Michael Mann and sound mixes (updated)
A few years back, in his review of Michael Mann’s Miami Vice for The Weekly Standard,* John Podhoretz complained that the sound mix made it almost impossible to hear the dialogue. It’s a complain I understand; I just watched it again for the fourth or fifth time, and I’d say that about 3-5% of the lines I’ve simply never understood. I’m tempted to watch it with subtitles on next time.
In part, this difficulty arises because a number of the actors (Gong Li, John Ortiz, Luis Tosar [update: Ortiz was born in Brooklyn. So he’s probably a native English speaker…but damn does the accent he uses make his dialogue difficult to pick through. 2 out of 3 ain’t bad, though, right?]) aren’t native English speakers (to the best of my knowledge), and their accents/halting speech cadences make it hard to understand what, precisely, is being said.
There’s another issue, however, having to do with Mann’s sound mixes: Speech gets quieted down a little in favor of making the rest of the soundtrack extra jarring. It’s something you see in the rest of Mann’s body of work. As a result, the spikes in action — the post bank robbery shootout in Heat, the cabin showdown in Public Enemies, the opening nightclub scene and final shootout at the shipyard in Miami Vice — become all the more disorienting.
The best way to experience this is in a theater watching Heat, during the final scene. You might remember that the climactic shootout between Al Pacino and Robert De Niro takes place on the runway of an airport — planes are landing and taking off; glaring lights flash on and off to guide them in. On television, the scene always kind of annoyed me, but I had the chance to watch it at the AFI Silver a few years back on a massive screen with a great sound system, and the difference was earth shattering. The massive spikes in noise from the airplanes caused the most disorienting experience experience I’ve ever had in a theater…and this was a movie I’d seen a half-dozen times before.
Anyway, that disorientation comes at the expense of the dialogue throughout the rest of the movie: Without the discrepancy in the levels, you don’t get the amazing effect at the end of the picture. Same thing with Miami Vice.
*Which I cannot find for some reason; maybe it got lost in the transfer to the new website. I know he wrote it, though, because I remember editing the piece.