Film Analysis of "Heat" (Dir. Michael Mann 1995): DeNiro and Pacino Actor Comparison ( Pages 1 • 2 • 3 • 4 )

 

 Other essays and articles in the Arts Archives related to this topic include : Tribal Depictions in the Michael Mann Film, The Last of the Mohicans (1992)  • The Presence of the Classic Epic Hero in the Film Star Wars •  Comparison of Films "Sidewalks of London" and "La Strada" : Leigh and Masina    Film Comparison of "Gone with the Wind" and "Cold Mountain"

 

Later after this point in the plot of the film “Heat” the character of Hanna finds his stepdaughter in the bathtub, where she is on the verge of death after having slit her wrists, and he takes her to the hospital but then leaves his wife to cope with the emergency on her own, as he’s just received a hot tip that might finally lead him to McCauley. In these scenes, and in many others, the viewer sees how difficult it is for Hanna to manage his personal life as successfully as he does his professional life. This does create a sense of character complexity in the film Heat by Michael Mann, however, as not all the “good guys” are wholly good and even the bad guys seem to have some kind of humanity.

 

Just as Hanna is not 100% good, neither is McCauley 100% bad, but like Hanna, he finds it profoundly challenging to relate with other people intimately outside of his immediate crew, all of whom are as emotionally incompetent as he is, if not more so. If one’s home, as some psychoanalysts have said, reflects one’s life, then Neil McCauley is empty in both respects. “When are you going to get some furniture?” asks his robber-buddy, Chris, who has crashed at McCauley’s sprawling bachelor pad with an amazing ocean view after an argument with his wife, who (rightly) wonders where all Chris’s money has disappeared if he and his boys are doing the impressive kinds of capers that capture evening news headlines. McCauley responds by saying, “When I get around to it,” but it is clear that he has no plans, immediate or long-range, to “get around to it.” When Chris asks McCauley when he plans to get a woman, McCauley’s answer is the same, and while he has no plan for doing that either, life intervenes, as it so often does, and drops a single Southern belle with a sweet Appalachian accent right in his lap. The viewer may be tricked for awhile into thinking that McCauley will give up his criminal life and set up house with Eady, who he genuinely seems to like, but the end of the movie confirms that McCauley has not grown as a character in this regard; until the bitter end he remained utterly incapable of reconciling his criminal vocation with more pedestrian and socially sanctioned relationships and activities.

 

One critic who wrote an acerbic, brow-beating review of the film by director Michael Mann, observed that both Hanna and McCauley are men who fit a description that “applies to most of [Mann’s] protagonists” (Gilbey, 2006, p. 38). They are heterosexual, they are risk-takers, they are “nothing without their jobs” (Gilbey, 2006, p. 38). They are “emotionally stunted,” yet because of the sympathetic portrayal of them, the audience is able to empathize with each of them (Gilbey, 2006, p. 38). In short, both are “are “doomed to lives of noble solitude” and both are “never more complete than when [they are] alone”(Gilbey, 2006, p. 38). Both have “pared [their lives] down to [the] barest essentials” in order to be able to fulfill what each genuinely believes he has been called to do, which, of course, is to complicate life for the other.

 

What is perhaps most fascinating about the characters played by De Niro and Pacino is the candor and intensity of the dialogue that occurs between the two men during the famous diner scene, in which they come face-to-face for the first time. After Hanna gets a tip as to McCauley’s whereabouts, he pulls him over on the side of the interstate. Hanna does not do the predictable and arrest McCauley; instead, he invites his nemesis for a coffee.

Just as improbably, McCauley agrees, and they both drive in their separate vehicles to a nearby diner, where the rivals share a coffee and some philosophical conversation that neither is capable of having with anyone other than the other. It is in this scene where the psychological complexity of the characters is on full display and in which the acting skills of both De Niro and Pacino are put to the test. Hanna and McCauley have a frank and intimate conversation they would be unlikely to be able to have with anyone else. They listen to one another respectfully. They do not use insults. Neither raises his voice. Both maintain their own positions assertively without being hostile towards the other and without capitulating. Incredibly, they identify their own similarities in an oddly moving exchange about the lives that they have chosen for themselves:

 

Hanna: “I don’t know how to do anything else.” McCauley: “Neither do I.” Hanna: “I don’t much want to either.” McCauley: “Neither do I.” The conversation is both longer and more thoughtful and respectful than one might expect from either character, particularly given the relative emotional ineptitude they have demonstrated up to this point, and it ends with the mutual understanding that they will continue to pursue one another, neither hesitating in pulling the trigger should it become necessary, as it ultimately does.

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