July 29, 2006
miami vice
One result of the series of events decades ago that freed actors from studio contracts, and the more recent shifts in the "media landscape" which have allowed stars to retain celebrity/bankability for lengthy periods without actually releasing new product, is that there is simply far less access to first-tier cinematic leads at any given moment. No recent movie has suffered more from this than Miami Vice. Michael Mann can't be said to lack for chutzpah, so one might assume that it was the financieros who refused to let him cast nobodies in the lead; at the same time, George Clooney was directing, Brad Pitt was interning with Gehry, and Tom Hanks is less an action hero than a symbologist.
And so America's best director was forced to cast Colin Farrell as Sonny. He did succeed in getting Jamie Foxx as Rico — a fairly irreproachable (if largely wasted) choice, though he would have done better, both in terms of smooth menace and cash outlay, to get Benicio Del Toro. But Colin gives the B-list a bad name. He once looked like quasi-feral rough trade, hungry, about whom you could at least imagine he might be a star some day (even if you knew it was a no-chance fantasy you were sharing with him). Since then, he looks to have sated his hunger: while maintaining his status as an agonizingly bad actor, he has also apparently eaten Philip Seymour Hoffman. And has awful hair.
Don Johnson wept.
Mann has learned a few things from HK cinema, the most persistent of which is tweaking the camera's depth of field so that the neon lights in the background shake themselves into an anxiously ambient blur. This is complemented by a strange depth effect resulting perhaps from his mission-specific hi-def cam whereby, in static shots, the background seems painted in (and rather expressionistically at that). One might say these ways of imaging are the film's star, but this would be a mistake; he also learned a thing or two about casting women (finally). Much as Spielberg's War of the Worlds was basically a Dakota Fanning film with the hapless Cruise hanging around only to make this fact evident, Mann's Miami Vice is entirely a Gong Li film, interrupted.
Posted by jane at July 29, 2006 08:26 AM | TrackBack