Miami Vice - 2006 - Film

Wednesday, August 2, 2006

Without any opening credits, expository dialogue, or introductory establishing shots, Michael Mann's latest Miami Vice begins with its characters already in motion. Detectives Ricardo Tubbs (Jamie Foxx) and James Crockett (Colin Farrell) are at a nightclub caught among rays of light and reflections as they search for the suspects in their case. They move outdoors where the Miami skyline hangs in the background as an establishment of location, and as another face itself that makes their hunt more difficult. The detectives' obstacle is the simple movement of people and objects as it is figuring out the logistical narrative of the case. They map their way through the space of the city where angles of light and shadow on the face of buildings and streets are as much a part of the story as the criminals they are after.

About a week ago I heard a public radio segment called "Two Minute Reviews" by Bob Mandelo, who described the film as "over-stylized." As you can imagine his two minutes were up quick, and he devoted the bulk of his time lauding the actors' performances, and didn't once comment on what it meant that the film was so style-heavy. Then I came across Sean Burn's review from the Philadelphia Weekly, and he helped flesh-out some of that abstract Mann style. My favorite description is this:

You don't so much look at the screen as peer into it, mesmerized. Miami Vice's best scenes border on painterly abstractions—propulsive mini-symphonies of motion and color, punctuated by shocking bursts of violence.

He gets it. And you can read his entire review here, if you like.

Watching Miami Vice reminded me of Mann's 2004 summer flick Collateral, which employed much of the same "painterly" style, though of the Los Angeles skyline rather than Miami's. In both of these films Mann keeps the audience occupied with setting as much as characters, he makes us aware of how a space influences a character's actions, how a person's colorings change as a result of their environment. The narrative of the story is synchronized with the kinetics of action within the city; flickering lights on the skyline, reflective surfaces of cars and streets, and the immovable figures of Tubbs and Crockett as they stand within a perpetually moving environment set the movements of their world to one beat.

Dialogue is sparse within the narrative so that it de-emphasizes Foxx's and Farrell's star presence, and the audience's eye is instead relied upon to see the overall action taking place in the cityscape. There is heaviness to the picture that creates a real sense of anxiety. Crockett and Tubbs don't smile much (if at all?), and they utter no marketable one-liners that are traditional to most action movies. The two agents complete their job, they finish a transaction of business and justice prevails. The payoff for their work is the job's termination, and we get a sense that bigger things loom in the agents' off-screen life. As the final shot fades to black the first credit appears and reads, "Miami Vice." It is a word succeeding its definition, and the film ends like it began, like a sequence of action that has no finite beginning or end.


Post-Publishing Note, (08/28):
Michael Anderson at Tativille also has a lot to say about this movie, and he is very specific in describing the cultural colorings within Miami and its surrounding countries and cities. He also references Howard Hawks, Wong Kar-wai, and Budd Boetticher to substantiate his deconstruction of this so-called "over-stylized" film. Check it out.