Michael Mann’s movies are appraised by many critics and audiences alike as movies for men. It’s easy to understand why: His gangsters and crime fighters are gruff and self-important, dominating the screen with close-ups of their deathly serious expressions. Though his movies often feature compelling female characters, the typical Mann plot involves a man—or two, or three—hashing out some plan of action.
But these men are also compelled by love—and without the push and pull of romance, there would be no deeper story within many of his films. If many cinematic romances imagine how two people can overcome adversity through love, a Mann romance is more about how love itself can be the adversity. Were it not for their relationships, the highly skilled professionals in his movies might endlessly and easily rob every bank or catch every criminal.
No Mann film exemplifies this more than Heat, which was released 30 years ago, in 1995. By then, Mann had explored romantic tension in Thief and Manhunter, movies in which the protagonist’s love life helps shape their motivations and moves the plot forward. In Heat, those relationships are the plot. On its face, the film is about the cops-and-robbers, Tom-and-Jerry dynamic between Vincent Hanna, a Los Angeles Police Department lieutenant (played by Al Pacino), and Neil McCauley, a bank-robbing mastermind (Robert De Niro). But the heart of the story is what happens with McCauley’s right-hand man, Chris (Val Kilmer), and his wife, Charlene (Ashley Judd).
Mann’s movies are interested in the tension that results when two individuals pit their independent lives against a near-inexplicable desire for each other. When we first meet Chris and Charlene by the pool at their Los Angeles villa, the passion in their eyes says it all. But their marriage is a mutual liability: Chris is a gambling junkie who fuels his lifestyle through dangerous heists, and Charlene is a young mother looking for stability for their son. If either had any sense, they’d call it quits.
And yet, Chris can’t quit Charlene. “For me, the sun rises and sets with her, man,” he tells McCauley after sleeping off another bender. Hanna’s squad has gotten onto Charlene’s trail, and threatened her with imprisonment if she doesn’t help them arrest Chris. Following McCauley’s big bank job that serves as the movie’s centerpiece, Charlene and her son are stashed at a safe house, where she’s set to rendezvous with Chris before he skips town—and where the police will presumably corner him. From a balcony, Charlene watches Chris step out of his car with a new haircut and the biggest grin in the world. During the bank shootout and a resulting chase scene, he caught a bullet in his shoulder and is now visibly pale from blood loss. One look from the woman he loves, however, can make everything right.
When Charlene waves him off, indicating the plan was a trap, Chris’s world collapses. In a brilliant bit of acting by Kilmer, his crumbling facial expression shows just how rudderless he is without her. For Charlene, letting Chris walk puts her at risk of prison time; their son might be sent to foster care. Still, even after all the screaming fights, the two have a bond that appears to cause physical pain when broken. This moment carries the entire movie. All the gunfights, stress, and back-alley surgery—what was it for, if it pushed you away from the love of your life?
Notably, Chris takes exactly 30 seconds after Charlene’s signal to get back in his car and drive off. That’s the magic number quoted by McCauley, first to Chris and later to Hanna, that gives this movie its title: “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.” For McCauley, this mantra is about the discipline required to stay out of prison. Early in the film, we see him responding to Eady (Amy Brenneman), a woman he meets at a diner, as though she’ll just needlessly tie him down. Before sleeping with her, he tells her, “I am alone. I am not lonely.” He then leaves her in the middle of the night, and heads back to his life of no attachments.
But something shifts when McCauley sees the smiles and laughter between his crew and their wives while they’re all out celebrating a successful robbery. He has never wanted a regular life, but he is getting older—and time is running out. He has an idea that all of his thievery is building toward something, a way out, a new life. However, surrounded by loving couples in the restaurant, his facade breaks. One phone call to Eady, and he’s back at her place, asking her to run away with him.
The romance between Eady and McCauley is complicated. Both are loners teetering on the fringes of society, and Eady’s ability to see McCauley as a real person, even if only as a stranger reading a book, is enough to undo his entire worldview. On their first real night together, they tell each other their dreams while looking out at L.A.’s blinking lights from a balcony. When McCauley walks out the next morning, he leaves Eady a glass of water wrapped in a perfectly folded napkin—a rare sign of tenderness from a man who, at the start of the movie, didn’t hesitate to order the execution of armored-car guards. “I’m a needle starting at zero going the other way—a double blank,” he later tells her. “Then, all of a sudden, someone like you comes along.” It’s a line worthy of any romance, easily placeable in a Frank Capra or Nora Ephron film.
Rooted in these romances, Heat transcends its crime-driven plot to become a bigger rumination on life’s purpose. Chris’s and McCauley’s relationships might be roadblocks to success as bank robbers, but the easy life they want is unimaginable without the women they love. In that way, they resemble the workaholic husband in a rom-com who is trying to get the top promotion even as it causes strife in his marriage. For these two professional crooks, however, that means squaring their desire for an everyday home life with chasing big scores and brutal murder.
This sentiment is echoed throughout Mann’s oeuvre. In Manhunter, an FBI agent’s love for his wife fuels his incessant need to stop a serial killer who is targeting families. In The Last of the Mohicans, an adopted member of an Indigenous tribe puts his community in danger after falling for the daughter of a British officer. Time and time again, Mann pits his characters’ ambitions and responsibilities against their romantic desires, forcing them to either accept a balance or lose it all. His most recent film, Ferrari, explicitly sees the title character trying to juggle his relationships with his wife and mistress alongside his passion for car racing. “This is how life really is,” Mann said in an interview with Collider. “It’s complex; it’s complicated.”
Mann’s romances do feel realistic, even when they’re staged in larger-than-life action movies. His love stories require work, patience, and sacrifice to succeed, and even the best outcomes leave their participants a little banged up from the turbulence. The characters who invest in romance tend to make it out okay, while many of those who can’t commit are left with tragedy. Romance may be difficult, but it might also be the meaning of life—a sentiment that is reflected in the real world, where the filmmaker has been married to his wife for more than 50 years. If only his characters could see it so clearly.
