Collateral — Someday Is Tonight

Twelve years of a temporary job climb into a cab with a man who has no future at all.

Watch what Max Durocher does before he takes a single fare. He wipes down his cab the way a surgeon gloves up, and he clips a photograph to the sun visor: an island in the Maldives, white sand, water the color of a promise he keeps making himself. He has never been there. At red lights he looks at it the way other men look at rosaries. Ask him about his plans and he will walk you through Island Limos, the luxury car service he is going to launch any year now, the moment every detail is perfect. He has been driving this cab, temporarily, for twelve years. Michael Mann opens the film by handing this man one perfect fare at dusk, a federal prosecutor named Annie who bets him her shortcut beats his, loses graciously, and leaves her card on the seat like a door left ajar. Then the next passenger gets in. Gray suit, gray stubble, and an offer: six hundred dollars for five stops before dawn.

The passenger is Vincent, and the first stop tells you exactly what kind of night this is going to be, because a body comes out of a fourth-floor window and lands on the roof of the cab. Max stares at the dead man and asks the only sane question. You killed him? The answer holds the whole movie in six words: “No. I shot him. The bullets and the fall killed him.” That is precision offered where a conscience should be, and it chills more than any threat could. A few minutes later Vincent hands over his creed, and he means it as comfort. A man died on the MTA right here in Los Angeles, he says, and rode the loop for six hours before anybody noticed the corpse sitting next to them. Seventeen million people and nobody watching any of them. Vincent uses the story the way he uses everything, as permission. Nobody notices anybody, so nothing means anything, so do the job.

Collateral gets filed away as a hitman thriller, and that sells short what Mann actually made, which is a two-hander about putting your life off and the counterfeit cure for it. Vincent looks like decisiveness in a pressed suit. No attachments, no hesitation, total presence in every moment, everything the self-help shelf promises. But the film keeps letting Max see through the tailoring, and eventually he says it straight to Vincent’s face: the standard parts that are supposed to be there in a person, in him, are not. Vincent has not beaten the fear that runs Max’s life. He has cut out the part of himself that could feel it. The island photo on the visor and the killer’s adapt-and-improvise patter are the same disease wearing opposite bodies. One man postpones living. The other has abolished the self that would do the living. The night locks the two of them in one car and makes each man the other’s verdict.

What makes the film permanent is what Mann does with the city itself. He shot the nights on early digital cameras because celluloid could not see Los Angeles after dark without drowning it in movie light, and the video sensors drank the sodium-vapor ceiling straight. For the first time, the city at night looked on screen the way it actually looks through a windshield: a grainy gray-orange sky with palms inked against it, streets legible for miles, distance in every direction. Understand how strange that is. Noir night is cover, shadow you can hide in. This night is exposure. Everything is visible and nothing is seen, which means the look of the film is the MTA story printed on every frame. And then the coyote. Somewhere past midnight a coyote crosses the boulevard through the headlights, unhurried, eyes flaring green, a guitar moaning low under it. It is literally an animal the city displaced, commuting through the middle of it. Mann holds the shot a beat longer than he has to, and it turns into a mirror for the two displaced predators watching from the cab, each one deciding what he is.

The casting alone tells you what Mann is hunting. Tom Cruise, the most eager-to-be-liked movie star of his generation, plays a man who deploys likability the way a locksmith deploys a pick, and the gray rinse dresses him in the city’s own colors. He is camouflaged as the light. Watch the alley takedown, or the run through the Fever club: efficiency with no adrenaline in it, violence done as clerical work. Jamie Foxx answers him with velocity running in reverse, and his best scene has no gunfire in it at all. Forced to impersonate Vincent in front of Felix, the cartel middleman, Max borrows the killer’s posture and cadence and negotiates like a man who has done this forever, and you watch him discover improvisation twelve years late, under a borrowed name, at gunpoint. Then there is the jazz club, where Barry Shabaka Henley’s Daniel tells the story of the night Miles Davis walked into his room in 1964, and the film quietly sets before Max the life he keeps deferring: a man who built four walls around one perfect memory and calls it home. Vincent dresses the contract up as a jazz quiz, lets the man shine one last time, and completes the job anyway. It is the cruelest scene in the picture, because the pleasure Vincent takes in the story is real. Appreciation and annihilation wear the same face.

Only the last movement blinks. When the final name on Vincent’s list turns out to be Annie, the chamber piece trades its pressure for a finale other movies could have supplied: a blackout, a stalk through the law library stacks, a sprint to the trains. Mann runs it with total command, and it is still the one stretch where Collateral resembles its genre instead of rising past it. The coincidence stings too. A night the film built on randomness suddenly needs fate to close the loop, first fare and final target the same woman. And Mark Ruffalo’s detective, the one man in the city who reads the night correctly, gets an hour of careful build and is spent with a single bullet the film never pauses to mourn. The complaint is real. It does not sink the picture, because Mann shoots the ending not as a routine but as a rhyme.

Vincent dies on the MTA. Shot through the door glass between cars of a dawn train, he takes a seat, straightens his jacket, and becomes his own anecdote: a guy gets on the subway and dies, think anybody will notice? The film has spent two hours arranging the answer. One person will, and one person is the entire moral. Max steps onto the platform with Annie into gray morning light having finished, for the first time in twelve years, something he started. Two decades on, every digitally shot city night in movies owes this film its texture, and Max himself has only gotten more familiar, because an economy now runs on skilled people driving strangers through the dark and calling it temporary. Vincent was wrong about the city, but he was right about the clock. Nobody is coming along to notice you into your life. Dawn on that platform is what it looks like when a man finally notices himself.