Random Late Summer Notes: Blah Blah Blah - Page 7

Collateral isn't an exposé in the manner of Steven Soderbergh's Traffic (2000), it's a chivalric romance involving a struggle between a white and a black knight (traditional moral color here the opposite of the actors' skin pigmentation, and steeds replaced by the cab). As with all chivalric romances, the topic is what kind of knight the hero will turn out to be, a dramatic subject that gives rise to no suspense whatsoever.

That's a problem, as is the fact that the allegorical framework is too simple to support the action set-pieces (which pale next to the crystal method of Paul Greengrass in The Bourne Supremacy) and the maunderings about jazz improvisation and insignificance. The characters could be called Aggression, Sensitivity, and Morality, and you wouldn't need more than a single-paneled fresco to get out of the interplay all there is to be gotten.

This is where virtuosity comes in. Or should. To put it succinctly, Tom Cruise is the last actor to cast as a character whose keynote is "improvisation." (The same complaint could be made of the whole picture: a coyote can't cross the road without getting sucked into the movie's symbolic matrix.) Even if nothing else were altered, the movie would play better if Cruise and Foxx switched roles. As it is, Foxx, who's been terrific letting loose in a comedy like Booty Call (1997), isn't asked to improvise but to play a timid character who "learns" the importance of improvising. In other words, Foxx is not used for what he's good at, enlivening a movie from its low end, but to demonstrate how an unassuming man can get a new lease on life as an action hero.

As for Mann's own virtuosity, the substance of the movie is so trivial that the nervy, scanning, night-vision camerawork just seems mannered. He seems to have read the script and gone ahead despite his better judgment; he's still looking out the car windows for something to make a movie about as he's filming the convictionless scenes. Unfortunately, the movie was shot on high-definition digital video and images that are supposed to have a burnished quality--the polished surfaces of an urban hell--have the dull sheen of images reflected on plastic rather than metal. In extreme close-ups, Foxx's face sometimes scans as flat as a refrigerator magnet, and the whole movie looks like surveillance camera footage. It's another example of Hollywood spending a lot more money to do badly what independents have done well for a fraction of the cost (e.g., Danny Boyle's 28 Days Later (2002), in which the dimness of vision made poetic sense).

Article Author: Alan Dale

Alan Dale earned a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from Princeton University and a J.D. from Yale Law School. He currently works as a corporate tax attorney in Portland, Oregon.

He is the author of What We Do Best: American Movie Comedies …

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