Collateral: The Ascent of Los Angeles

Collateral: The Ascent of Los Angeles
by Dileep Rao

The new thriller Collateral, directed by Michael Mann, is a superb example of the genre. Mann has always been at his best when telling taut stories in which danger and violence balloon in unexpected emergent directions, and here he does not disappoint. The film considers the story of a cab driver hired by a hit man to chauffer him around Los Angeles as he goes about his tour of duty on a single night.

The film stars Jamie Foxx as the cab driver Max and Tom Cruise as the hit man, Vincent. The third star of this film (though in many ways it takes the lead) is the city of Los Angeles itself. Mann has photographed this film with digital cameras that perfectly capture the Los Angeles night--one that is never truly dark, but rather is peppered with pools of light, lurid and layered, blending into ever less connected islands of activity.

Mann's Los Angeles is a phosphorescent and fluid world; life and death blend into each other with a suddenness and brutality that is jarring and entirely authentic. His is a city that is constantly moving, a pelagic shark that may let you pass, or may take an enormous bite out of you. Technically the film is excellent, the photography is exacting and the camera moves with a grittiness and rawness that exposes much of the territory that Mann has always dealt with, but to a greater effect: the film is jarring, brittle and fluid, emulating the brittleness of the men he is so fascinated with, men whose need for control leads them toward the violence that neither gives them that control nor teaches them how antithetical it is to their aims.

Cruise is genuinely great in this film, the first time I have thought he was well cast and acted brilliantly. He is not an actor of great depth or emotional truth but he can be very funny, incredibly charming and lethal. His lupine presence in this film snarls with a ferocity and calculated, adrenalized execution that is the finest performance of his career. His truest talent is for a physical communication that is crystal clear when it speaks instead of his words. Jamie Foxx is excellent, playing a subdued man put in extraordinary situations who, when broken from his somnambulent life, changes into an actualized and driven character with remarkable ease and subtlety. The film is an act of transference, the feral and willfully-alive Vincent gives charge to the eddying and sputtering Max just as the cab driver's thoughtfulness, in its brief spark, gives Vincent the room to think on himself and ponder his own existence.

There are some nice smaller performances by Mark Ruffalo, Javier Bardem and Jada Pinkett. But the show belongs to Cruise and Foxx and they play it to the hilt. Mann has crafted an exquisite picture that is sharp, harrowing and lurid, but in the end is a love letter to the beauty and daunting complexity that is Los Angeles.

Dileep can be reached at dileep@babblog.com.