GETTING BY AIN’T NO PLEASURE, CRUISE

Michael Mann’s new film "Collateral" is about survival. More specifically, it's about the pretenses we put on, the lies we tell ourselves, in order to get through our everyday lives. The movie is also a suspense-thriller, and a very good one. It has a great visual style, and great acting. Outside the bit of Miles Davis trivia that even a non-jazz buff like myself knows, the script is well-paced and never over-the-top violent.

The main character, Max (Jamie Foxx), has been driving a cab for twelve years. But whenever anyone asks him how he likes being a cabbie, his immediate reaction is, "Oh, this? This is just my part-time thing, while I put other stuff together." He’s even lied to his own mother, told her he runs his own limousine company, that he drives movie stars and famous people around.

Why does Max deceive his mother? A more important question might be, is Max also deceiving himself? As an audience, we think "yes." From the first shot of him, wearing a dejected look on his face when he sits down behind the wheel for the start of his shift, we guess that Max doesn’t really like driving cabs. As the movie progresses, we come to understand that his denials are a survival mechanism. That’s how Max gets through life, by convincing himself that he won’t be a cabbie forever, even though he likely will be.

One night, he picks up a fare (Jada Pinkett Smith) who also doesn’t seem to like her job. They wager over the quickest route back from the airport. A friendship develops between them. When he presses the question of whether she likes her job, she sheepishly reacts, "There are some days when I like being a lawyer." We’re not sure whether she’s telling the truth, but maybe self-denial is her survival mechanism, too.

Then Max picks up a well-dressed guy named Vincent (Tom Cruise), who happens to exit the same building the lawyer works in. After testing Max, and seeing that he clearly knows his way around the city, Vincent offers him six-hundred dollars, all in one-hundred dollar bills, to drive him to five different locations all over L.A. But Vincent, as it turns out, is an assassin. The visits are mob hits.

So Max finds himself in dangerous company, forced to chauffer a man who will not hesitate to kill him if he refuses to help. What is Max to do? Though he has survived the mean streets of Los Angeles for twelve years, he is also a sensitive soul, not duplicitous like Vincent. But a more aggressive, predatory nature, the kind Vincent has in spades, is necessary to survive the L.A. underworld that Max finds himself becoming immersed in. High praise goes to writer Stuart Beattie, for presenting Max with various situations over the course of a single night, where he has to become tougher, more savvy, a better liar, and for raising the cost of failure in each scenario.

For example, early on during Max’s forced tenure with Vincent, cops pull the car over for having a damaged windshield. Vincent tells Max that if the cops search the vehicle (which is hiding something), he will kill them. Max tries to lie his way out of the search, but his attempts seem nervous and half-hearted, and immediately crumble under the cops’ gruff authority. Max will have to try again later. By then, however, it will be his life, not just the lives of innocent bystanders, on the line.

Going back to the theme of self-denial as survival mechanism, Vincent is probably the film's interesting character, because he hires himself out to kill people. What happens to such a person's soul over time? How can they just go around anonymously offing people who probably, as Max points out in one case, have wives, kids, families?

That’s a psychological question Beattie and Mann are smart enough to ask. Vincent shrouds himself in a fog of fatalism. He claims that killing means nothing, because we are all insignificant specks of dust in the universe. As a viewer, however, I got the impression that Vincent was more angry than blasé. Otherwise, explain one of the most fascinating scenes in the film, where a taxi dispatcher, and Max's boss, tries to make him pay for the damage to his cab. Vincent grabs the walkie talkie, then angrily begins to explain the rules of "collision umbrellas" in auto insurance.

On the one hand, it's a scene showing how Max is timid, while Vincent goes for the balls. But if he really thought life was meaningless, then shouldn’t he have just shrugged it off and walked away? Perhaps Vincent’s way of coping with life is to always be the predator, to aggressively attack when slightly provoked. Maybe he's just naturally confident because he knows what an efficient killing machine he is.

Of course, Vincent is a killing machine who utilizes his physical dexterity, and his brains and wit, for money, not to survive. Max, meanwhile, uses his burgeoning survival instincts in order to avoid getting killed. Ultimately, the movie pits those two types of predators against each other, and asks: Which is the more formidible adversary, the one that kills for sport, or the one that kills out of necessity.

Does Vincent really believe that existence is pointless? If so, he cannot hold his own life too dearly, either. He cannot be afraid to die. Beattie and Mann eventually test Vincent, presenting him with a scenario where he has to prove the courage of his convictions. Rather than reveal whether he actually passes the crucible, I will merely reiterate: The filmmakers are smart enough to pose this question.
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In other news, the Thai flick "Last Life in the Universe" opens in New York today. I saw it at the Tribeca film festival, and I highly recommend it. Granted, there are plenty of critics who dismiss it as just another "suicidal librarian/prostitute dream girl/lonely expatriate/obsessive-compulsive disorder/yakuza" flick. But it’s shot by Christopher Doyle, longtime cinematographer for Wong Kar-Wai, and there’s awesome special fx for the scene involving flying books.

The director of "Ishii the Killer" and "Dead or Alive" (movies I’ve heard are great) makes a cameo in the film. Also, there’s an unusual amount of bodily fluid humor, considering that it’s an art flick. "Dumb and Dumber" actually has less.

Before the Tribeca Film Festival screening, Christopher Doyle—the coolest man alive—told us that we might see, "…people inhaling smoke through these little white sticks." He added, "It’s called smoking. I don’t see anyone in American movies do it anymore, so I assume nobody in this country does it."

After the screening, the director, Pen-Ek Ratanaruang, fielded questions, answering all of them with, "That’s a very interesting question. I think the best way to answer it is for you to buy another ticket, and see the movie again. Take all your friends and family this time."