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To offer a short summary of the film by Michael Mann, “Heat,” in terms of the character types played by both Robert DeNiro and Al Pacino, it is worth nothing that the character played by Pacino who is assigned the role of Lieutenant Vincent Hanna, the ostensible good guy, and De Niro who plays the role of Neil McCauley, a consummate robber who has a penchant for well-tailored suits and who leads a gang of sidekicks who are skilled in thievery but who have a much harder time thinking for themselves and getting along in the more quotidian aspects of life. In a traditional cop-robber narrative for a film like this that takes a typical look at characters in the black and white way so common in a movie from Hollywood, it is the cop who should be the likeable hero with few or no character defects, and the robber who should be a wholly unlikable and unsympathetic character whose badness is bone-chilling, but it is in upsetting this expected dynamic that the real narrative interest of the movie is developed and the characterization of wholly complex human beings by DeNiro and Pacino accelerates and impresses.
As the viewer learns through evidence that continues to accumulate over the course of the nearly three-hours long movie by Michael Mann, “Heat” starring DeNiro and Pacino, Lieutenant Hanna and Neil are not so different as they might appear. Both men are whip-smart, especially when compared to their colleagues, and are an intellectual match for one another; neither outsmarts the other for very long, even with the most sophisticated and carefully guarded strategy. The characters played by both DeNiro and Pacino are both strong and compelling leaders who command the attention of their colleagues easily but without threat, coercion, or force; others want to be around the men because they know they are competent and accomplished, and they hope that Hanna’s and McCauley’s skills, smarts, and success will rub off on them. Both Hanna and McCauley played by Pacino and DeNiro respectively in the film by director Michael Mann, are also completely committed to their careers, almost to the exclusion of other interests. McCauley is plotting round-the-clock for bigger and better heists, while the good lieutenant is meeting up with potential informants in shady clubs at all hours of the night and is permanently attached to his pager, ready to respond to any lead and at any time within seconds.
There are other similarities that these seemingly opposite characters share in common in the film by Michael Mann, “Heat” starring Robert DeNiro and Al Pacino. Both men characters approach their respective careers with a curious mixture of wholehearted intensity and necessary detachment. They are 24-7 career cops and criminals, but they also recognize that being in their chosen professions requires a certain lack of emotion if their work is to be carried out effectively. Neither of the characters played by DeNiro or Pacino in the Michael Mann film “Heat” gets overly involved or concerned about victims of the consequences of his own actions. In a scene in which Lieutenant Hanna’s wife is encouraging him to share what happens on the job with her by talking about his work, he sarcastically replies that he does not need any cathartic release by talking about crime scenes with her when he comes home, which is both late and rare. He says to her in one of the important lines from the movie Heat:
Oh, I see. So what I should do is, I should come home every day and say “Hi honey. Guess what? I walked into this apartment today, where this junkie asshole had just fried his baby in a microwave, because it was crying too loud! So let me share that with you. Come on, let’s share that, and in sharing that we’ll somehow cathartically dispel all that heinous shit.” Right? McCauley, for his part, lives by a theory from which the movie gets its name: “Don’t let yourself get attached to anything you are not willing to walk out on in 30 seconds flat if you feel the heat around the corner.” In short, both Hanna and McCauley avoid feeling and displaying emotion because feelings simply get in the way of the work they each feel called to do.
Hanna and McCauley are also similar in that they are profoundly flawed human beings who have incredible difficulty with any aspects of their lives that do not involve complete attention to their careers. Hanna, the good guy, is not, the audience learns, 100% good. He yells at his wife and neglects her, so much so that she feels provoked to seek a simpering lover in order to get her husband’s attention. When Hanna takes notice of this development, the only aspect of the situation that really seems to anger him is that the lover is watching Hanna’s television. He reacts by ripping the cord out of the wall, telling the lover that he can “ball my wife if she wants you to, and lounge around here on her sofa, in her ex-husband’s… bullshit house… but you do not get to watch my fucking television set!” With that, he and the television leave, and seconds later, strangely, he tosses the television out of his car, leaving it in broken fragments on the street, where a motley collection of homeless people look at it curiously.
