Why are movies funnier in a theater?
Or: It took less than a week to write something about "Collateral."
Saw Collateral at the Egyptian on Sunday. Utter perfection, better with age, this glimmer-pulp murder hang filmed on scuzzy old pixels. Michael Mann off his ten-year epic swell chugging Los Angeles like Red Bull. 19 and a half years since I last saw it in a theater, I forgot how immersive yet jumpy this dark night feels. Focus pulls, light-tap zooms. The camera cuts from shoulder close-up to metropolitan skycam, like Mann wants you to be a first-person shooter and a SimGod.
There are failures that succeed in Collateral. I really can’t tell if Mann understood how insane Tom Cruise looks. This alleged ultra-stealth operator almost glowing in his silver suit and silver hair. Always wearing sunglasses inside at midnight, not uncocaine-ishly. Might as well have a sign declaring ME MISTER MYSTERIOUS. An illogical, astounding visual. And upclose shaky cam grit was an everywhere mode back then, but Mann burgeons every frame with something richer than realism. Watch the signs. “Left Turn Only” in the shot where Jamie Foxx runs right. “Exit to Hope Street” behind two characters boarding a train whereon someone will die. Must be said, also: This is cinema’s best coyote.
The film played so well on Sunday. A ready crowd, American Cinematheque Members Only. And the other thing I forgot was Collateral’s utter comedy. Not like funny lines. I mean the humor magma boiling within the neo-noir crust. Foxx’s sweaty-minnow desperation, Irma P. Hall’s mom who never listens, Javier Bardem stealing his scene with the bored expression Kobe Bryant used to model nailing threes in a whatever game. People laughed when the camera lingered too long on Cruise running all elf-turbo. More laughs, lighter and sweeter, when Jada Pinkett Smith’s lawyer gives Foxx’s cabbie her phone number. (Streaming on Paramount+, go now.)
I didn’t realize how funny it was. Been hearing that a lot lately from random people in this movie city. Heard it at Barry Lyndon, Apocalypse Now, and Lost Highway after I caught them at the Aero. The first two were, when I was young, shorthand for unthinkable wonder, things lost in a cinematic mist then rediscovered by, I don’t know, the utopian future of DVD technology. Highway was metal-noir unleashed, not just nasty but Reznor-nasty. I’m sure brilliant critics admired Kubrick’s drollness, recognized Coppola’s satire amidst the druggy mythmaking. I did not know those long Lynch-dialogue pauses were a maestro pausing for laughter. But I never remember the humor of those films being such a palpable described part of the experience. Worship was crucial.
We laugh more in a movie theater. Have we always done that, or are we changing? I watched every Hitchcock home alone with Blockbuster. Not until a rep theater played Strangers on a Train did I realized his terror depends on his humor, these awful things happening to amusing people. Did we lose some crucial layer in generations of home video? Is that why a lot of Hitchcock’s inheritors seem more rigid in their tension, relentlessly conjuring storm-your-senses cool without the undercutting counterbalance of wit? CoughcoughNolancoughcough, sure, but Mann himself self-amputated the comedy instinct for awhile after Collateral.
A counterargument declares: No, laughter is a wrong response from a fallen society. Memes leave us incapable of moral seriousness. Decades of low-ambition acting make any performance choice outrageous to our blind eyes. Contemporary cinephile culture dangles above the pit wherein all content shall forever be consumed with the mauled-giggle indifference of a Ridiculousness marathon.
I worry about this; I disagree. Something soul-healthy about a chuckle with strangers, especially over a movie you all thought you knew. It makes me wonder if amusement is a deeper, truer cinematic reaction than awe. You can stare up astonished with Spielberg-kid eyes at any movie in an empty theater. You need other people to unlock the secret pleasures, these reactive impulses that can only exist in a community. Anyone can go to church alone. Takes a crew to heist the communion wine.