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Film: Miami Vice
While Heat, The Insider, and Collateral are better Michael Mann movies, Miami Vice is his greatest work of art.
I feel like I'm watching an impressionist painting or listening to a master jazz musician play a familiar song in a totally unusual way...you think it's a crime epic, a franchise reboot, a police procedural, or an action film. None of the above. It's an experimental film.
First, the screenplay structure. It has all the components we're familiar with - the undercover cops get their mission (inciting incident), they go deep undercover in false identities (upside down world), an unlikely love story emerges as a B-plot, they uncover a rat, the bad guys get ahead of them the problem, we get an "all is lost" moment when one of their team is taken hostage right before the 3rd act turn, a showdown in finale. But the reason why many folks didn't "like" the film is because all of these major structural moments are completely deemphasized in the storytelling. The moment they discover the rat in the FBI office is basically a throwaway, almost expositional beat. Most viewers probably won't even notice it during the first watch of the film. The "inciting incident" is almost completely buried because it comes right after an intense emotional moment when their old CI (John Hawkes) throws himself in front of a truck. The "all is lost" moment is almost vague, with the shots of the white supremacists holding Trudy in the trailer park - you can't see their faces at all, rendering the situation mysterious and from Trudy's blindfolded POV rather than an emotional crisis for Sonny and Tubbs. None of the structural turns are uplifting or cause "oh shit" moments of reversal that we are accustomed to from "good movies." The movie doesn't care about the plot. I'm not even sure the movie cares about character development or the relationships. What the movie cares about are moments. Moments infused with different types of emotion, each like a moving painting that accumulates into an experience of the artwork, it is these moments that we remember from the film -- the opening impressionistic montage in the club, where we don't get to see any of the main characters head-on; we just get glimpses of them working. The streak of blood on the freeway, the brief interludes of "reality" that occur in the shower, their criminal contact (Nicolas) on his couch, a thunderstorm in the deep, deep background. Jose Yero watching Isabella and Crockett dance, with "cuts" of other people passing the frame, of Montoya's back of his head, the speedboat to Havana, the private jets floating in the sky, the Haitian gangster waving Crockett and Tubbs to the basement meeting, Gong Li in the yellow light of the limo driving away, the FBI agent exploded by .50 bullets through a car, the Chinese man carrying a USB through Ciudad del Este. These are all moments that leave a mark on us - they capture paranoia, fear, envy, horror, peace, freedom, fury, longing...elemental things about our existence and our universe. Because that's the other thing I think Mann is after in this film - he's not trying to find a structure to the story, but rather to explain the structure of our world. There is an underlying order to this universe, an order that transcends people, cities, nations, bureaucracies, or even morality (good vs evil)... and that order is commerce. Trade. Money. Transport. That's it. That's the order. Morality and love, they are brief, momentary respites that exist within and perhaps on top of a completely different order altogether. That's what the film is trying to capture. That's why he loves the depth of field of the digital cameras, because WE (the humans, and the characters) are not the focus of the structure. The structure is elsewhere - the structure is the long shot from the front of the go fast boat - the ocean on the way to Cuba, it's the depth of the shot into Miami from the freeway right before Hawkes steps onto the road. It's the final shot...the back of Crockett stumbling back into the hospital to re-join his team, a tiny little speck within something much, much larger and elusive. Just consider how that shot compares to the opening of Heat. A slow mo shot of DeNiro, also entering a hospital...a shot that says: pay attention to this character, he's important to this story. Versus Crockett...the shot is of the building, the structure which towers over him.
And more thoughts. Just think about the dialogue in this film. Is it even dialogue? Do you remember any actual exchanges between characters? Do they sound like how human beings talk? Do they match the rhythms of speech or conflict? They are snipits. Lines. Fucking haikus. "I'm a fiend for mojitos." "Time is luck. Luck run out." "She mine now." "Because you live a life of crime." "I ain't playing." "Ships move, that's why they called ships. I need a vector." "I run it. (for emphasis) I run it." "Don't shine me on, slick." "But you got your tan in Miami." "They are wrong." "Which way is up." "We can get down if the play calls for it." "Smooth, that's how we do it." It's like the opposite of Seinfeld where the situations are paramount -- they are describable and recognizable. The dialogue are little meditations, fortune cookies...
This movie is so awesome.