Film Notes: Heat

Heat (1995) film notes by Tova Gannana for the L.A. Noir: Shadows in Paradise series, presented by Greg Olson Productions. The series runs through November 2025 at SIFF Cinema Uptown. 

On the top floor of a high-rise, in dim light, with windows looking out at the glittering city, Lt. Vincent Hanna (Al Pacino) is out to dinner with his LAPD Burglary and Homicide Unit and their spouses. They could almost be in the same building with Neil McCauley (Robert De Niro) and his band of thieves, who are dining out with their spouses on the first floor of a neon-lit strip mall.

Vincent dances slowly by a piano with Justine (Diane Venora), who will never be happy with him; she wants to be Myrna Loy to his William Powell.

In Heat (1995) the LAPD and the criminals seem to be the city’s only inhabitants. They’re each other’s opposites: good angels and bad angels. They work long hours, day and night. They ask a lot from themselves and from the women who want to be with them. They’ve served time, both in prison and on the job. They get a call, they answer. There’s a line between life and death: They’re on one side of it, waiting for the other.

Vincent’s suits are too big for him, at times cape-like, other times with just a fraction more fabric than needed. His too-big suits float him around L.A. Vincent dreams about ghosts; his suits feel like they’re inhabited by more than just him.

The most expressive face in Heat is Vincent’s. Like his too-big suits, his expressions are the expressions of more than just himself. Like passing shadows on the city streets, he is animate. Like Detective Jim Wilson (Robert Ryan) in On Dangerous Ground (1951), Lt. Vincent is black eyed, the seer for all of the city, leading LA, batty and blind, through the onslaught of an oncoming fog. In 1950s cinema, Jim had a chain of command above him to discipline him, to throw him out, to send him upstate to a snowy town, to solve a crime. Vincent will never leave LA. Above the city, in a helicopter, he hovers. Vincent is above, Neil is below. They’re each other’s heat.

Heat is about chaos; in sunny LA, it is darkness that reigns. People go about whatever it is that you go about when you’re not a criminal. Then a gunfight erupts in the center of downtown; the sound of bullets echoes against the buildings. Heat is also a film about codes among men that will always be broken. Thou shalt not...and thou usually does. From the legal to the moral, laws are broken. Neil says that he lives by his own code, one he heard and picked up: “Don’t let yourself get attached to anything you’re not willing to walk out on in 30 seconds flat if you feel the heat around the corner.” Turns out the heat is not the police, but instead the master of us all: time.

“Do you travel a lot? Does it make you feel lonely?” Eady (Amy Brenneman) asks Neil on their first encounter. “I’m alone, but I’m not lonely,” he replies. Eady and Neil kiss above the city, and the lights below look like stars. Eady is in graphic design, which in 1995 was the way of the future: To learn how to build online, to master the digital world.

Neil pulls his third and final job, not in stealing bearer bonds like in the film’s opening heist, but in bills – cool cash – in broad daylight, in public. This is what leads to the gunfight. Neil has gone from being the man in the mask to being the man running wounded.

Vincent searches for Neil in his helicopter with its lights above the city making rainbows.

First, Vincent and Neil meet for coffee, two foes who have what friends would say “much in common”. Only Vincent and Neil having coffee at their table are in focus; everyone else in the restaurant is in the background, a blur. Vincent and Neil are at the center: two forces in the world that represent multitudes. In the language of American cinema, they’re cop and robber.

They share what it is they dream about: Singular dreams; dreams that repeat. Vincent is visited while he sleeps by “all the victims of all the murders I’ve ever worked sitting at this table, and they’re staring at me with these black eyeballs. There they are – these big balloon people – because I found them two weeks after they’d been under the bed.” Neil asks Vincent, “What do they say?” Vincent replies, “They don’t have anything to say. We just look at each other. They look at me and that’s it. That’s the dream.”

Neil’s recurring dream is: “I’m drowning and I’ve got to wake myself up and start breathing, or else I’ll die in my sleep.” Vincent tells him, “You know what that’s about?” Neil answers, “Yeah: Having enough time.”

Ultimately, Neil is not brought down by Lt. Vincent. In fact, he almost gets away. Instead, Neil is brought down by his inner heat, his inability to let things go. He veers off the highway to return to LA. His last lines to Eady are, “I’ll be right back. Keep the car running.”

Because they know one another’s dreams, either Vincent or Neil will die in the end; the other will have to keep living.