Last night I had the pleasure of seeing Michael Mann’s masterpiece Heat screen at the Arclight Cinemas in Hollywood. It had been at least a few years since I had watched the film the whole way through, and I had not seen it in a theater since it was first released 14 years ago. The film remains as stunning now as it was then, but it was also interesting watching it in the context of films that have followed. It speaks volumes, I believe, about the state of the movie industry in our time that the film that seems closest in tone, style, and overall quality to Heat would be a comic book movie. I’m speaking of course about Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight, which while undoubtedly a popcorn movie, retains similar themes of the blurred distinction between light and dark, and how two men consumed by what they do can overshadow everything else in their lives, and ultimately bring them close together.

The interesting diversion between the two films is in how the “hero” and “villain” are portrayed in each by the respective actors. In Heat, Vincent Hanna, played with bravado by Al Pacino at his most gloriously melodramatic, is a loud, flambouyant figure. When he walks into a room he becomes the center of attention, filling it with his hubris, and his entourage of lackeys await his every command. In most movies, this type of behaviour is reserved for the villainous figure, and it’s exactly how Heath Ledger plays the Joker in The Dark Knight. Both men, Hanna and the Joker, have obvious demons in their past, and they present them unabashedly, with a dangerous air of violent unpredictability. The Joker’s constantly evolving story about his scars is no less terrifying than Hanna’s retrieval of his television set from his cheating spouse. Interesting then, that one of them exoricises these demons in an unrelenting pursuit of justice, while the other in a calculated creation of terror and chaos.

On the other side of the battle you find have the perfect adversary for each man. For Hanna that is Neil McCauley, played with cold efficiency by Robert DeNiro. DeNiro, as he so often does, plays a fascinating loner, a man for whom the job, and the solitude and discipline it requires, defines the life he leads. His gorgeous house on the beach in Malibu surely looks nice on the outside, but inside there is no furniture, no soul. His mantra is a piece of advice he received as a young man: have nothing you can’t walk away from when you feel the heat coming around the corner. He clearly spends much of the film confronting and accepting his lonliness, and by the end he must make a choice between getting away clean with a woman he might love, or getting revenge on the man who wronged him. The same lifestlye choice is made by Christian Bale’s Batman, for whom the secretive nature of his true identity and his evenings and weekends job dictates that he must operate with extreme discretion, and do so with no one to turn to for comfort but his paid manservant. His choice to remain Batman through the course of the film, and to do the only job he really knows how to do, costs him dearly. In the end, the death of those he cares about is his only reward. These two men follow very different goals, but the result remains the same for both.

Nolan was very clearly inspired by Mann in this regard. The two films are cut from the same cloth, beautiful elegys on the nature of masculinity, and the lonliness of being passionate about something that goes beyond yourself. There is a profound sadness of inevitability about both films, particularly in their climaxes. Both contain discussion of futility, that fate will bring these men together until one vanquishes the other. That one required comic book characters and bigger, louder action scenes to be realized only says what is percieved as value by film studios today. Once upon a time, the story of two great men, portrayed by two great actors and guided by a master filmmaker, was enough to sell a movie. Nowadays, it takes more. Does that mean we’re all the worse off for it? I don’t think so, because what’s important is that great stories are still being told. If they need a little bit more window dressing to stand out from the crowd, so be it. But as The Dark Knight is now one of the highest grossing films ever made, it’s clear that audiences are just as receptive to stories like this now as they were when Heat was released in 1995.