| Tony Scott’s Man on Fire
creates a world of sense impressions. A world whose physicality
is generated through a constant heightening of visual and
acoustic fragments. Images are fastened, slowed, paused. Frame
rates are varied. Things happen that are too quick to catch.
Small almost imperceptible sounds are accentuated. Images
are out of focus or bleached-out or grainy or tinted with
sulfurous yellow and gritty browns. Shots are rough, quick,
truncated. When it rains, it storms. The world becomes silent,
then explodes again in a fiery barrage of sounds. This contemporary
trend towards an increasingly frenetic film-style has opened
up a new and fascinating dimension of cinematic expression,
and has been discussed and examined by theorists and critics
alike. From the viewers’ perspective, however, it can
sometimes be just plain confusing – (in Armageddon
[1998] and Any Given Sunday [1999], for example,
viewers complained that they were presented with such rapid
fragmented impressions that they were unable to grasp what
was happening) -- people I’ve spoken with have said
that they wished such films would occasionally include a wide-shot
to establish the relations between objects and people. But
the sense of having a larger picture is something that this
film-style consciously aims to bypass. In Man on Fire,
the fragmented manner in which Scott presents action and events
enables him to create a world that is full of danger and tension.
Scott is constantly expanding and then limiting our field
of vision. Even more than this, he uses fragments of details
and actions to construct character and narrative. Scott might
focus on the cigar they’re smoking, a gun in their hands
that they are playing with, or in the case of Man on Fire’s
central protagonist Creasy (Denzel Washington), he shows us
his finger hovering above the trigger of a gun before a kill.
It’s not a hovering of indecision -- Creasy is merely
waiting for the right moment to shoot. And in this hovering
patient finger lies Creasy’s entire being: a calm, often
composed exterior, that belies the intense force and violence
just below its surface.
Creasy, a tortured somewhat burnt-out man who has lost his
way and wound up in Mexico in a kind of limbo between life
and death, existence and oblivion. Creasy, a man whose come
to forget his past. Creasy, a man who has come to escape himself
by diving into a sea of whiskey. Creasy, an ex-soldier who
finds work as the bodyguard of a small girl, Pita (Dakota
Fanning), the daughter of a wealthy family in a Mexico City
that is rife with violent kidnappings. Director Tony Scott
abandons his usual character dynamics here. In earlier films
such as The Last Boy Scout (1991), Enemy of the
State (1998), and Spy Game (2001), Scott tends
to focus on the relationship between two men, typically an
older disgruntled master, and a younger upstart who learns
from him when the two are thrown together. In Man on Fire
Creasy is more tortured, more of a loner, and more prone to
violence, than Scott’s earlier characters. He doesn’t
eat, can’t sleep, and even looks for comfort in the
Bible. All this while realizing that his life is spiraling
hopelessly out of control. It’s no coincidence that
Pita gives him a necklace from which hangs a charm of St.
Jude, patron Saint of Lost Causes. Pita understands Creasy
from the start. She says of him, "He’s just like
a big sad bear". But she makes him smile, something he
never does. And he comes to enjoy her company and much as
she enjoys his. Then she is kidnapped. After the paying of
the ransom is bungled, the police and the family, realizing
that Pita has been killed, call off the investigation. After
being informed of her death, Creasy is asked by Pita’s
mother, "What are you going to do now?" "What
I do best", he replies, "Kill them all." Creasy
gears up with an arsenal and, despite his pain over his young
companion’s death, surrounded by his guns and with a
mission to murder, he seems to be in his element. The film’s
title almost says it, but not quite: Creasy is a slowly smoldering
coal about to explode into flame. Because Pita is dead, our
interest in Creasy’s mission is not "Will he get
her back?", as it would usually be in this species of
action film, but is in the execution of an act of pure revenge.
Due to this, the entire film has an element of moral ambiguity
that will attract some and make others feel uncomfortable.
Creasy tells us, "They say a bullet always tells the
truth" -- it’s true that Creasy’s bullets
always find their way to those who most deserve to be punished
-- but it’s also true that Creasy is clearly at home
with a brutality and violence that has no place for the slightest
gesture of mercy. While watching Man on Fire a question
was slowly taking shape in my mind: what happens when Creasy
has killed everyone? In his single-minded pursuit of Pita’s
killers, he reveals himself as a man for whom violence is
the only way of life he knows. So what’s going to happen
when he has killed everyone? What is there for Creasy at the
end of all this? The answer is simple: nothing.
Tony Scott’s cinema is a kinetic sensory cinema of action.
No doubt about it. Yet Man on Fire manages to transcend
these self-imposed boundaries. Despite its almost non-stop
barrage of movement, speed and tension, it’s a film
full of eloquence, tragedy, ragged beauty, sadness, and bittersweet
friendships.
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