Collateral

Couldn't find a seamless way to mention it in this essay so I just want to say: everyone knows Tom Cruise and Jamie Foxx are great in this movie, but I feel like they still aren't given enough credit. Foxx is so sympathetic, one of the most relatable characters I've seen in film, and I love that Cruise imbues Vincent with unexpected vulnerability. These are two of my all-time favorite performances, and there is so much nuance in them. Frankly, every performance in this film is immaculate: Ruffalo, Henley, McGill, Berg, and Bardem. One of my favorite actors, Jada Pinkett Smith, doesn't get as much screen time as the leads, but in the time she has, she's wonderful. Since he's one of my favorite filmmakers, I don't think I could pick my favorite Michael Mann film, but Collateral might be the one I find myself returning to the most.

2 quick notes:

1) If I quote or allude to something Michael Mann said but don't directly link to it or cite my source, it's from the film's commentary track (which is great).

2) There are big-time spoilers ahead, in both the essay itself and the images that accompany it.

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“Over and over again I have seen how thoughts that were not thought and feelings that were not felt by day afterwards appeared in dreams, and in this way reached consciousness indirectly.” — Carl Jung

Gas stations, markets, nightclubs. Bustling transit hubs. A skyline of palm trees, refineries, and reflective skyscrapers. Lights that blanket the city like bioluminescence. This is the Los Angeles that belongs not to visitors or tourists but its nocturnal inhabitants, a city rendered with hallucinatory clarity in Michael Mann’s Collateral. One of the first images that came to Michael Mann during its development was, “guys stalking each other as near-silhouettes against the city at night,” and their story plays out along L.A.’s freeways and streets, the city’s circulatory system. Collateral is an inverted buddy film, the story of “a collision of two lives,” an existential noir. It’s a film about the intimacy of strangers, striking a balance between instinct and deliberation, finding purpose in a hostile universe. Collateral is a nightlong dream.

The film documents what happens when an agent of chaos is introduced into the well-ordered life of cabdriver Max Durocher. Jamie Foxx’s Max is a planner, averse to disarray and impulse. His taxi is a sanctuary, a reliably peaceful place unlike the world outside it. He says he’s working as a cab driver to fund his business idea, Island Limos, which he describes as, “an island on wheels. A cool groove, like a club experience.” The job is temporary, he says, but he’s been driving a taxi for twelve years.

Annie (Jada Pinkett Smith) is Max’s first passenger of the night, and their rapport is immediate. He sits silent while other fares ignore him, but something about Annie brings him out of his shell. He sees her. Intuits that she’s a lawyer. She admits to him that she’s stressed out about a big case, and he recognizes what she’s going through, listens to her, and gives her something important to him: a postcard of the Maldives that he keeps underneath his visor. A small gesture, but a big sacrifice. Whenever it gets heavy, that’s where he goes. His island timeout is a sacred, secret ritual for him. But he can’t bring himself to ask for Annie’s number, illustrating the inertia that plagues him. Annie’s the one who returns to give him her card. It’s a scene that tells us everything we need to know about Max, showing us his passivity, but more importantly, his incisiveness, his thoughtfulness, and his humanity.

He’s not quite so lucky with his next fare, a dangerous passenger in the form of Tom Cruise’s silver-haired assassin Vincent, who's just arrived in Los Angeles to kill five informants. Vincent is seemingly Max’s opposite: a man of action, instinct, improvisation. Annie is building a case, and Vincent is in town to tear it down. Unlike his dynamic with Annie, Max is uneasy with the man. The story he tells Max is that he’s in Los Angeles for one night to close a real estate deal, meet some friends. He offers Max several hundred dollars for his services for the night, and Max agrees.

Of course, Vincent is not who he says he is. Over the course of the night, he reveals everything there is to know about him. Vincent is something dredged up deep from the unconscious. He’s the personification of noir’s fatalism. He represents chaos and death and every unpredictable thing in our lives that we cannot plan or prepare for. Vincent is the Grim Reaper, the crushing weight of the future. He’s that whiff of mortality that reminds us it’s time to do, not dream. According to Michael Mann, he’s “the ghost of Christmas Future.” But Collateral is not just Dickens, it’s Shakespeare, with Vincent as the Ghost, a seemingly supernatural entity who appears only at night, and who draws Max, like Hamlet, “into madness,” and finally gives him direction.

Vincent is the man Heat’s Neil McCauley or Thief’s Frank could’ve become, Michael Mann’s man taken to the extreme — not a hero or an antihero, but an outright villain. Mann’s movies are about professionals, and Vincent is the ultimate embodiment of this. For him, there is room for nothing except the job. Vincent personifies the thing that keeps Mann’s men lonely: commitment to his profession at all costs, and at the expense of connection with others. In Neil McCauley’s words, “A guy told me one time, ‘Don't let yourself get attached to anything you are not willing to walk out on in 30 seconds flat if you feel the heat around the corner.’” The lines could’ve been spoken by Vincent himself, as he is the ultimate realization of this philosophy. And, like Manhunter’s Francis Dollarhyde, Vincent is a monster created by cruelty and neglect.

But Max has compassion. He’s gentle and kind. He cares for others, visiting his mother every night, making Annie feel at ease. Self-sacrifice is something he obviously understands. He doesn’t realize it yet, but he has potential, and all the makings of a hero — if only he could get out of his own way. Vincent’s and Max’s relationship feels like one of Mann's characters split into two conflicting aspects: the moral center, the man who cares and who seeks relationships, and the darker half who is so resistant to love that it renders him terminally alone. When Thief’s Frank tells Jessie about how he survived his time in prison, he says, “You gotta get to where nothing means nothing.” Vincent doesn’t have to get to where nothing means nothing because it’s where he’s always lived.

Vincent’s love of jazz reflects his approach to life, an approach summed up concisely when he tells Max: “Now we gotta make the best of it, improvise, adapt to the environment, Darwin, **** happens, I Ching, whatever man, we gotta roll with it.” It's unsurprising that Max hates jazz — and it’s appropriate that a jazz club is where Max begins to learn how to improvise. The club’s owner, Daniel Baker (Barry Shabaka Henley), is Vincent’s third target, and he’s the first one that Max actually meets. Daniel has a drink with the pair, telling them about the time he got to play jazz with Miles Davis (an anecdote that makes the “fierce” and “focused” legend sound not unlike a Michael Mann character). He says, “That night was the moment of my conception.” In just a few minutes of conversation, Henley conveys a history, the weight and shape of an entire life. Max thinks it’s one with worth. Vincent does not — or maybe he’s unwilling to admit that he does. Either way, it’s not enough for Vincent to let him go. To Vincent, Daniel is just a job. Something to cross off his to-do list.

Vincent could, at any time, kill Max and continue with his work unencumbered. Maybe after Ramone fell on the cab, giving the game away, or when Max destroyed Vincent's briefcase, torpedoing his hit list. Instead, Vincent sticks up for him, becomes his cheerleader, playing a warped, ****-talking Cyrano de Bergerac as he feeds Max lines to humble his abusive boss. He forces Max to visit his mother in the hospital, identifies himself as his “friend” rather than his client, urges him to call the girl he likes. He shares intimate details about himself, telling Max about the father who abused him and died of liver failure. Though he undercuts this revelation with a joke about killing his father, it’s otherwise the truth. When Max dresses him down, pinpointing that he was institutionalized, he looks genuinely wounded. Throughout his life, Vincent has hewed too closely to Neil McCauley’s code. As Max becomes more like Vincent to survive, the more Vincent finds himself affected by Max. While Max grows more confident, Vincent is being unmade.

Cruise’s performance is mostly cold and terrifying, but there are devastating moments when his Terminator-like mask briefly falls, showing us the child who was abused and institutionalized, betraying that his entire nihilistic persona is just that: an elaborate affectation to protect something terribly fragile and uncertain. The first hairline fracture in his exterior appears when he kills Daniel. He lets Daniel’s head fall into his hands and positions his arm almost lovingly on the table so he looks as if he’s sleeping. The screenplay describes the way he does this as, “gently, almost regretfully.” It’s an act that conveys remorse. After, he seems to collapse slightly, unable to look away from what he’s done.

According to Michael Mann in the film’s commentary, the “second anomaly” is something Vincent says off-handedly to Max just before they see his mother Ida (Irma P. Hall) in the hospital. Max resists Vincent’s suggestion to buy her flowers, and this offends Vincent, who argues, “She carried you in her womb for nine months.” It’s a confession: Vincent’s mother died before he remembered her, and there’s something reverent in his tone, another hint that his purported nihilism is indeed a lie. Once they enter the room, the dynamic between Vincent and Max veers into a “sibling rivalry.” When Max's mother turns her attention to Vincent to tell him the flowers he brought are beautiful, it flips a switch. He “glows with charisma” and begins to earn her affection, much to Max’s chagrin.

The nightclub Fever is where Vincent finds the fourth mark on his list, and it’s where he slips a third time. One of Peter Lim’s bodyguards disarms him, a rare moment of weakness for Vincent. He recovers quickly, grabbing a knife and stabbing the man in the leg. But Mann describes the beat just before he recovers as a glimpse into what’s going on inside Vincent: “In my mind, [ . . . ] it was almost as if Vincent was eleven years old for an instant, for a fraction of a second, and he’s confused by bad things that are happening to him. And he responds by reassembling his perspective and reacting and acting out with violent aggression.” It’s likely the pattern he’s followed his whole life.

In Fever, Vincent makes a decision to save Max. If everything Vincent told Max about himself was true, he would have let him die and proceeded to his final hit, but he chooses not to. “You’re alive. I saved you,” he crows afterward. “Do I get any thanks? No.” It’s both a testament to his attachment to Max and his fundamental misunderstanding of human behavior. He thinks this act was heroic, an expression of the illusory friendship he perceives between them, and that Max will appreciate it, and him. He doesn’t understand that killing Mark Ruffalo’s Detective Ray Fanning, Max’s only ally and rescuer, might erase any good will that the act could have otherwise earned him.

Without realizing it, Vincent seeks and clings to what feels like family. He turns Max into a brother and Ida into a mother. Most of his interactions with Max express this perceived brotherhood: talking to him about the meaning of life, hoping he'll call the girl he likes, bickering with him over his briefcase when killing him would be much more efficient. Fanning recalls an almost identical scenario that took place in Oakland where a cab driver inexplicably killed three people, then himself. The detective on the case always thought someone else was in the cab. We surmise that this must have been Vincent’s work, or the work of someone just like him. But Vincent makes it sound as if, unlike Max’s predecessor, he wants to let Max live.

In Mann’s and Cruise’s backstory for Vincent, they imagined that the character’s alcoholic, abusive father loved jazz, and Vincent became interested in it to bond with him in the only way he could. Maybe Daniel reminds Vincent of his father, and this is the source of his transient guilt when he kills him. He’s a lost child looking for warmth and kinship. And toward the end of the film, Max starts to apprehend this. Michael Mann says that, “Max sees beyond the end of Vincent’s gun and sees Vincent for who Vincent is, which is damaged goods.”

In Man and His Symbols, Jung writes: “There are other hero myths in which the hero gives in to the monster. A familiar type is that of Jonah and the whale, in which the hero is swallowed by a sea monster that carries him on a night sea journey from west to east. [ . . . ] The hero goes into darkness, which represents a kind of death.” Max drives headlong into the darkness, with Vincent as his passenger. Max and Vincent represent the best and worst aspects of masculinity, and of humanity: Max is a protector, Vincent is an annihilator. And the annihilator takes Max on a guided tour of death, first making him watch Daniel’s murder. It’s hard not to read Daniel as a surrogate for Max, a man who never quite achieved his dreams, a man who earns Vincent’s respect but gets killed anyway. During this visitation, Vincent is in Ghost of Christmas Future mode, inadvertently showing Max how he might end up if he never pursues his goals.

After Max destroys the list of dedos, Vincent forces him to meet an emissary of death in the form of Felix Reyes-Torrena (Javier Bardem), the drug lord who hired him. Max must pretend to be Vincent in order to retrieve another copy and to preserve Vincent's anonymity. It marks the first time he’s truly stood up for himself, and he does it by mimicking Vincent, absorbing his strengths, harnessing his darkness. Meeting with Felix is practice, another test. (Max fails his first test when he can't talk his way out of a ticket.) If Max doesn’t pass, he will die. And he will experience a figurative death — when he crashes the cab and emerges from the wreck, a reset and a rebirth.

Throughout the night, Max traverses the wilderness of Los Angeles with a gunfighter in his backseat, their story hurtling toward a showdown. And, absent any meaningful help from the authorities, Max must make his own law. (Fanning tries to help, offering Max a brief glimmer of hope, but we know how that goes.) Collateral is a neo-noir, but it’s also a western, and Max is haunted by images of cowboys that seem to urge him to action. There’s the picture of a cowboy in Ramone Ayala’s apartment. Men dressed as cowboys fill El Rodeo, and a poster inside for Que Buena Radio depicts two men in cowboy hats that loom over Max as he enters the nightclub. The film’s most memorable image is the unfinished mural of a headless vaquero lassoing a bull outside Max’s work. It’s easy to read Vincent as the vaquero, but by the end, it’s Max who’s in control. He has to become the vaquero to save Annie and himself. Like his Maldives postcard or Frank’s collage in Thief, the mural of the vaquero is a dream that Max aspires to make real. (After Max gives Annie the postcard, her business card replaces it on his visor: a new dream replaces the old.)

Vincent and Max were never as dissimilar as they first appeared. When they stop at a red light and watch the coyotes lope across an empty street, the connection between them and Vincent is clear: the coyote is a nighttime apparition, a solitary hunter, a kindred spirit. It's elemental. But Max notices it, too. For Vincent, it illustrates who he is. For Max, it illustrates what he could be: a creature seemingly out of its comfort zone who is, in fact, fully in command of itself and its surroundings. Mann says this scene depicts both characters, "submerging into his own perspective of what life is: a retrospective moment; a prelude to a violent confrontation.” It’s an image that resonates with both men, linking them as lonely outsiders.

Jung wrote, “Everyone carries a shadow, and the less it is embodied in the individual’s conscious life, the blacker and denser it is. [ . . . ] At all events, it forms an unconscious snag, thwarting our most well-meant intentions.” Vincent is Max’s unconscious snag, his shadow made manifest. He’s something Max has been repressing, finally unshackled. These men are symbiotic, two sides of the same coin, typifying the Apollonian and the Dionysian. (And in Greek mythology, Apollo and Dionysus weren’t enemies, they were brothers.) They even play-act being one another: Max takes Vincent’s place at El Rodeo, Vincent takes Max’s place in the hospital. In spite of his posturing, Vincent is as trapped as Max is, and an even bigger mess. Vincent is the photo negative of Max. He forces Max to “look in the mirror,” to self-reflect, to confront hard truths about himself. Max ultimately rejects Vincent’s perspective, but he assimilates his darkness in order to evolve.

Vincent seems to be the shadow of Los Angeles itself, a monster dreamed up by the city’s collective unconscious, who believes in — and represents — the worst aspects of the city. A city that is unplanned, spread out, isolated. Comprised of little enclaves, enclosures that keep us from each other and guarantee anonymity and loneliness. “17 million people. This was a country, it’d be the fifth biggest economy in the world and nobody knows each other,” Vincent tells Max. “Whenever I’m here, I can’t wait to leave. It’s too sprawled out, disconnected.” But Vincent is describing himself. He embodies the very thing he hates about Los Angeles: a disconnected, alienated, guarded entity.

The film’s end is a refutation of Vincent’s mentality, an exorcism. But it’s also a transformation and an acceptance. Max subsumes some of Vincent’s qualities — he must be a little bit more like Vincent to save Annie’s life, and to be a more fully realized human being. If not for Vincent, he may not have ever called Annie or seen her again. Mann calls Vincent “an agent for the liberation” of Max. Max survives because he learns from Vincent, and he uses Vincent’s lessons for good. Ironically, Vincent fails to kill Max on the train because he was as methodical as Max is: he shoots in the same exact pattern that helped the coroner recognize his kills. (“Two in the sternum, one in the head. This guy is shooting in tight groups, too. Double taps a couple millimeters apart.”) He’s precise, and he would have hit his target — if the metal doors hadn’t obstructed his shots. But Max aims for the windows on either side of the metal, managing to hit Vincent by chance. He succeeds by improvising.

When Vincent first meets Max, he recounts a story: “I read about this guy, gets on the MTA here, dies. Six hours he's riding the subway before anybody notices his corpse doing laps around L.A., people on and off sitting next to him. Nobody notices." His perspective becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. Max’s connection with Annie contradicts Vincent’s outlook. To him, people aren’t strangers. Like Max says, if someone held a gun to Vincent’s head and said, “You got to tell me what’s going on with this person over here, or I’m gonna kill you. What is driving him? What was he thinking? You know, you couldn’t do it, could you, because…they would have to kill your ass because you don’t know what anyone else is thinking.” He can’t understand Max, what’s going through his head and what he’s capable of. “What are you gonna do, shoot me?” he asks, just before Max shoots him. And ultimately it’s this blindspot, this tragic flaw that's his downfall. Whereas Max’s ability to empathize with and to recognize another person is his advantage over the contract killer. Screenwriter Stuart Beattie said: “You realize that they are just two very lonely people struggling really to find out who they are in the world. One of them grows and one of them doesn't and as a result the one who doesn't, dies. That's the price.”

As he dies, Vincent becomes a ghost in the reflection of the train window, diminished, so small compared to Annie and Max, who sit across from him. The city’s horizon glows behind Max and Annie, but only darkness backgrounds Vincent. A tree’s silhouette passes behind him at the moment he dies, like a shadowy thing leaving his body.

When he understands his death is imminent, he spares Max and Annie. Maybe he's too weak to finish the job, or maybe it seems pointless. Vincent never changed, but maybe he recognized the humanity in Max, his worth. And now Vincent wonders whether his own life meant anything. He repeats the story of the man who died on the MTA, and here it takes on new meaning. “Think anyone will notice?” he asks Max. It’s a question about himself. About whether anyone will notice that he’s gone, or that he was ever there.

Maybe Collateral is a story about nothing more than survival in an uncaring universe. Vincent’s arrival was meaningless, just a blip in Max’s life, and Max will ultimately remain unchanged by this encounter and never achieve his dreams, just as Vincent coldly predicted. But even Vincent never really bought his own bull****.

When Max witnesses Vincent’s first murder, he wants to know who the man was. To give him “perspective,” Vincent informs him that millions were killed in Rwanda, and he asks whether Max ever did anything about it. Max says he doesn't know any Rwandans. Vincent counters, “You don't know the guy in the trunk, either.” Vincent’s mercenary perspective on humankind is what distinguishes him from Max: Max recognizes the value of a single life, and Vincent never will. In truth, Collateral is about the value of human life and our connections with one another, the importance of empathy, and the meaning we create in spite of the universe’s indifference.

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