Ruby in Paradise

No other filmmaker other than Charles Burnett, John Sayles or Mike Leigh excels at telling stories about real people like Victor Nunez. He has been called the working man’s auteur and with one exception, his films capture the essence of Florida culture in a refreshingly understated way that is increasingly rare at time when big budget blockbusters and quirky independent films reside at polar ends of the spectrum with very little in-between. His films are populated by protagonists that are outsiders reinventing themselves in Florida. Nunez has said that he is fascinated by “people who have somehow strayed from the world, and they’re trying to decide whether or not they’ll be able to get back in again.” This is evident in the conflicted reporter torn between two sides in A Flash of Green (1984), the grandfather protecting his family from dangerous criminals in Ulee’s Gold (1997) and this is certainly true of Ruby in Paradise (1993), which chronicles a young woman’s journey from an abusive relationship in Tennessee to her new life working in a souvenir shop in Panama City.


Right from the opening scene Nunez eschews convention when he avoids the clichéd break-up scene by muting the sound of Ruby Lee Gissing (Ashley Judd) leaving her rural home and irate boyfriend (husband?) behind so that we only hear the Sam Phillips song “Raised on Promises” playing over the soundtrack as she arrives in Florida at dawn. Nunez captures this moment by showing Ruby in silhouette, which coupled with the music, makes for a very atmospheric introduction to the film’s protagonist. She awakes in a motel to the sounds of an Indian woman singing a traditional song while carrying some towels to her family. Ruby starts a diary, which allows us access to her innermost thoughts, feelings and musings on life. She’s a young woman trying to figure out who she is and what she wants out of life.

Unfortunately, Ruby arrives during the offseason and work is scarce. However, she finds work at a local souvenir shop when she convinces its owner Mildred Chambers (Dorothy Lyman) to hire her. As she gets acquainted with her new surroundings, Nunez uses this opportunity to immerse us in the sights and sounds of Panama City. There are nice shots of Ruby and one of her co-workers Rochelle Bridges (Allison Dean) walking the deserted streets with the stores shuttered for the season. Nunez wisely lets the impossibly beautiful setting speak for itself as we witness stunning sunsets over the ocean.

Rochelle is a young woman like Ruby trying to get by. She goes to business school when she’s not working and has a boyfriend in Atlanta whom she hopes to marry some day. Mildred’s son, Ricky (Bentley Mitchum), is a good-looking troublemaker who takes a shine to Ruby. He has a contentious relationship with his mother who warns Ruby not to get involved with him, which she does anyway, slipping back into a cycle of men who are no good for her. The crucial difference being that she is no longer suffocated by her surroundings, told what to think and is allowed to make her own decisions, even if they aren’t the right ones. Her relationship with Ricky represents her past, which is why eventually cutting him loose symbolically puts the past behind her. As she says at one point, he is “a 100% of something I would like to forget.”

Ruby meets a nice guy named Mike McCaslin (Todd Field) who runs a nursery where she buys a plant for her new place. They start dating and she finds him to be everything that Ricky isn’t. Mike listens to her, makes her feel good and gives her breathing room. He helps her break out of the cycle of bad relationships with domineering men. Todd Field brings an easy-going affability to the role of Mike and is not afraid to show the character’s faults. He is cynical, looks down on people who enjoy mainstream popcorn movies (and yet is fascinated by a T.V. evangelist) and discourages Ruby from going back to school. Mike is definitely a glass-half-empty kind of person. He doesn’t buy into the materialism of our culture. He leads a lo-fi life. His job is growing things from the earth and selling them.

Ruby in Paradise is filled with all kinds of character-defining moments that are little pieces of a bigger puzzle. For example, Nunez paints Mildred the way you would assess someone in real life. At first, we only see as a strict boss at work but later in the film she takes Ruby on a business trip to a trade show in Tampa and the two women get to know each other. We get the impression that perhaps Mildred even sees some of herself in Ruby and, in turn, the young woman sees her boss in a new light. This sequence humanizes Mildred and helps us understand her character better. Nunez obviously has affection for these characters and this makes us care about them as well.

There is plenty of local color in this film, like the next-door neighbor Ruby observes frequently – an old man who fishes daily off a nearby pier. There is the teenage girl next door who lives with her abusive boyfriend, which also acts as warning for Ruby that if she’s not careful she could so easily slip back into old habits. Ruby in Paradise is filled with blue-collar folks and Nunez actually shows them at work, which is a nice touch. He shows the little details of everyday life that enriches these people and pulls you into their lives because it makes you think about your own. These characters flesh out the world that Ruby inhabits.

Victor Nunez had always been fascinated by Panama City. As a child, he vacationed regularly there with his family. As an adult, he became intrigued by the life experiences of the people who worked year round in coffee shops and motels. This led to the genesis of Ruby in Paradise. After completing A Flash of Green, a few years passed and he made notes about his initial ideas concerning the challenges women faced: “How do we define who we are, now in this time?” He wanted his protagonist Ruby to try and figure this out during the course of the film. He spent a year working on the screenplay drawing inspiration from several literary sources: William Faulkner’s The Bear for the character of Mike; the structure of The Odyssey but with a woman instead of a man going through a series of trials; and Northanger Abbey by Jane Austen as a model for depicting a woman’s dilemma. For the look of the film, Nunez was inspired by Italian neo-realism cinema where character, place and story are “inexplicably linked.” He spent years trying to get Ruby in Paradise made and was rejected numerous times by financiers who read the script and felt it wasn’t “American enough. It was not hot enough. It was not cool enough or urban enough.” It got so bad that he began questioning his abilities as a filmmaker and felt like an outsider in the film business. He finally decided to make Ruby regardless of the budget and financing suddenly fell into place when his great aunt passed away, leaving him what was left of her trust. In addition, he was also able to borrow money. The final budget was a lean $750 to $800,000.

Nunez went to Los Angeles for ten days to cast Ruby in Paradise. According to the filmmaker, the casting director was pushing a very accomplished young actress but she didn’t feel right to him. He saw three actresses who were very good but were “a little too much Tennessee Williams and not enough Tennessee. Their experience of the South was from doing Williams, not from living in the north of Florida.” He met with Ashley Judd who had grown up in various places in the South with only a few television credits and had been modeling in Japan. She came in late, did the interview, came back 30 minutes later and gave him a CD of the Judds (her sister and mother’s country music band) so that he would know which sister she was. Judd had read the script and “felt passionately moved by it. And for some reason or another had an instantaneous and deep understanding of the material.” Nunez realized that she had “minimal acting experience but exuded a ‘hungry’ quality that was right on.”

To get a feel for the role, Judd drove the back roads from Tennessee to Florida, observing the people she encountered along the way. Principal photography lasted six weeks with a day and a half in Tampa and two days of pick-ups. To save time, money and get the exact shots he wanted, Nunez operated the camera himself, something that he has done for his entire career. “When you make low-budget films, you live in the ‘good enough’ mode by and large. And if you’re lucky, you’re moving fast enough and everything is flowing well enough that ‘good enough’ is what you need.”

Ruby in Paradise received largely positive notices from critics. Roger Ebert gave the film four out of four stars and wrote, “Ruby in Paradise is a breathtaking movie about a young woman who opens the book of her life to a fresh page, and begins to write.” In her review for the Washington Post, Rita Kempley wrote, “Nunez's empathy and affection for women are reflected here in both his fine writing and his obvious respect for his heroine.” The San Francisco Chronicle’s Edward Guthmann gave the film four out of four stars and wrote, “Judd, in her first film, gives a subtle, delicate performance.” The Guardian’s Derek Malcolm wrote, “The whole film is very well played, very well set and directed with a sharp eye for detail. And if it tells its story in a way which may suggest that 114 minutes ought to have been about 100, those who like it may not mind hanging around for a few minutes longer. Of all the American independent movies this year, Ruby In Paradise is one of the strongest because, for all its meandering style, it seems to know exactly what such a life as Ruby's is about.” In her review for The New York Times, Janet Maslin wrote, “With a girlish face that contrasts hauntingly with her steady, mature speaking voice, Ms. Judd projects a seductive radiance that becomes the film's inner core. She gives substance to the film's slow, reflective manner and to its suggestion that Ruby's journey of self-exploration may truly lead to some greater serenity.” USA Today gave the film three out of four stars and Mike Clark wrote, “Judd, though, looks like a screen rarity – projecting intelligence and beauty without even seeming to try.”

However, Entertainment Weekly gave the film a “C+” rating and felt that it was “tentative-and more than a little plodding. Instead of following through on the relationships, Nunez allows Ruby in Paradise to get bogged down in his heroine's economic woes” In his review for the Globe and Mail, Rick Groen wrote, “For all its sensitivity, Ruby In Paradise combines the art-film's fear of melodrama with the pedant's fear of the cliché – life, alas, admits of both.”

Judd’s performance, like the film itself, is wonderfully understated. While she is naturally beautiful, her hair and makeup are very natural. Ruby is a very stripped-down version of a human being as represented by how she dresses and where she lives. This is her foundation that will allow her to grow. Nunez allows the character moments of quiet contemplation as Ruby watches the world and enjoys the simplicity of life. She is not a perfect character. She makes mistakes, like getting involved with Ricky, but she learns from them. She often looks haunted, like she’s never fully in the moment, slightly detached from what she’s doing, like at work doing menial tasks. Judd suggests that Ruby is thinking about something else. Judd disappears completely into the role as she delivers an intelligent performance of an independent woman. Done early in her career (it was only her fourth role and first lead in a feature film), Ruby in Paradise was the breakout role for the actress who went on to bigger films and a variety of parts but nothing quite as good as this one.

While Ruby in Paradise launched Judd’s career it sadly did not do the same for Nunez despite winning the Grand Jury Prize (along with Bryan Singer’s Public Access) at the 1993 Sundance Film Festival. He did go on to make his most high profile film to date, Ulee’s Gold, which revitalized Peter Fonda’s career but then didn’t make another film until the little-seen crime film Coastlines (2002) with Josh Brolin and Timothy Olyphant. Nunez doesn’t make dynamic-sounding films that dazzle financiers, hence the lengthy lulls between projects, which is a shame because he is a rare breed of filmmaker. One that finds the poetry in the everyday lives of people just trying to get by as best they can.

SOURCES

Bettendorf, Elizabeth. “Looking at Florida Like a Native.” Research in Review. Fall/Winter 2009.

Macaulay, Scott. “Fade to Paradise.” Filmmaker. Fall 1993.

Smith, Russell. “Little Ashley’s A Big Girl Now…” Calgary Herald. February 19, 1993.

Stone, Judy. “Modern-Day Heroine in a Honky Tonk.” San Francisco Chronicle. October 31, 1993.

Walsh, S. Kirk. “For Ashley Judd Acting was the Siren Song.” The New York Times. October 3, 1993.

The Passion of Darkly Noon

The Passion of Darkly Noon (1995) is a strange film. One that features Brendan Fraser covered in red paint and barbed wire, Viggo Mortensen as a mute carpenter, and the unforgettable image of a large silver boot floating down a river. It is quite unlike any other film and is the brainchild of Philip Ridley, a British performance artist, filmmaker, novelist, painter, and playwright whose three feature films to date deal with the loss of innocence. Best described as a dark, fantasy tale, Darkly Noon was only his second feature film but it is a masterful one. Sadly, few people got to see the film; it was barely reviewed, and quietly disappeared to home video where it remains to be rediscovered.


Our story begins with a disheveled young man (Brendan Fraser) in a suit staggering through a forest. Exhausted, he finally collapses on a dirt road where he’s almost run over by another young man (Loren Dean) driving a pickup truck. He takes him in and drives to a nearby house. The driver’s name is Jude and we are soon introduced to one of the house’s occupants. Callie (Ashley Judd) is a beautiful young woman who appears walking out of the forest. Ridley stages this scene during a sunny day so that the tall grass is a vibrant green, which is in sharp contrast to Callie’s blue jeans and snow white t-shirt. She takes in the young man who stays conscious long enough to look into her eyes and grab her hand.

“Does God play jokes?” – Jude
“All the time.” – Callie

Among the man’s possessions, Callie finds a copy of The Bible with the words, “Darkly Noon,” written in it. This turns out to be the young man’s name, which he says was chosen randomly from the book by his parents. It comes from 1 Corinthians 13: “For now we see through a glass, darkly,” and explores the subject of love. We find out that he comes from a very conservative religious cult that are devout followers of The Bible. Darkly fled from a Waco-style attack that killed his parents. Brendan Fraser recounts the story in timid, hushed tones, stuttering nervously while sounds of the carnage play in his head. This is a quietly powerful scene that the actor delivers with convincing intensity.

Callie lives with her boyfriend Clay (Viggo Mortensen), a mute carpenter who builds coffins for the local undertaker and is prone to taking long, spontaneous walks, “in the dark,” to think and sort out his problems. As the hot summer days run into each other, Darkly fixates on Callie, his savior. Coming from a repressive religious upbringing, she is an oddity to him: free spirited, speaks her mind and is often clad in small, summer dresses or tight blue jeans that cause him to have what he perceives as impure thoughts (c’mon! this is Ashley Judd after all). When Clay returns on the fifth day, Darkly feels threatened and jealous, as he and Callie are no longer by themselves. His behavior becomes increasingly erratic and a conflict is inevitable.

By the time Darkly spots a large silver boot floating down a river, you know things are only going to get stranger as we perceive the world through this troubled young man’s warped perspective. Things get even weirder when Grace Zabriskie shows up as Roxy, a crazy woman who lives in a trailer out in the forest. She befriends Darkly and tells him about a monster that lives in the forest and eats young men. She also tells him that Callie is a witch that stole her husband. This feeds into his skewed worldview, sending him over the edge. Ridley employs quick jump cuts to convey Darkly’s increasingly fractured mind and the explosive climax recalls Apocalypse Now (1979) channeled through the sensibilities of Lars Von Trier.

Ridley has a real knack for making the settings in this film come to life and become almost like another character. There is a scene where Callie takes Darkly to a cave in the heart of the forest and it is filled with an impressive array of stalactites and stalagmites. It is an absolutely stunning location that eventually becomes Darkly’s lair. Another excellent example is a scene in which Jude says of Callie, “She’s like a forest – wild sort of beauty,” and Ridley pans over an incredible shot of an expansive forest that seems to go on forever as we see Darkly and Jude dwarfed by the environment. Ridley’s attention to the environment and its affect on the characters reminds me of the way Peter Weir conveys the same relationship in his films, specifically Picnic at Hanging Rock (1975), which shows the duality of the environment – at once beautiful and ominous, much like what Ridley is doing in Darkly Noon. The forest represents the entire world for these characters. It is initially a haven for them but eventually is transformed into a hell on earth.

Interestingly, the passage in The Bible that proceeds the one in which Darkly is named after, reads, “When I was a child, I spoke as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things.” This could easily describe Darkly’s arc over the course of the film. When we meet him he resembles an innocent child but once that innocence is destroyed he becomes a man. Ridley’s previous film, The Reflecting Skin (1990), ended with the protagonist running away from his dying family, stumbling through a field until he falls, Intriguingly, Darkly Noon begins with its protagonist running away from his dying family, stumbling through a forest. It’s as if the protagonist from The Reflecting Skin grew up to become the one in Darkly Noon.

Known mostly for goofy comedies like George of the Jungle (1997) and Dudley Do-Right (1999), every so often Fraser tries something different, like Gods and Monsters (1998) or The Quiet American (2002) or The Passion of Darkly Noon. They demonstrate his range and ability to do good work while the mainstream crap he does to pay the bills. Normally playing gregarious goofballs, he delivers a fascinatingly internalized performance for most of the film as a very shy, repressed individual. Fraser even adopts a slight stutter and his often-blank expressions and intense stares hint an inner turmoil that gradually boils to the surface as the film progresses. The actor explores depths with Darkly Noon that he had never done before or since for that matter. Think of this film as his Taxi Driver (1976) and Darkly is his Travis Bickle, a deeply disturbed loner obsessed with a woman he can never have. Darkly’s descent into madness is impressive to watch and Fraser’s slow burn on the way to get there is mesmerizing.

Darkly Noon is a potent reminder of the kind of adventurous roles Ashley Judd took on early in her career with films like Ruby in Paradise (1992) and Smoke (1995). She had only been acting for four years prior to this film with very few substantial credits to her name. She conveys a relaxed confidence with Callie, a woman who is comfortable in her own skin and this intimidates Darkly who is not used to this kind of image of femininity. Clay is mute which forces Viggo Mortensen to communicate through body language, perfect for such a physically expressive actor as evident in the action/adventures he’s done, like The Lord of the Rings trilogy or Hidalgo (2004). Through hand gestures and facial expressions, the actor delivers a fascinating performance. Aside from Grace Zabriskie, Mortensen was the most experienced actor in the cast and had already done excellent work in films like The Indian Runner (1991), Carlito’s Way (1993), and Ridley’s first feature film, The Reflecting Skin.

What critics did review The Passion of Darkly Noon were unimpressed with it. In his review for Variety, Todd McCarthy felt that Ridley, “puts a good cast to work on a tale scarcely worth telling … Not likely to gain critical support, this looks like a forlorn commercial entry in most markets.” The Independent’s Adam Mars-Jones wrote, “The film stands or falls by the resonance of its images, not by the repeated profundities of the dialogue.” In his review for The Times, Geoff Brown wrote, “At best Ridley achieves a fable’s cryptic simplicity … At worst, all we see is intellectual vacuity and a self-conscious striving for effect.” The Observer’s Tom Lubbock felt that the film was “indeed poetical, imagistic, visionary, surreal, symbolic, and more. But to get the best from Darkly Noon, the title is one of the several things about it that are best ignored.” Entertainment Weekly gave the film a “D-“ rating and criticized its “bombastic dialogue, bad acting, tawdry prurience and inane plot developments.” The one lone positive reaction came from Fangoria, which praised Fraser’s performance: “This is unlike anything else Fraser has done, surrounded by more acclaimed actors, he nonetheless dominates the screen.”

The Passion of Darkly Noon is a fascinating parable about the extremes of religious devotion – how it corrupts and warps, often with tragic results. Ridley’s film warns of the dangers of ignorance and fanaticism. He has crafted a very unusual horror film that stays with you long after it ends. It is very stylized in nature, from the way it looks to how the characters speak and what they say – hence the dark, fairy tale vibe. This actually works in Darkly Noon’s favor and is also part of its appeal – if you’re willing to take the leap of faith that it requires.

NOTE: The Passion of Darkly Noon is available streaming on Netflix.

Heat

It seems rather fitting that it took nearly 15 years for Michael Mann to get his ambitious crime epic Heat (1995) made and it has been 15 years since it was unleashed in theaters. After the commercial and critical success of The Last of the Mohicans (1992), he parlayed its commercial and critical success to get his pet project made. He was able to cast legendary actors Robert De Niro and Al Pacino as the leads in what would be their first the on-screen appearance together in a film (they were in The Godfather: Part II but never appeared in the same scene). Mann returned to a 1986 draft of a screenplay that had originated before he made The Jericho Mile (1979). He now had a much clearer idea of how he wanted Heat to be structured and decided to expand its scope.

At the core of Heat is the relationship between career criminal Neil McCauley (Robert De Niro) and dedicated cop, Vincent Hanna (Al Pacino). Mann takes the career criminal from Thief (1981) and the intensely dedicated cop from Manhunter (1986) and places them in the same film together with the sprawling metropolis that is Los Angeles as its backdrop. It is a deadly cat and mouse game realized on an epic level. Imagine Stanley Kubrick’s The Killing (1956) but on the scale of 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968).

The opening of Heat introduces the two main protagonists, McCauley and Hanna without any dialogue. Mann relies entirely on their actions to illustrate their defining characteristics. McCauley, disguised as a paramedic, steals an ambulance. It is how he does it that is so impressive. He walks through a busy hospital purposefully, taking in everything and touching nothing so that he leaves no clues behind for the police to find later. Within a matter of moments he is gone.

We first meet Hanna as he is making passionate love to his wife, Justine (Diane Venora). From the beginning, Mann shows a sharp contrast between Neil and Vincent’s professional and personal lives. McCauley is all business. His life is devoted to preparing for his next score. Mann remarked in an interview that the character “is not an archetypal ex-convict, who steals mindlessly until he gets busted back. This guy is methodical and good at what he does. He's going to accumulate a certain amount of capital, and then he's going to boogie. He has a doctrine of having no attachments, nothing in his life he can't walk out on in thirty seconds flat.” Hanna is married — albeit in a relationship rife with problems but at least he has some semblance of a personal life. During the course of the film, these two men will switch roles and this will determine their respective fates.

Hanna may have a personal life but it is a relationship in decline. He is on his third marriage and is gradually losing touch with Justine and her daughter, Lauren (Natalie Portman). After Hanna and Justine make love she tries to invite him to breakfast but he brushes her off to hook up with one of his partners. But not before he comes off as a bit of hypocrite. He criticizes Lauren’s real father for being late in picking her up and for standing her up repeatedly in the past, but he hardly pays attention to her or her mother either. This scene also establishes one of Mann’s prevalent themes: the fracture that exists between parents and their children.

Hanna is not in his element in a domestic setting and this becomes obvious when he appears at the crime scene of the armored car heist perpetrated by McCauley and his crew at the beginning of the film. As soon as Hanna walks on the scene he immediately takes control. It is a real treat to see Pacino act out this scene. He dominates it both physically — in the way he gestures and moves around — and verbally, in the authoritative tone that he speaks to the people around him. Pacino displays a confidence of an actor totally committed to his role, which is appropriate considering his character is someone who is completely committed to his profession. With little prompting, Hanna’s subordinates fill him in on the evidence they found and expertly piece together what they think happened. Hanna listens intently, absorbs everything and then quickly analyzes the situation. He assigns specific tasks to his men with all the efficiency of a professional. This is the complete opposite of what we saw him like at home. He barely hears what Justine has to say and briefly acknowledges Lauren’s presence before quickly leaving for work.

If Hanna is all about the verbal side of the professional Mann protagonist, McCauley is the flip side of the same coin. He is the quiet individual who lets his actions speak for him. Mann defines McCauley’s character visually. This is achieved not only in the exciting armored truck heist sequence — the essence of ruthless efficiency but, more significantly, when he returns to his home. Like most Mann protagonists, he lives in a Spartan, empty place. The establishing shot utilizes a blue filter that saturates the frame, with the ocean infinitely stretching out in the background. This is reminiscent of the scene in Manhunter where Graham and Molly make love in their bedroom. However, Mann uses this scene to illustrate that, unlike Hanna, McCauley is a loner, a prisoner trapped in his own empty surroundings. This is further reinforced by a close-up of his handgun; placed on a coffee table. As he walks over to the large windows overlooking the ocean, the gun looms large, upsetting the composition of the frame as it dwarfs McCauley. He is a man dominated by his profession — it defines who he is as a person. The camera pans up and we see him standing in the middle of this large, empty room, the frames of the window acting as bars, metaphorically trapping him.

Mann uses architecture to illustrate McCauley’s personality. His apartment is comprised of large, blank white walls, cabinets with the bare minimum of dishes and very little furniture. There is just enough to make it functional. This simple design is also reflected in his fashion sense: simple gray or black suits with a white dress shirt. According to Mann, this was an important clue to McCauley’s character: “His main job, as he sees it, in the way he’s elected to live his life, is to minimize risk. That’s why he wears gray suits and white shirts—he doesn’t want to have anything about his personal appearance that’s memorable. He’s a gray man, just some figure who moves through the umber of a poorly lit coffee shop. It’s all invisible, and it’s strictly pragmatic.” Like Frank in Thief, Graham in Manhunter, and later, Jeffrey Wigand in The Insider (1999), McCauley is yet another Mann protagonist who is constantly shown to be a solitary figure in an empty room. He claims, at one point, that “I’m alone. I’m not lonely,” but he is a forlorn figure or else he would not feel the need to get involved with Eady (Amy Brenneman).

Heat is different from other crime films in that it goes to great lengths to show how those around these criminals and the police that chase them are affected by what their loved ones do. Most of the relationships are very dysfunctional and none more so than between Chris Sherilis (Val Kilmer), one of McCauley’s crew, and his wife Charlene (Ashley Judd). He gambles away all of the money he makes on scores and this makes her very upset. She tells him, “It means we’re not making forward progress like real grown-up adults living our lives.” They argue and she makes it clear that, for her, it is not about the money but their son, Dominick. She is concerned for his safety and well being. For her role, Ashley Judd met several women who had been prostitutes and were now housewives. Mann located them through the convicts’ wives and ex-cons he had interviewed in his pre-production research. Some of them had turned tricks in their teens and were now middle-aged housewives selling real estate.

This scene of domestic disharmony is paralleled by Hanna’s own problems. When he comes home Justine informs him that she had dinner ready for them four hours ago. She tells him, “Every time I try to maintain a consistent mood between us you withdraw.” He replies, “I got three dead bodies on a sidewalk off Venice Boulevard.” Hanna tries to articulate something resembling an apology but he is unable. This is not good enough for her and she leaves the room leaving him alone and frustrated. The final shot is of him sitting alone watching T.V. Justine, like Charlene, is frustrated with her relationship. Both women are unhappy and not afraid to let their significant others know how they feel. Justine does not understand Vincent’s devotion to his job or his obsession with taking Neil and his crew down and this results in a rift between the two that is not repaired by the film’s conclusion. Both Hanna and Chris are unable to explain themselves to their wives. They may be the best at what they do but their personal lives are a mess.

Up until this point Neil has stayed faithful to his personal credo, “Don't keep anything in your life you're not willing to walk out on in thirty seconds flat if you feel the heat around the corner.” This begins to change when he meets Eady at a coffee shop. Initially, he is guarded and stand-offish — an attitude that comes with his job. But once he realizes that she is genuinely interested in him, he softens somewhat but is still evasive, lying to her about what he does (a salesman) and asking her a lot of questions but offering little information about himself. He gives out only vague details: “My father, I don’t know where he is. I got a brother somewhere.” However, he does offer one interesting insight into his character. As they look out at the city lights of Los Angeles he tells her about his dream: “In Fiji, they have this iridescent algae. They come out once a year in the water … I’m going there someday.” Like Frank’s dream of a family in Thief and Wigand’s vision of seeing his children playing in The Insider, McCauley will be unable to realize his ambitions because of his failure to adhere to his own personal code. His fatal flaw is that he develops feelings for Eady and thereby betraying himself. Mann foreshadows McCauley’s inevitable downfall as a result of this relationship with tragic sounding electronic music that plays while McCauley and Eady kiss.

The film’s centerpiece is undeniably the classic meeting of Pacino and De Niro, on-screen together for the first time in the careers that takes place over coffee at Mantelli's restaurant in Beverly Hills. Although, ironically, Mann edits the scene so that each man is shown in over-the-shoulder shots and we don’t actually see them face-to-face at any time in the scene. This is the moment when both men size each other up and tell each other their personal philosophies. The dialogue between the two men reveals a lot about who they are:

Neil: If you’re one me and you gotta move when I move, how do you expect to keep a marriage?

Vincent: So, then if you spot me coming around that corner, you just gonna walk out on this woman? Not say goodbye?

Neil: That’s the discipline.

Vincent: That’s pretty vacant.

Neil: It is what it is. It’s that or we both better go do something else, pal.

For Mann, the coffee shop scene between De Niro and Pacino is when "every theme and every storyline in the picture winds up in that scene. It's very much the nexus of the film." Mann made sure that nothing distracted from the exchange between these two men. He wanted the place to be as invisible as possible with the “background is as monochromatic and as minimalist as I could get it, because, boy, I did not want anything to take away from what was happening on Al's face and Bob's face.”

It makes sense, then, that these two men understand each other better than they do their wives or girlfriends. They are more open with each other than with their loved ones because there is a mutual respect and bond between them. Over coffee they tell each other their dreams and Neil’s is particularly illuminating: “I have one where I’m drowning. And I gotta wake myself up and start breathing or I die in my sleep.” Vincent asks him, “You know what that’s about?” To which Neil replies, “Yeah, not enough time.” Like Frank in Thief, Neil’s dilemma is that he does not have enough time to do everything he needs to do. Neil is a fascinating variation on Frank’s character in the sense that he too is forced to decide between preserving a relationship and his work but unlike Frank, he wastes too much time deciding on which one to follow. When Neil finally does make up his mind it is too late and he is punished for his indecision.

Heat’s most exciting action sequence is the now famous bank heist scene. Right from the beginning, Mann establishes a quick pace as Neil enters the bank with pulsating electronic music that anticipates what is going to happen. With incredible precision and timing, McCauley and his crew have taken out the guards, have control of the bank and are taking out large quantities of money in under a minute. The music is underplayed but still effective in creating tension during the sequence. Once McCauley and his crew emerge from the bank and Chris fires the first shot, the music stops and the rest of this exciting sequence plays out with no music — only the deafening roar of the guns firing as McCauley and his men try to escape and turn the streets of Los Angeles into a war zone. Mann made sure that the gunshots sounded realistic and went to great pains to make sure he got the right sounds for the machine guns. He said, “There's a certain pattern to the reverberation. It makes you think you've never heard that in a film before so it feels very real and authentic. Then you really believe the jeopardy these people are in.”

Mann alternates between shaky, hand-held cameras and fluid tracking shots with kinetic editing that brilliantly conveys the exciting action that is taking place. One of the reasons why this sequence works so well and comes across as being so authentic is due in large part to one of the technical advisors for the film: Andy McNab, a Special Forces soldier who infiltrated enemy lines in the Persian Gulf War to sabotage SCUD missiles. De Niro gave Mann his copy of Bravo Two Zero, written by McNab. It so impressed the filmmaker that he hired him to train the cast how to shoot guns for two months. McNab worked from a tape of L.A. Takedown, Mann’s T.V. movie rough draft of Heat, to get an idea of what Mann wanted. The actors rehearsed carrying around the weight of the money they would be stealing in the bank heist. De Niro had to practice how he would carry Kilmer once he was shot and how to fire his weapon with one hand.

Before filming the bank heist sequence, Mann and McNab conducted a dry run with the actors on a real bank. De Niro, Tom Sizemore and Kilmer all wore disguises and body armor. Only the bank manager knew what was really going on. A couple of guys covertly videotaped everything from cameras in bags. The sequence was to be shot at the Far East Bank in Los Angeles. Location manager Janice Polley and the producers spent months beforehand meeting with officials of the bank explaining what was involved. Mann and his crew took over the entire financial district of the city every weekend for five weeks. They were allowed to shoot between 6 pm on Friday and 5 am Monday morning. The production shut down 5th street in L.A. and notified hotels and residents within earshot. The bank heist sequence was so authentic that in 1998, two men foolishly tried to copy what was done in the film. They robbed a bank in L.A. and as McNab remembered, they even "delayed the robbery for three days so they could get exactly the same bags as Kilmer had, and they used machine guns, body armor—everything."

The rest of Heat plays out the aftermath and fallout of the bank heist as McCauley ties up loose ends and attempts to escape with Eady before Hanna can catch him. Ultimately, Heat is about choices. Neil’s final choice in the film is also his most crucial. He has to decide whether to stay with Eady or run on his own from Hanna who is now in hot pursuit. However, Neil hesitates too long and this is what ultimately defeats him. He goes against his own personal code and is punished. Hanna does not and is willing to sacrifice his personal life so that he can take McCauley down. The film ends as it began — without dialogue as Hanna tracks Neil down.

The origins of Heat were based in large part from the experiences of an old friend of Mann's, Chuck Adamson. The police officer had been chasing down a high-line thief named Neil McCauley in Chicago in 1963. One day, "they simply bumped into one another. Chuck didn't know what to do: arrest him, shoot him or have a cup of coffee." Heat was also based on another person according to Mann: “Another is a guy I can't really talk about, who's bright, intuitive, and driven, and runs large operations against drug cartels in foreign countries. He's a singularly focused individual and much of the core of Hanna's character comes from him.” From these two sources, Mann created a story that explored the relationship between Neil McCauley, a career criminal and Vincent Hanna, a dedicated cop with very similar approaches to their professions but on opposite sides of the law.

Mann wrote an early draft of Heat in 1979 that was 180 pages and based on real people he knew personally and by reputation in Chicago. He wrote another draft after making Thief with no intention of directing it himself. During a promotional interview for The Keep (1983), Mann talked about making Heat into a film and was still looking for another director to make it. In the late 1980s, Mann tried to produce the film several times and offered it to his friend and fellow filmmaker, Walter Hill but he turned it down. Mann was still not satisfied with the script, which had developed the character of McCauley but Hanna still needed work.

After making The Last of the Mohicans, Mann returned to a 1986 draft of Heat and decided that he would make it himself. He felt that the L.A. Robbery-Homicide division would be an ideal basis for a television show and took his script and “abridged it severely. I abstracted probably something like 110 pages from 180 pages ... so it’s lacking in the sense that it’s not fully developed.” The result was a made-for-television movie entitled, L.A. Takedown. It was an incredibly fast shoot – uncharacteristic for the methodical Mann – with only ten days of pre-production and 19 days of shooting. In comparison, Heat would have a six-month pre-production period and a 107-day shooting schedule. Takedown starred Scott Plank as Hanna and Alex McArthur as Patrick McLaren, the character that became Neil McCauley in Heat, with Michael Rooker, Xander Berkley (who has a small role in Heat), and Daniel Baldwin. It aired on NBC on August 27, 1989 at 9 pm. In many respects, Takedown was another draft of Heat. The director said in an interview, "it had a similar kind of nucleus, which was the rapport between the thief and the cop." In the L.A. Takedown script, McCauley's gang is not fleshed out all that much. The Chris Shiherlis sub-plot does not exist, the bungled bank robbery sting is gone, and Hanna's step-daughter's sub-plot does not exist. NBC was willing to buy the show if Mann recast the lead actor. He refused and the network did not pick it up.

After L.A. Takedown, Mann had a much clearer idea of how he wanted Heat to be structured. "I charted the film out like a 2 hr 45 min piece of music, so I'd know where to be smooth, where not to be smooth, where to be staccato, where to use a pulse like a heartbeat." In 1994, Mann showed producer Art Linson another draft of Heat over lunch and told him that he was thinking of updating it. Linson read it, loved it and agreed to make the film with Mann. On April 5, 1994, Variety announced that Mann was abandoning his James Dean biopic and prepping Heat with Al Pacino and Robert De Niro attached to the project with filming to take place in either Chicago or Los Angeles.

De Niro got the script first and then showed it to Pacino who read it and wanted to be a part of the film. De Niro thought it was a "very good story, had a particular feel to it, a reality and authenticity." To research their roles Mann took Val Kilmer, Tom Sizemore, and De Niro to Folsom prison and interviewed several inmates. Sizemore talked to one career criminal in particular who was a multi-millionaire and “had socked away several million dollars and continued to do it, you know one more score ... The guys we educated ourselves about only do big jobs, they won't do anything under $2 million. It's all true, that's what's amazing,” the actor remembered.

Scouting locations for Heat started in August of 1994 and continued through December with location manager Janice Polley, who had first worked with Mann on Last of the Mohicans. She had a staff of three to four people who went all over Los Angeles to find locations that had not been filmed before — no easy task. Mann let them know the kinds of houses each character would live in according to their income and financial status, the look of the house and the surrounding area. For example, Chris Shiherlis lived in Sherman Oaks, Vincent Hanna lived in Santa Monica, Neil McCauley's house was on the beach in Malibu, and Eady's house was in the Hollywood Hills. Polley did her job: less than 10% of the 85 locations used had previously appeared in a film. Not a single soundstage was used.

It was important for Mann to capture a certain vibe of L.A. It was almost another character in the film. The director remembers, “I wanted to capture basically the way the city felt to me being out in the middle of it at two in the morning or on top of the gas tower or on top of a roof or flying over it with the LAPD helicopters. You know, there’s a glow that it has, it’s unique western.” The most challenging location for Polley to get was Los Angeles Airport, one of the busiest in the country. After much negotiation, permission was given to shoot in a restricted area where the radar towers are located. At the last minute, Polley got a call. The Unabomber had threatened the post office at LAX and the FBI were called in to investigate. A delay in filming would have cost the production thousands of dollars. They met with LAX security and the FBI and it was determined that the area they were going to shoot in was far enough away from any potential danger.

Heat was released on December 15, 1995 in 1,325 theaters, grossing $8.4 million on its opening weekend. The film was a commercial success, grossing $67.4 million in North America and $120 million in the rest of the world for a worldwide total of $187.4 million.

Heat received mostly positive reviews from critics at the time. In his review for Time magazine, Richard Schickel praised Mann’s direction: “An opening sequence that may be the best armored-car robbery ever placed on film. He proceeds to a crazily orchestrated bank heist that goes awry and finishes in a wild firefight on a crowded downtown street that is a masterpiece of sustained invention.” Newsweek magazine’s David Ansen wrote, “Mann’s not interested in good or evil, but in behavior: the choices people make, the internal pressures that can cause the best-laid plans to go awry.” Roger Ebert gave the film three-and-a-half stars out of four and wrote, “It's not just an action picture. Above all, the dialogue is complex enough to allow the characters to say what they're thinking: They are eloquent, insightful, fanciful, poetic when necessary. They're not trapped with clichés.” In her review for The New York Times, Janet Maslin wrote, “The huge, well-chosen cast for Heat attests to Mr. Mann's eye for both esthetic interest and acting talent. Even small roles are so well emphasized that they show these performers off to fine advantage.”

However, in his review for the Washington Post, Hal Hinson wrote, “Ultimately, though, the movie never transcends the limitations of its Hemingwayesque, men-with-men attitudes. Its point of view about the innate violence of men is essentially that of Peckinpah's The Wild Bunch, but while the idea itself remains valid and even relevant, Mann cancels all that out with a ridiculous ending that suggests some sort of final spiritual, metaphysical mind-meld. To call it mythic absurdity is a kindness.” Entertainment Weekly gave the film a “B-“ rating and Owen Gleiberman wrote, “Mann's most perverse decision was to cast these two legends and then keep them apart from each other. Half-way through, they finally get an extended dialogue in a coffee shop (it's the first time the actors have ever been in a scene together), and you can feel their joy in performing. We're not watching McCauley and Hanna anymore; we're watching De Niro and Pacino trying to out-insinuate each other. For a few moments, Heat truly has some.”

One of the problems critics (and some viewers) had with Heat was Pacino's sudden, loud outbursts of outrageous dialogue. However, the actor justified his character's behavior in an interview: “I think that the character is prone to these kind of explosive irrational outbursts. A lot of those interrogations and that kind of thing, I got from watching detectives working, going into a kind of, flipping into a kind of–flipomatic, as they say–this state of just general chaos in order to get something. The hysteria shakes up the subject and gets to the truth.” Mann further elaborated in an interview where he explained that Pacino's character "will rock that person of his foundation, to the point where the man loses whatever defense mechanisms he may have set up against this detective coming in."

Heat has gone on to inspire numerous other films and filmmakers. Directors for both the Hong Kong crime film Infernal Affairs (2002) and the British gangster film Layer Cake (2004) have cited the look of Heat as an influence on their own work. Most impressively, before going into production on The Dark Knight (2008), director Christopher Nolan screened Heat for all his department heads. He said, “I always felt Heat to be a remarkable demonstration of how you can create a vast universe with one city and balance a very large number of characters and their emotional journeys in an effective manner.” Indeed, the bank heist that begins the film is reminiscent of the one staged in Heat right down to a cameo by William Fichtner as a defiant bank manager in a nice reference to the actor’s role in Mann’s film.