Two sides of the same coin

Heat (1995)

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"Allow nothing to be in your life that you cannot walk out on in thirty seconds flat if you spot the heat around the corner"

This is some of the best advice you will ever receive, especially when you are planning to be a master criminal. Watching this masterpiece, one must wonder how this is not among the other blockbusters people keep blabbering about whenever they talk about action/crime films. I am talking about 1995’s epic action-crime thriller, Heat. Directed by Michael Mann and starring two of the finest actors in Hollywood cinema, Al Pacino and Robert De Niro, it mainly follows the conflict between master criminal Neil McCauley (De Niro’s character) and Lieutenant Vincent Hanna (Pacino’s character) and also the effect of their respective professions on their personal lives.

Although Heat has several iconic scenes, be they fully action oriented or the ones that explore the emotional aspects of the characters, one scene that comes up time and again and is considered one of the all-time great scenes in Hollywood cinema is the coffee shop scene that takes place in the middle of the film.

Prior to this scene, De Niro and Pacino had never shared the screen before. This might have been due to the fact that both of these actors are very similar in terms of their style and suited roles. They, however, had been in the same movie before in the immortal The Godfather Part II. Pacino played Michael Corleone, the main protagonist across the three films, and De Niro played a younger version of Vito Corleone, Michael’s father.

Moving onto the scene, this is not only iconic but also holds significance in the context of the movie. Hanna asks McCauley for a cup of coffee, to which he firmly agrees. It is always risky to visit a public place with your enemy without any protection or backup, but neither of the men think much of it. Rather they both see this as an opportunity to psycho-analyze one another and also get into each other’s heads.

The following conversation that occurs just portrays how similar these two men really are, despite being on opposite sides of the law. They threaten each other, they share their personal lives, and they even sympathize with one another, all while they are psychoanalyzing each other. At one point Hanna asks McCauley if he ever wanted a “regular-type” life to which McCauley replies “What is it? Barbecues and ball games.”, to which Hanna half-heartedly replies back “Yeahhh….”. This shows neither men really know what “regular” actually means as their dangerous and demanding professions have taken over their lives and they can’t think of anything else being peaceful or “regular”.

The attention to detail is also immaculate in this scene, with McCauley constantly looking for the door, showing his characteristic of being aware of his surroundings. Moreover, when Hanna says “some poor bastard whose wife you are going to turn into a widow”, we can see McCauley looking down and showing signs of guilt. This shows McCauley sympathizes a little with his victims but doesn’t let it affect his work, thus making him good at what he does. Michael Mann used multiple cameras at various angles to film this scene so as to capture every single movement the actors took, to give the audience a clearer outlook on what was going on in their heads.

Despite not being drenched in action or involving any sort of climax, this scene is one of the most historical scenes in cinema as we might never see two of the finest actors with similar skill sets with two contrasting yet similar characters just sitting, talking, and analyzing each other. This has influenced many other directors to use similar settings in their films, most famously used by Nolan which he used in making “The Dark Knight” more woeful and grittier than it already seemed to be. This scene is priceless to cinema and should be preserved to inspire future generations.

This conversation that happens between two supposedly opposite characters, at the end of the day, makes the two men and everyone watching, realize that they are not that different but are just two sides of the same coin and maybe in a parallel universe, where the rules are a bit different, they would have been friends or even partners.

-Written by Kinshuk Chatterjee