In brief, “Collateral” is intended to be a thriller. It is based in L.A . One night the dreaming, going nowhere cabby Max ( Foxx) unwittingly picks up assassin for higher Vincent ( Cruise). Max is bullied into driving him around as Vincent kills five witnesses. The cinematography is stunning. Reviews are ten to the dozen. What this essay aims to look at now is the characters and how they are formed.
It was Colredige that wrote
“it becomes both morally and poetically unsafe to present what is admirable,—what our nature compels us to admire —in the mind, and what is most detestable in the heart, as co-existing in the same individual without any apparent connection, or any modification of the one by the other.”.
He was talking about the problems that any dramatist faces in the characterisation of Iago types. To the adult there is something elusively, childishly unreal about such characters. It is nigh impossible to portray characters as powerfully evil in adult drama as the wicked witch does for children. Coleridge believed that this could be linked to a basic mortal arrogance; that we could not conceive that someone who was gifted with intelligence or wit or articulation &c could truly be evil to the core. This was the reason he gave for Macbeth’s success in battle, Edmund’s apparent repentance at the end, Claudius guilt and Shylock’s loss of a daughter. Misfortune gave the characters motive and so the audience could understand why they might be evil. Good deeds proved that the characters admirable features were helping to keep them good. In short the arrogant self delusion was maintained.
This was also the reason Coleridge was so in awe of Shakespeare’s Iago. There is no redeeming feature in “Othello”’s villain. If we look at Tom Cruise’s Vincent we can see something very similar. From the out he has the same abrupt calculation, giving directions to the next hit as if he was just on business. He is completely unremorseful and mechanically matter of fact, when Max accuses him of having killed a man he replies “No, I shot him. The bullets and the fall killed him”. When the police (in time) appreciate what is going on the first thing that is pointed out to the audience is that every kill is done in exactly the same way, bullets in the same vital areas, only millimetres out.
It is clear from the outset that Vincent is a character that can be stretched to evil of great lengths. This mechanisation of Vincent is largely to credit for the unfeeling ruthlessness that emanates from him. Stephanie Zacharek of Salon.com is of the opinion that :
“….Cruise's dignity rings stiff and false (not even the suit helps), and he's no match for Foxx. Foxx inhabits his character so comfortably that he renders meaningless Vincent's babble about the tough, real world. Max is the one who lives in the real world, which is ultimately the point of the movie -- but it takes the picture a very long time to reach a conclusion that's evident from the start to any attuned viewer.”
I would suggest that, the faults mentioned above are largely down to the fact that it is very hard to portray this peculiar intensity of evil. Moreover, a complaint of stiffness would seem to go against the obvious attemps of Mann already made to dehumanise Vincent. The fact of the matter is that complaints can be lodged against the stiffness or the philosophy only if they contain a counter argument to the need to partially remove the mortal core of Vincent in order to portray this level of evil effectively.
It isn’t vital that the audience be convinced by Vincent’s ideas, they just have to find them more convincing that Maxx’s in order that the Iago characteristics be conveyed and maintain believability and interest. When Vincent gives his “Horoshima and Nagasaki” speech, Maxx is left lost for words or retort. What Vincent is ultimately broadcasting is the selfishness of the human condition, the essence of his character. Perhaps complaints of the final scene’s length could be best countered by claiming that it was required for the change in Maxx’s character. He has moved from the shy cabby to someone who will steal mobile phones from by-standers. The scene where he has to impersonate Vincent is the end of the beginning of this change. A change which climaxes in his killing of Vincent, despite his passangers perpetual reluctance to make collateral damage out of Maxx. Once more, like Iago, if he is motivated by anything, Vincent is propelled by the material benefit that his actions will result in. In attempting to save Vincent’s last kill, Maxx steps infront of the money, so he has to die.
There has been a lot of argumentation from critics centering arround the idea that the two characters were supposed to rely on and learn from one another. It would seem more consistant to the characterisation that this was not the case. Yes, Maxx was scared into driving arround the hitman and ultimatly had to conceed that he was partly correct regards the selfish nature of the huamn condition. Yet Cruise’s character bears no such change. This essay would argue that he kept Maxx alive only because he drove well. Tom Cruise plays a character that has distorted views on the value of anything, it may well be that he places a good cab driver above a life. More interestingly, it may have been to selfishly sooth his conscience, he let Maxx live to prove to himself that he was not entirely evil. Though, given his previous actions, this seems unlikely. He truly is a twentyfirst century evil capable of matching Iago in wit, with his argumentation of selfishness, pure evil in his mechanistic approach to killing and in his apparent defiance of the laws of drama; in so far as it is a successful portrayal of what human nature compells us to disbelieve.