August 15, 1986 | These days, Michael Mann is best known as the executive producer of Miami Vice, the sleek and stylish TV series that places a high premium on flashy, MTV-style imagery. But long before Don Johnson put on his T-shirt and shoulder holster, Mann impressed movie audiences with Thief, a moody film noir thriller with an equally imaginative production design.
The gripping drama of a resourceful burglar who will not be co-opted by organized crime, Thief marked Mann as a feature filmmaker of great promise. With Manhunter, he more than fulfills that promise.
Slick, scary and almost incessantly suspenseful, Manhunter is the best American thriller to hit movie screens since Joel and Ethan Coen cooked up Blood Simple. Based on a best-selling novel by Thomas Harris, it works brilliantly as both a taut police procedural and a riveting psychological drama. But you’ll have to work a little bit to soak it all in: This is a movie that demands you pay attention every second, so you won’t miss a subtle dollop of characterization or exposition. Make sure you see it at a theater where the sound system and the projection quality are strictly first-class. And don’t wait until it pops up on videocassette.
Cinematographer Dante Spinotti and production designer Mel Bourne give Manhunter the chilly, shadow-streaked look of an especially decadent fashion magazine layout. Going one step further, Mann has matched the New Wave visuals with an insistently foreboding electronic musical score by The Reds and Michel Rubini. Better still, he also throws in an effective oldie-but-goodie, Iron Butterfly’s “In-a-Gadda-Da-Vida,” to enhance the nerve-racking climax.
All this high-tech razzle-dazzle could have gotten out of hand, as it did in Mann’s last film, The Keep, and as it does some weeks on Miami Vice. But Mann uses the sound and fury to support, not overwhelm, his story. And, more important, he doesn’t forget about the human factor.
William Petersen, last seen in William Friedkin’s To Live and Die in L.A., gives an arresting performance as Will Graham, an ex-FBI agent lured out of early retirement. Before he turned in his badge, Graham was notorious for his ability to reason like a psychopath, which enabled him to figure out the behavior patterns of serial murderers. (He’s not clairvoyant, just amazingly perceptive.) Unfortunately, he spent too much time inside other people’s heads: After a near-fatal encounter with a killer, he suffered a nervous breakdown.
When we first meet Graham, he looks like he hasn’t had a decent night’s sleep in years. And he looks even worse when his former boss shows up to ask a very special favor.
Someone has slaughtered two entire families — one in Atlanta, the other in Birmingham, Ala. — and is likely to kill again if he isn’t found. Graham, now living in Florida with his wife and son, doesn’t want anything to do with the case: He fears what will happen to his sanity after another walk on the dark side. But he can’t help himself once he sees family portraits of the murder victims.
The tension starts to build the first time Graham walks through the blood-stained house in Atlanta. Slowly, eerily, he loses himself in a vividly imagined psyche as he guesses what went on in the killer’s mind. We don’t see the murders — all we get is a quick glimpse of police lab photos while Graham sleeps on an airplane. (A little girl seated near Graham also sees the pictures, and they scare the hell out of her.) But by leaving so much to our imagination, Mann makes the crimes seem even more horrifying.
Mann isn’t dealing with anything new here: There have been plenty of other movies about hunters who discover they have more in common with their prey than they’d like to admit. But in Manhunter, the familiar plot has a compelling edge, particularly when Graham contacts the last killer he captured, a soft-spoken psychopath named Lektor.
It’s Lektor who describes murder as the ultimate act of hubris, an attempt by mortal man to be like God. And this raises the unsettling question: Is Graham committing an equally dangerous folly by trying to be like a homicidal maniac?
Petersen is excellent as the profoundly spooked-out Graham, a man constantly frightened by his own bizarre talent. His best scene is an atypically quiet interlude in a grocery store, where Graham explains to his uneasy son just what happens when Dad has “bad thoughts.” It’s an unexpectedly affecting moment, revealing Graham as both tragic and terrifying. Petersen skillfully sustains the balancing act throughout the entire film: We never know for certain whether Graham will remain on the edge, or plummet into the abyss.
Brian Cox makes a chilling impression as Lektor, his understated British accent somehow making him all the more menacing. As the killer currently in Graham’s sights, Tom Noonan is a formidable villain who nevertheless turns shy and tongue-tied around a beautiful blind co-worker (Joan Allen).
And to top it all off, Mann has assembled a notably strong supporting cast: Kim Greist as Graham’s nervous wife, David Seaman as their son, Dennis Farina as Graham’s former boss, and Stephen Lang as an obnoxious tabloid reporter who gets what he deserves.
Manhunter most assuredly isn’t a movie for every taste. But if you like your thrillers served ice-cold with a twist of glitz, you’ll find this is a very potent brew.
