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God and Mann

'Miami Vice' icons seek readmission to the religion of cool.

Dorothy Woodend 4 Aug 2006TheTyee.ca

Dorothy Woodend is the culture editor for The Tyee.

She has worked in many different cultural disciplines, including producing contemporary dance and new music concerts, running a small press, programming film festivals, and writing for newspapers and magazines across Canada and the U.S. She holds degrees in English from Simon Fraser University and film animation from Emily Carr University.

In 2020, she was awarded the Max Wyman Award for Critical Writing. She won the Silver Medal for Best Column at the Digital Publishing Awards in 2019 and 2020; and her work was nominated for a National Magazine Award for Best Column in 2020 and 2021.

Woodend is a member of the Broadcast Film Critics Association and the Vancouver Film Critics Circle. She was raised on the East Shore of Kootenay Lake and lives in Vancouver. Find her on Twitter @DorothyWoodend.

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Foxx and Farrell: talking is a problem.

Picture poor Michael Mann, tossing in bed late one night, a single burning question in his fevered brain -- how to reinvest something that was once cool with new cool? "How?" screams the Mann, "How can I erase the blight of white suits with pastel pink shirts and a pet alligator? Help me, God of Cool!"

And lo, the God of Cool answers him, but the divine gift is double-edged (as most divine gifts tend to be). "I will give you the most beautiful woman in the world, but I will make her speak like she has approximately 800 marbles in her cheeks. You can have two of the most gorgeous male creatures alive, but you must also take this bevy of incomprehensible fellows with enormous bushbeards. Is it a deal?"

The Mann says, "Okay, but can you at least make Colin Farrell into a good actor?"

"No," says God. "That is even beyond my power."

Thus was Miami Vice loosed upon the world. And the world didn't really pay all that much attention.

Despite what you may have heard, Miami Vice is not a completely terrible film. I have an odd soft spot for Michael Mann and his man movies. Heat was a hoot -- Al Pacino chasing Robert De Niro through the streets of L.A., Val Kilmer in a ponytail. What more could you possibly ask for? Sure, the women in his films are always a drag, always wanting the men to stay home and have quality time, but his name is Michael Mann, after all. And he makes films in which a man's gotta do what a Mann's gotta do. And vice versa. In this Vice, Tubbs and Crockett (whose names always makes me think of an obscure brand of margarine) are a crack undercover team of vice cops battling drugs lords, white supremacists and moles. Not the cute kind either, with tiny eyes and a little pink nose.

At least that's what I think they're doing. It's hard to understand what anyone is actually saying in this film.

Bushbeards and marble-mouths

The villains, each one with a huge facial forest, are bad enough, but Colin Farrell, trying to strangle his Irish lilt as Crockett, trumps them all by being utterly incomprehensible. Pity Farrell, blessed with leading-man looks, but none of the suaveness to go with them; where there should be laser beams of self-confidence, his eyes shine forth only terror and confusion. The sight of him flailing about can't help but recall an earlier film (Alexander) in which he was similarly beshagged with more hair than he could handle, and the need to play it tough. It's a bad combination. Perhaps a little less hair would help, but the cop jargon is also a problem.

This cop-talk patois is a bit more realistic coming out of the mouth of Ricardo Tubbs (Jamie Foxx), who has some serious style. Although Foxx does little more than look broody, broody is a pretty good look for him.

Worse still is Gong Li (as Isabella, an upscale gang-moll). Gong Li is perhaps one of the most beautiful women on the planet. Here, she is like a knife in female form, all long legs and sharp-cut suits, with the business sense of a shark. As long as she doesn't open her mouth, things go swimmingly, but this is a fairly talky role, and the poor woman is quickly in trouble. It is well nigh impossible to understand a single word she utters. After a series of fraught moments in which the heroes try to infiltrate a Columbian drug lord's gang, of which Isabella is second-in-command, she and Crockett decide to take off in his super speedboat. One exchange goes something like this:

"Is it fast?" she asks.

"Sure," answers Crockett.

"Chow me."

What! It can't possibly be faster than you, lady. But into the tub they hop, and take a ride over to Cuba to listen to a four-hour speech from Fidel. No, not really, instead they make crazy love, drink mojitos by the bucket and get gooey over each other.

Close your ears and watch

The film has style to burn -- fast boats, fast cars and super-fast women, but what it doesn't have is a universal translator, one of those handy devices they used to have in Star Trek which would interpret a billion different alien tongues into the mellifluous tones of one Patrick "Royal Shakespeare Company" Stewart. Babbling Babel it is, and that's okay; there's a lot to look at even if you shut your ears.

The film does some interesting things with the grainy quality of digital images (from the handy Viper FilmStream camera). Those are not billions of bugs on the big screen; it's art, don't you know. It works beautifully in certain scenes, providing an inherent tension to the action. In sexy montages it adds a purring frisson. In one scene the camera glides over the back of Tubbs as he and his lady love get down with it, their skin as richly textured as rich Corinthian leatherrrrrrrrrr, as Ricardo Montalban used to say. So there is a bit of heat here. Not as much as there was in the actual Heat, but some degree of style, if not substance.

But as an exercise in cool, Miami Vice fails, since cool is dependent, to some degree at least, on not giving a damn what anyone thinks. This film cannot say that. It tries very hard to do what it does, which in effect, kills the very thing it wants so much to do. The set pieces are exciting: boats cut through the dark water leaving phosphorescent tails behind them, Crockett works his stubble as hard as he can. There is plenty of gun play, a few balletic blood spatters, but the very ineffable thing that would vault it from remake of TV show to Steve McQueen-worthy vehicle is missing. Which calls into question the original source material. Is it possible to make a silk purse out of an old TV pig? Perhaps not. Or perhaps the new version of cool is morphing and evolving in some ways we cannot see or recognize yet.

Who's cool? No one who'll say so

It's so very hard to be cool these days, when every leading man wants desperately to be the c-word. But cool is in pretty short supply, at least on movie screens. I ask you, is Tom Cruise cool? I'll wait until you stop laughing. Brad Pitt? Err ... maybe in Surrey. How about George Clooney, Clive Owen, Orlando Bloom? Okay, now it's my turn to laugh.

Cool is something that quickly melts in the glare of the spotlight. In the pursuit of cool, like the pursuit of love, the pursuit part may be the problem. You set out to catch something ineffable, indecipherable, but the faster and harder you chase it, the more it eludes your grasp, slips out of your fingers and runs off laughing at you. But since the entire nature of large-budget films is to try as hard as possible to appeal to as many people as possible, cool is undone by its need for popularity. Any studio film already has a quality of the unreal, the test-marketed, the pre-produced -- a fake feeling that is very hard to hide. That's not butter on your popcorn, it's Tubbs and Crockett margarine topping.

So, if you like that kind of stuff, all is well and good, they don't seem to make real butter much anymore anyway.

But the weird thing about cool is that it is always subject to change. Witness the younger generation embracing Scarface with such fervour. Or even stranger, The Warriors (soon to be seen again on the big screen). In 20 years' time, Miami Vice may be heralded as a work of genius, celebrated for its very incoherence. And we'll be treated to another remake! Damn you, God of Cool, you are a Bitch God. You giveth and you taketh away, and sometimes you make your worshippers wear pink shirts with white suits, while somewhere a Mann gently weeps.

Dorothy Woodend reviews films for The Tyee every Friday.

Related Tyee stories: Dorothy Woodend wrote about female style and hell in In Vogue and bringing style home in How Clothes Make the Me.  [Tyee]

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