Feeling my bona fides as a film studies person slipping away because I’d seen only one movie in the theatres this summer, I decided tonight to catch Collateral, the new Michael Mann movie. Attendance was delectably sparse in the THX house where I saw it, though the hardy few around us still managed to be distractions: the folks in back frequently talked to each other, the patron to the left got so excited at one point that she began slapping her thighs–loudly and with real vim–in time to the music (couldn’t fault her too much for that, I guess), and the patron in front decided to use an emery board on her nails during one of the film’s many quietly intense moments. Yes, an emery board. Rubbarubbarubba. That was a new one for me, and I thought I’d experienced most every form of patron rudeness short of a fistfight.

This, dear reader, is why watching a movie on DVD is often more involving than watching it on the big screen.

Not even my antic fellow citizens, however, could leave a mark on the moviegoing thrills tonight. And the most thrilling moments were not the crashes or the gunshots or even the suspenseful waiting for the hammer to fall. The deepest thrills tonight were aesthetic, ethical, metaphysical. Aesthetic, because Michael Mann has an extraordinary eye for beautiful, arresting images that are never merely pretty. His frames are dynamic, yet painterly; carefully considered, yet loose enough to be full of the energy of discovery–his, and ours. (This time Mann uses digital filmmaking as a way to make the night come alive: see this article for more details.) Ethical, because the entire movie revolves around the question of how and why one ought to act in a universe where the idea of meaning itself is just another riff in the cosmic jam session, no more or less: brownian motion on the bandstand at the Universe Club. Metaphysical, because the questions behind this question are posed with great glee and even a kind of tenderness that makes them all the more terrifying. Who notices our actions? What difference can they make? If our actions are insignificant–literally, pointing to nothing–how can our choices have any weight or value?

Interestingly, the action of the movie does two things: it keeps those questions alive and urgent, and it steadfastly refuses to give us any satisfaction as to their answers. It doesn’t even allow us the comfy distance of the agnostic materialist. Even agnosia, finally, is made to feel like a cheap escape. We know too much already.

So we’re left with a movie whose nihilism is nearly pure but in which we still find ourselves rooting for a hero. We’re not made to feel like chumps for doing so, either. But we are denied any final satisfaction for doing so. There’s a kind of intellectual rigor here that combines with a pained awareness of shared suffering to implicate both head and heart. Yet for all that, the movie never pats us on the head or throws its arm around our shoulder. Instead, the movie’s questions ride in the back seat all the way home, talking to us, involving us, and not letting us go, even after the long night is over.

A fine and unusual movie, in my judgment, despite being saddled with a few pat moments in the storytelling. You owe it to yourself to see a mainstream movie with Tom Cruise that is anything but ordinary. Highly recommended.