Having Enough Time

There are nights when it seems like L.A. goes on forever. A city without end. A future that stretches into infinity. And no matter how far you drive, you can never leave. You have no choice but to stay there. You need to stay there to create your own story, your own myth, the person you want to become and there’s nowhere else to do that. Before you know it, it’s like you’ve become one with the place. It’s part of you. And, hopefully, you’re part of it even if it’s only part of the mythology in your own head. Watching HEAT sometimes I can’t help but think to myself, is this the L.A. where I’ve been living all this time? Is this what L.A. was when it was made? Is this what it still is now? And how much have I changed in all the years since I first saw it? Kate Mantilini, the restaurant in Beverly Hills down the street from the Academy where Vincent Hanna and Neil McCauley go for coffee closed for good over ten years ago. Is it still the L.A. we know and love if that place is gone? Bob’s Big Boy in Toluca Lake, one of the other unnamed restaurants in the film and where McCauley recruits Donald Breedan to be their driver on the big job, is at least still there, which is a relief but it’s not quite the same thing. Maybe each of these places will always be there in our heads, so we can keep the mythology of our own lives going for as long as we can.

The experience of watching HEAT, because it is an experience, goes with the mood of watching it, because the whole film is a mood, and it’s still an exhilarating one all the way through, an epic which comes out of the feeling you get from that portrayal of Los Angeles through the lengthy running time, an epic because of who the people in the film become as you watch it. An epic because of the place and the people, but maybe they’re one and the same. The rush of the film comes out of who they are and what they are thanks to that place. It’s an almost simplistic cops-and-robbers story that gets fused into a visual and sonic experience allowing us to place ourselves in this story that becomes almost overwhelming the more they stay in our heads. And it feels like that’s what it was always supposed to be since back then it was impossible to imagine any other film that could possibly feature both Al Pacino and Robert De Niro together in the same scene for the first time. Just about my strongest memory of seeing the film at the Chinese Theater on opening weekend back in December 1995 was the applause heard at the end of the coffee shop scene between the two of them. Everyone there knew how important this moment was. This feeling has always stayed with me and for a long time I almost couldn’t imagine seeing the film anywhere but the Chinese, nothing else ever seemed good enough. That theater was built for a film like HEAT. It’s what the film deserves as well as the theater, appropriate for a film that creates its own myth.

In Los Angeles, professional thief Neil McCauley (Robert De Niro) and his crew which includes Chris Shiherlis (Val Kilmer) and Michael Cherlitto (Tom Sizemore), rob over a million dollars in bearer bonds from an armored car but the job goes wrong when new addition Waingro (Kevin Gage) gets trigger happy in the middle of the robbery but he escapes before Neil can take care of him. The unexpected body count catches the attention of Robbery Homicide Detective Vincent Hanna (Al Pacino) who begins to investigate and soon gets on the trail of the next job McCauley is going to pull. At the same time Hanna is also trying to save his marriage to Justine (Diane Venora) while McCauley has just met graphic designer Eady (Amy Brenneman) and started a relationship with her. With Hanna and his own crew on the tail of them, McCauley and his crew soon become aware of the heat close by as they plan one last bank job before breaking off for good.

Thirty years on, HEAT remains an overwhelming film, one which should be seen on the biggest ‘Scope screen imaginable with a Dolby system as loud as possible and if only this is the way it could always happen yet the most epic things in it are still the faces of all these characters along with what Michael Mann finds in them. He understands these people so much through what gets revealed in those faces and it feels like for the writer-director that this film was his big statement, it was what he’d been building towards in his career beyond his directorial debut THIEF and serving as executive producer of MIAMI VICE, the purest expression of what he wanted to portray cinematically in how he saw the world and its people, the clothes, the music, the vibe, all of those things that fascinated him so much, always feeling tangible in a way that makes you feel the essence of every scene. HEAT is spectacular and always has been, a phenomenally well-made film and one that has a power to it all the way through, staying in the mind for all these years as we wonder about these characters and the choices they make, playing back certain scenes in our heads repeatedly. Watching it again, it all feels like what I want a movie to be deep down maybe more than I ever realized. It takes a crime story which is essentially pulp and makes it become an epic through that sense of pure visual and emotional intensity. And, it should be said, ultimately, it is pulp. Beautiful, glossy, rich pulp. Maybe this is part of why I don’t approach what the film is as something out of the real world and only take it so seriously as an actual drama since this isn’t strict realism and these aren’t people in the real world, almost none of them are. They’re archetypes, they’re symbols, they’re what we find ourselves projecting onto them, all a part of this story that is sprawling, willing to linger as the characters try to understand what’s in front of them yet it always feels tightly plotted, moving like a freight train towards the big job and what follows. It’s a story set in Los Angeles but it also somehow feels like it takes place on the edge of the world, which may be the same thing.

“I felt like being alone,” Vincent Hanna’s pre-teen stepdaughter Lauren played by Natalie Portman tells him when he picks her up in his car after not meeting her mother as expected. So much of the film is about people being alone and what they are when they’re alone, no matter how much they want to be with someone else. Much of the time L.A. is about being alone too and it’s the perfect city for this to be set in. Neil McCauley is the one who distinguishes between alone and lonely with the way De Niro embodies the character felt right from the start as he moves quickly through all these places, past all those regular lives he’ll never know anything about or understand. Al Pacino’s Vincent Hanna, meanwhile, is introduced making love to his wife, his third of course, and it seems like it was a pretty strenuous session for the early morning but the roller coaster of their marriage is going to make things go bad again pretty soon and the fighting will start up once more, the pretense he is able to put up about being with someone only lasting for so long. Characters in this film are with people they seem comfortable with if only on a surface level but the real person only comes through when they’re without them and that’s usually when the real choices happen. Portman’s character only appears for a few moments before she figures into the third act in a way that changes everything for her mother and stepfather but the broad strokes of what she’s going through are so well-defined, nothing to do with the crime story but fits in perfectly as another piece of the world Vincent Hanna has chosen to be a part of.

The film is about all of them alone but it’s also about all these people together, filtered through a story about a few armed heists and everyone on both sides of the law affected by what happens but is ultimately about these two guys. Hanna zeroes in on McCauley immediately, as if he somehow knows they’re the same and the plotting moves so fast that at times it can be easy to miss the details through all the fury of the sound mix but they’re there, things like the linchpin of their plan to rob the bank involving cutting the alarm twenty minutes before and the bodyguard played by Henry Rollins tipping off when it’s happening seeming brushed over but this is still plot stuff, not always what needs to be worried about. Introduced as a badass and nothing else, inserting Waingro back into the story as a serial killer is kind of a blind alley in terms of plot, dropped almost as soon as it’s brought up as he moves onto other matters, there to keep him in the film and a reminder of how dangerous he is plus to give Pacino a big moment that can lead into his own marital dilemma. But it’s also one of those things that makes the film more of a mosaic than a tight, condensed structure, a tapestry where things flow in and out, sometimes moving away from us but then coming back in ways we never expected.

Even the way the two men dress says something about them, the way McCauley wears his jacket, white shirt and no tie like his own armor to keep from being noticed, a nice contrast to the flash of Vincent’s suits that I envy so much and the relationships to their women feel a part of this. The chemistry Vincent has with wife Justine brings a pop to their scenes that fit just right with my weakness for Diane Venora in this film, the cool artsy woman dressed in black, going together perfectly on a surface level but they can never keep the streak on after the great morning sex when he checks out and heads to the next crime scene. It’s not as easy to imagine Neil with any woman so his pairing with the quieter Eady isn’t as obvious, but their tentative way with each other brings an unexpected tenderness to their first scenes as if what’s happening surprises each of them, two people looking for any kind of connection without knowing they need it. Just as Hanna might admit to himself in the end that it can’t work with Justine, no matter how much he would like it to, McCauley isn’t as quick to do that about Eady, denying what he’s always told himself about the possibility of the heat nearby and unable to accept that just because he would like the idea of going off with her doesn’t mean he ever really could. In their big confrontations Vincent and Justine are apart from each other, as if unable to be joined in the same shot while in their own key scene Neil and Eady are framed in a gorgeous tableau overlooking the water, together yet still separate, not looking at each other, close but far away. The people on the fringes of the story who attach themselves to others can’t entirely connect no matter how much one person might be reaching out, the way Donald Breedan’s girlfriend doesn’t find out what choice he made until she sees it on the news, the mother racing for a look at her dead daughter before Hanna stops her, the way Danny Trejo begs to be put down when he learns his wife has been killed and especially how much the layout of the fractured marriage between Val Kilmer’s Chris and Ashley Judd’s Charlene is given in just a few moments, the one pairing where it feels like an understanding was reached about who he is but that doesn’t mean it’s not going to fall apart no matter how much they still love each other in the end.

The L.A. of HEAT is not the real L.A. and yet it is, one familiar and not quite, just as sometimes the light hits through the darkness in exactly the right way, just as I always wonder about the strict geography at any point and imagine the missing sequence where McCauley follows behind Hanna for an hour as they drive to Kate Mantilini for coffee. I also wonder how Eady affords her place over Sunset Plaza on a bookstore salary but maybe some of these things were just easier back in the nineties and no one told me. Clearly the idea of strict realism doesn’t matter here, it’s the essence of it all that does. Much as this makes the city where it takes place about that feeling, the film also has a minimum of establishing shots unless there’s a specific purpose, like the one that leads directly into the location of the metals job done with a directorial flourish showing how empty the city can feel at night that takes us down into the scene before we expect it to. It’s the people in the film that are the establishing shots, their faces becoming as important a part of the L.A. landscape as any shot of a freeway or building, suddenly finding themselves in these spaces which become a part of them. How much of the film is made up of the characters in these voids, surrounded by so much yet completely alone because they can’t be any other way. Shot by the great Dante Spinotti, every frame looks like it belongs in a coffee table book, maybe sold exclusively at the bookstore Eady works at, showing places in the city that I know I’d never be able to find but also those places I thought I knew but suddenly look so different, a place where so much of life happens in these diners and restaurants and homes that look out on where it all takes place. This is particularly felt in McCauley’s empty pad overlooking the water he fears drowning in or the “dead-tech, post-modernistic bullshit” sterileness of Justine’s house which feels perfect for her character so you can almost imagine Hanna is all too happy to leave at the beginning of the day after the early morning sex. By the time he returns at night all he needs is his bottle of Jack Daniel’s and that house doesn’t feel like a permanent residence for him any more than Neil’s does.

As big as it feels, the story somehow becomes more compact on each new viewing, more about the emotions of these people than simple plot mechanics. The focus is on them more than the action but all that action is beautifully executed by Mann and nothing else made around this time is quite like it, whether the growing tension of the opening robbery, the nastily effective shootings in the abandoned drive-in sequence but especially the bank heist with Brian Eno’s “Force Marker” ticking along with the rising tension of the robbery until the gunfire erupts so deafening that it makes you want to duck down in the movie theater, too loud for any score, turning the streets into a warzone and even as I wonder about a suburban supermarket in the middle of downtown L.A. (again, it needs to be remembered that realism is not the issue here) there’s nothing else quite like it. Mann’s approach to action contains a true sense of danger to each moment that is always visceral as it builds through each shot, always intense as well as done with a sense of total clarity so as big as it gets, the danger always feels real and the sheer rush that comes from it all is undeniable. Mann doesn’t do unnecessary crashes and explosions if the scene doesn’t call for it, like the way the truck slows to a stop after the drive-in shootout as if a reminder that these flunkies should never have gone up against McCauley & crew, but sometimes he makes it clear that the loudest possible crash in the middle of a scene is the most necessary thing imaginable.

There’s an almost overwhelming feeling that comes from so much of the film even if the scene isn’t about action at all, the way Hanna races down the freeway in his car after McCauley to pull him over there for the pure sensation of the moment as much as anything, letting us soak in all that music and noise representing the soundscapes inside their own heads. The score by Elliot Goldenthal and others (little known fact, Moby’s “God Moving Over the Face of the Waters” heard at the end was actually written for its appearance in the 1993 short film SPACE WATER ONION directed by Paul Yates) along with the whole soundscape, all a reminder how there’s nothing like the experience of someone driving through L.A. at night in a Michael Mann film whether it’s shot on the most beautiful film stock imaginable like here or early digital in COLLATERAL later on, there’s a genuine sense of frisson to it all that seemingly no one else can ever achieve and it can be hard not to think of those times of driving on the 10 heading for the Harbor Freeway as the downtown skyline gets bigger, maybe with this soundtrack playing once again since there’s never been a better soundtrack to listen to while driving on those freeways late at night and there probably never will be.

Even the quiet moments feel deafening in their effectiveness with such a clarity of focus and briskness of plotting, the quiet of the metals heist leading to the disruption that causes the head-on shots of the two of them representing their first meeting even without knowing it, the way the film pauses before the bank job to show the women who will be affected by it, the calm yet direct way Mykelti Williamson lays out for Ashley Judd the life her child will have. The entire Dennis Haysbert plot line feels like a masterclass in how it’s laid out in just a few brief scenes and made even more effective thanks to that look he has in the moment by himself after he says, “Fuck it,” to De Niro. Sometimes quietly saying, “Fuck it” is all you can do. You are who you are, no matter how much something else makes sense.

The famous coffee shop scene is quiet in its own way with the natural steadiness to each of their voices adding to the power of it and these few moments were so much of what the movie was known for at the time, wondering about why the two stars were in so little of the film together, urban legends that they didn’t even film it at the same time but with that photo showing the unused angle of the two of them hung over the door at Kate Mantilini so many years after for all to see. This scene quickly becomes about the myth of these two guys as they become more open with each other the more they talk, vulnerable in ways that they’ll never reveal to anyone else, each of them with nothing to prove but are still looking to show what they can do being played by two legendary actors with nothing to prove but still looking to show what they can do. They are who they are and the film reveals who they are when no one else is looking whether De Niro’s smile when he knows he’s going after Waingro and it can’t be any other way or Pacino running down the stairs after he gets the call with that undeniable excitement in his step.

Neil McCauley calls Los Angeles the city of lights but while looking out at the skyline at night next to Eady to him it looks more like the iridescent algae of Fiji, a place he’s never actually been. In the world of this film, sometimes in the film we’re living as well, L.A. is whatever you want it to be, a city about creating your story, creating your myth. It’s about what you do when you’re there and we all have those moments where we find ourselves feeling isolated even when we’re in the middle of a crowd or maybe can’t figure out why the woman the next seat over is even talking to us at first. We also have those nights where we just want to shove our goddamn television, or whatever we’re carrying around without thinking about it anymore, out of the car at a red light. Sometimes you want to be alone. Sometimes you have to be alone. But then there are those moments when you should be with someone who understands and hopefully you realize that. The power of HEAT is in what Mann finds in this loneliness mixed in with all the action and people desperately trying to hope things might be different, even if taking inspiration from the past it still becomes its own thing. After all, does the part of the climax on the airport runway take inspiration from the end of BULLITT? Would HEAT even exist without BULLITT? Does it matter? Maybe what does matter are moments like the sheer ferociousness of De Niro’s performance as he repeatedly demands, “LOOK AT ME” to Waingro in his last moment and the way Kevin Gage breathes in after being shot as if a demon who is finally being vanquished accompanied by a cue in the Goldenthal score that feels like the pure embodiment of McCauley’s own soul exploding.

Once a long time ago I agreed to take someone to the airport in the early morning hours. That feeling of driving with this person from the 10 onto the 405 heading to LAX in the dead of night on an empty freeway brought HEAT to mind, that feeling of floating over the city, somehow part of the place yet far away from everyone else there, feeling completely real and unreal all at once. Even if there’s not actually a tunnel there to pass through like in the film where a blinding white light reveals who you really are, you can sense the feeling anyway and there are a few lens flares that appear in the shot around when De Niro says, “Nothing, we’re home free” which feel almost supernatural and have to be some of the best I’ve ever seen. When Vincent chases Neil down with the planes coming in for a landing overhead past any of the LAX runways, it feels like the edge of the world with the two characters having nowhere left to go, the outskirts of the city that goes on forever, a chase that becomes more than just an action scene because the overwhelming feel to the visuals and deafening sound of all those planes but also because of how inevitable everything was. Of course they were going to meet again. And they knew it too. All this leads to that overhead angle featuring the two of them at the end after the shots have been fired, both actors finally joined together in a shot. It’s not a movie simply about cops and robbers, good and evil, but these two men who are going to be who they are. When Neil first met Eady he held out his hand not so much to apologize but as if to find some sort of connection to someone and here he does it again as he dies, holding out his hand for Vincent, this time for the one person who he knows understands him. For that one moment, they’re not alone.

If Al Pacino decided to give a normal, measured performance to play Vincent Hanna, it wouldn’t be enough. He needs to be as big as he is so he can take over every room, he needs to make his character this kind of oversize personality to command whatever room he’s in. And through how big that is it shows his sheer sense of focus that Hanna brings to doing his job and how nothing else comes close for him, chewing his gum to throw people off and the way he can rattle off any number of details at his job but can barely remember how to say the word ‘chicken’ during his tired late night spat with Justine. Any number of lines that Pacino has here are justly famous now but it’s the silent looks he gives at any moment that are amazing and show what’s going on inside more than anything.

This balances beautifully with the sense of control felt coming from Robert De Niro as Neil McCauley all through the film which works as a contrast to that showing his brutality but also the innate isolation from everyone around him. There’s an energy to his presence here that almost feels like this film contains the last vestiges of what we’ve always known as the younger De Niro, showing a vulnerability and uncertainty seen in his face when no one else is looking, contrasting perfectly with the deadly glare that he’s much more willing to let others see. It makes the two leads the ideal pairing through the entire film both in terms of what they bring to it as well as their obvious iconic status even if they barely meet with that smile between the two of them at the end of the coffee shop scene about what their characters realize but it’s also about who these two great actors are and what they mean to each other. What each of them do with their eyes alone throughout is amazing to see and it adds so much to every moment they are onscreen. In 1995 Pacino and De Niro were already legends, even if they’d been famous for less than 25 years at that point, leading to the rewards of all the screentime they shared in the greatness of THE IRISHMAN, but let’s just forget that RIGHTEOUS KILL ever happened.

Val Kilmer’s own smile when Chris looks up at his wife on the balcony in his final scene is part of how iconic all this is as well and it’s one of the shots of him seen during his moment in the TCM Remembers 2025 video, a reminder of how much it’s now part of his legacy but it’s also that sense of sheer intensity coming from him even with not much dialogue and it makes when he says about his wife, “For me the sun rises and sets with her,” one of Kilmer’s best moments ever. As that wife, it’s amazing to realize how little of the film Ashley Judd is actually in and she does so much in just a few minutes, playing someone who isn’t going to be intimidated easily no matter who is making the threats and her final scene, looking out at the arrival of Kilmer with barely any dialogue, is a killer. Diane Venora meets every glare Pacino gives her with a force that says she’s not going to back down with the uncertain shyness that Amy Brenneman projects while playing things with a disbelief that gets deeper the more she realizes, not knowing what’s going on in that hotel as she waits in the car but she knows something is very wrong. The barely recognizable Jon Voight as the mysterious Nate who has all the answers for Neil while seeming to exist entirely apart from where everyone else is living their lives, with the actor speaking in that gravely whisper that always makes you pay close attention and giving each scene a knowing acceptance that anyone is going to do what they’re going to do.

Everyone brings so much depth to their characters, giving the sort of impression that feels like so many of them have more screentime than they really do, whether Tom Sizemore with his deadly glare at the guy in the diner as well as Dennis Haysbert on one side of the law or Wes Studi, Ted Levine, Myktelti Williamson and Jerry Trimble in their scenes with Pacino. The intensity of Kevin Gage as Waingro is perfect in how he’s less recognizable than the others which makes him that much more dangerous and William Fichtner as Roger Van Zant, maybe a higher class of thief than McCauley ever is but one who misreads the situation he’s gotten mixed up in but still can’t fully shed his cockiness. Natalie Portman gives a totally believable look at a depressed young girl who clearly seems to think that everything is her fault and plenty of bit parts, both famous and not, make an impression throughout, Tom Noonan with the idea for the bank job saying how he got all this information because “this stuff just flies through the air”, Xander Berkeley (the one actor who also appeared in Mann’s L.A. TAKEDOWN, the 1989 television pilot that didn’t go to series but is basically the first draft of this story) as the infamous Ralph who Vincent finds at home with Justine and the uncredited Bud Cort as the loathsome coffee shop manager who lets Breedan know where he stands at his new job right away.

As Neil McCauley says late in the film, whatever time you get is luck. Nothing stretches out into infinity, after all, much as it sometimes seems like it will. Nothing is forever, not even living in Los Angeles. Maybe L.A was built to be the city where HEAT was set, just as the Chinese Theater was built to show it. And I was lucky to see it there so at least there’s that. All these years later HEAT is as great as it’s always been. It’s greater. I love looking at it, listening to it, getting lost in it, always remembering it. The film is a part of what I remember the nineties to be but it’s also now. So much time has passed, no time has passed at all. Maybe this film was the peak of so many of the things I wanted to love about films in the first place. Maybe so much of it is what I still want films to be, at least while watching it again. The film remains great even if I wish Michael Mann hadn’t tinkered with the film for the Definitive Edition on Blu-ray just a little, removing Diane Venora’s line “You sift through the detritus” to Vincent during their calm talk late at night in the empty restaurant, and, keeping with my fondness for her here, I miss it. But if that’s what HEAT is now, so be it. All this makes me wonder what my own future is at this point. Some days I feel like I’ve run out of time here myself. Then I remember the smile of the woman who came into my life out of nowhere and how everything changed. This city is where I made my life. Maybe it isn’t much of one but it’s mine and it’s something. It’s my mythology. Now if only Kate Mantilini would somehow reopen, it can really be the Los Angeles that we dream of and somehow turn ourselves into the myths we still want to become. At least for a little while.