What the Flick

COLLATERAL is a dynamic character study set in the mysterious world of downtown LA after dark. Max (Jamie Foxx), a gentle taxi driver, picks up a new and startling fare when Vince (Tom Cruise) hops into his cab and asks the time it will take to get to the destination. Max nails it to the minute (he takes pride in his work), and Vince offers him a handful of cash to take him to his next 4 destinations and then to LAX at dawn. Max is reluctant; he treasures his evening shift as a time of solitude rather than of intense moneymaking. He is contemplating the offer at their first stop when a guy flies out a window and hits his windshield. Oops. Turns out, Vince is not a real estate lawyer but the next closet thing, an efficient and determined hit man. On the up side, he also takes pride in his work and is a good conversationalist and man of his word, so though Max is forced to continue driving, occasionally at gunpoint, it's not boring. Max is a man of unfulfilled potential, the sort of good guy who is stuck in a tar pit of his own inertia. Ironically, his evening with cool-killer Vince may force his first step toward freedom. Meanwhile a cordon of law enforcement, led by hunky Mark Ruffalo, is solving Vince's puzzle and homing in on the duo, lending another layer of intensity. Yeah, this is a movie about men, good and bad, honorable and not, on both sides of "normal." The one gal with a speaking part, Jada Pinkett Smith, is crucial to everyone's motive, but not a dynamic actor in the drama. Tom Cruise and Jamie Foxx carry the weight of the story beautifully; Tom often does his best work playing against his looks, and here (sporting gray hair and a natty suit) he manages to be both endearing and terrifying. He makes a great sociopath.

This is a movie where talking is important, but not to the exclusion of at least one dynamite Koreatown nightclub scene; director Michael Mann weaves music and images into a vision of LA that is far more fascinating than the real place, a wonderland of discovery about man's worst and best instincts. By omitting LA's most stereotypical but least dramatic feature-the sunshine-his images of darkened skyscrapers, sodium-lit alleys, and empty freeways are both seductive and disorienting, a throwback to LA's noir glory days.
Speaking of glory days, whatever happened to those cold war glory days when it seemed all we had to worry about were Communists? These days we've got transnational everything chasing us down, leaving little room for wayward political philosophies. And in the new version of THE MANCHURIAN CANDIDATE, it's no surprise that the Manchurian Corporation, a global giant of defense and energy firms, has taken the place of those boring old followers of Mao that were the culprits back in 1963. The set up mainly involves two heroes of the Gulf War: Lt Marco (Denzel Washington), who has continued to serve in the military; and Raymond Shaw (Liev Schreiber), heir to a political dynasty and reluctantly poised to be the next Vice President. Shaw is pushed ahead in his career by his deliciously overbearing mother, Senator Hilar..., I mean, Eleanor Shaw (Meryl Streep), who is determined that her little boy will be VP come hell or the niceties of the law. The two veterans have not had it easy since Iraq 1991; Marco suffers from terrifying nightmares that leave him trying to avoid sleep and Shaw has that mother, who seems to have left him with little personality and no obvious life partner. Events conspire to bring Marco and Shaw together again when the former gets it into his sleep-deprived head that they were brainwashed in Iraq; oddly enough, considering the paranoia and tendency toward conspiracy theories that mark anxious times, no one believes him. Except that little Raymond has this nagging thought, until Mommy puts him straight. (And let me say that Meryl Streep is the creepiest Mother since Mrs Bates, Angela Lansbury in the original MC, or Glenn Close's Gertrude in that Mel Gibson version of HAMLET, and makes the movie well worth the ticket price.)

Anyhoo, though the brainwashing plot feels tired, the anxiety-driven principals seem very of the moment; director Jonathan Demme liberally sprinkles scenes with barely perceptible references to terror, bus bombs, private armies, and some far-off war action that leave you not quite sure of your bearings. Other than that, please: in our vicious political times I can't see a chance in Hades that Shaw would be a VP candidate. He's over 35 and single for Lord's sake, and how does that play in Peoria? Not to mention his complete lack of charisma; every time a bright TV light shines his way, he looks like a deer caught on the Turnpike. Maybe that, but certainly the Halliburton-like nature of the Manchurian Corp led some reporters to say this was a political movie critical of the present administration. Having seen it the week after the Democratic Convention, I can say it felt more like a movie critical of not any particular political group, but politics in general as practiced today, the back-room deals, the influence of money, and the tendency to equivocation and empty statements that the hungry media then analyze endlessly. There's no way to tell who among the characters might be the "good" guys; the movie leaves you feeling there are none, except for the nightmare-ridden who remember when we weren't mesmerized by the endless stream of drivel blasting from every newsstand and car radio. And, apparently, no one listens to those folks. More relevantly, the movie collapses somewhat under the weight of maintaining our belief in the brainwashing, sort of like those cloning stories. You don't need all that technology (really, you have to see the scenes with the brain surgery suite at the Waldorf) to mess things up royally.