Collateral (2004)

A lot of movies take place in Los Angeles (and of course a lot are made there), but few actually capture the essence of such a unique and strange city. The Los Angeles of the 21st century is a far cry from that of Jake Gittes, where he once remarked, "L.A.'s a small town, people talk." In the Los Angeles of cab driver Max Durocher, L.A. is a sprawling metropolitan area home to 15 million people. And they only talk when forced into proximity of each other; sometimes by taking a cab.

Enter the sharp-dressed hitman Vincent, played by a Tom Cruise, who arrives at LAX with no indication of his location of origin or past. He is The Joker from The Dark Knight before Batman ever began. You can say that this is undermined by the conversation he later has with Max about how he grew up with no mother and that his father despised him, but I would argue that growing up with a loveless single parent is hardly a substantial explanation for a sociopath along the lines of Vincent. "Improvise, adapt to the environment, Darwin, shit happens, I Ching, whatever man, we gotta roll with it," he says, conveniently describing his outlook and demeanor all within one line of dialogue.

Balancing the presence of Vincent is Jamie Foxx as Max, our cabbie that requires planned precision and routine as part of his life. He's been driving his cab for twelve years, but 'temporarily' as he says, only as a holdover until he can get his "Island Limos" company off the ground. His own personal inertia has kept him from doing anything else with his life. It's a fairly simple concept for a story, one where polar opposites collide and we watch the spectacular results of that crash.

While it is a movie driven along literally and figuratively by these two characters, what makes Collateral such an outstanding achievement is director Michael Mann's liberal use of digital cinematography where the crisp image captures a sense of immediacy and velocity that traditional filmstock could not. Los Angeles is a city of people coming and going anonymously, whether that be by cab or hitman's bullet. Collateral never skips a beat, and even seemingly mundane moments the elements of the movie are all accelerating towards the speed of light.

In addition to this eternal movement, Los Angeles (much like other major metropolitan areas) is also a city of urban isolation. People often get lost amongst the hubbub. Vincent recites a story about the man who dies on the MTA and is ignored by passengers for six hours. Max is as lonely as that dead man, alone as he is held captive by Vincent and as authorities think he is the killer himself. But once he learns to adapt to this environment (Darwin, I Ching, or whatever), Max finds another fellow lonely soul and overcomes this in the movie's sometimes-absurd climax.

But this movie is not a damnation of Los Angeles as an epicenter where evil comes to reap what it sows (all but one of the targets that Vincent is picking off seem to be heavily involved in some sort of drug dealing syndicate). Instead it is one that depicts and romanticizes the existence of Angelenos whose lives are always in the shadow of larger forces, be it a well-trained hitman or a city sprawling out of control. It is a beautiful struggle to etch out a niche where no one will give a shit.

While Collateral isn't the first movie to use digital cinematography, it certainly was a torchbearer and provided a glimpse at the potential that the medium had. In the 60s, the auteurs of the French Nouvelle Vague were able to create a sense of urgency and excitement through the use of jump cuts. In the 21st century, it seems as if the use of digital cinematography is the heir apparent to Godard's little trick.

It was partially a technical choice to employ digital cinematography in this movie, as it allowed more to be captured in the image as the majority of the movie takes place at night, but don't think Mann wasn't keenly aware of the aesthetic that it provided. The perpetual motion machine that is Los Angeles is rarely caught on film, and that may be because it is the wrong medium altogether.