the idea that different branches of a species have more physical similarities than differences-whereupon a monologue makes exactly the same point.) But the central storyline is so captivating, and the lead performances so earnest and humane, that the budgetary limitations and esthetic missteps don't hurt. Proteus is smart and haunting: a smashed flower of a movie.

I've been dismayed by the number of reviews of Takashi Miike's Gozu that not only failed to write around the movie's key plot twists, but went to the trouble of highlighting them. (Time Out New York even described the most important narrative development in detail-not in a review, but in a director profile, for crying out loud.)ÊIt's possible that I'm too sensitive about giving away plot developments-"plot spoilers ahead" is probably the most oft-repeated phrase in my column-but in this case, I believe more circumspection was warranted. Like David Lynch's movies, Miike's films are more startling and enjoyable the less you know about them going in. It's not impossible to write critically about a film as unusual as Gozu without going into detail about what happens and when; you just need to weigh your words more carefully and ask for the reader's trust. "

The Manchurian Candidate and The Village opened last week shrouded in secrecy; in reviews, features and straight news stories, U.S. critics avoided plot summary like land mines. It appears that the American press thinks Gozu does not merit the same consideration. Why? Is it because the film is Japanese?