DUEL IN THE BLANKNESS

By RICHARD SCHICKEL

NEIL MCCAULEY (ROBERT DE Niro) is an orderly and calculating man. Like many entrepreneurs managing small, risky businesses, he has put the rest of his life on hold lest emotional distractions disrupt more profitable pursuits. Though that business consists of planning and executing complex, high-stakes robberies, the man is actually as risk averse as an actuary, and about as romantic.

Vincent Hanna (Al Pacino) is, in contrast, a disorderly and incautious man. A Los Angeles detective who is all hot-wired impulses, he has never learned to control his emotions or wall off his professional from his personal life; he's heading helplessly toward a divorce from his neglected wife (Diane Venora) even as he sniffs his way toward Neil and his mob.

Dispassion vs. passion, intellect vs. instinct, the implosive vs. the explosive style--as writer-director Michael Mann develops the duel between this cop and this robber in Heat, his film becomes a compassionate contemplation of the two most basic ways of being male and workaholic in modern America. It also becomes a critique of pure reason. For Neil is placing impossible demands on himself, on his associates, on a chance universe in which they inhabit one of the chancier corners. He can't prevent himself from falling in love (with Amy Brenneman's innocent bookstore clerk). He can't prevent his most valuable henchman and his wife (Val Kilmer and Ashley Judd) from marital misbehavior that threatens his enterprise. He can't, in general, prevent blighted human nature from scribbling all over his neat blueprints. This leaves him vulnerable to a policeman--nice irony here--who is more accepting of the world's anarchy than he is.

All this adds good weight and tension to the movie and provides a lot of very good actors with the opportunity to do honest, probing work in a context where, typically, less will do. But Mann's aspirations don't stop there. Having revived the historical saga in The Last of the Mohicans, he obviously wants to do the same thing for what has become a much more familiar (and tiresome) genre, the urban action picture.

This Mann achieves with truly epic sweep, maniacal conviction and awesome technical proficiency. He announces his intentions in an opening sequence that may be the best armored-car robbery ever placed on film. He proceeds to a crazily orchestrated bank heist that goes awry and finishes in a wild firefight on a crowded downtown street that is a masterpiece of sustained invention. He ends with a chase that takes Pacino and De Niro into wholly original realms of hellishness, the back end of an airport, where their passions are nearly drowned out by the thunderous comings and goings of heedless flight.

There, in case you've missed it, is Mann's point. Throughout the movie, he has given us a vision of Los Angeles that goes beyond the usual sheen-and-scuzz contrasts it amuses most directors to observe. His L.A. is a void, a blankness, something like an empty movie screen--or an empty modern soul--waiting to be filled up with that most hypnotic of abstractions, violent action. This, he's saying, is what some of us are good at. And, all pieties aside, look how much we like it.