Mannerism: Michael Mann On Ali

Michael Mann takes the measure of Muhammad Ali (2001)

C’mon, what's more epic than the human heart?

While movies like Heat and The Insider might have typed writer-director Michael Mann as a trafficker of the crack action, terse dialogue and lush imagery of a postmodern thriller, his "Ali" is more intimate and in its own way, more heroic. Spanning 1964 to 1974, the most turbulent decade in the life of Kentucky-born, internationally beloved heavyweight boxing champion Muhammad Ali, Mann's elliptical biopic is both intelligent and intimidating. Cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki's camera is fleet and darting, mostly handheld or Steadicam, and the effect is less panoramic as one would expect in a film biography than close-in, the viewer becoming a witness to momentous events as they unfold.

It's hard to imagine anyone capturing the real life Muhammad Ali on screen--Ali himself tried it in 1977's indifferent, episodic The Greatest—yet Will Smith's year of training for the role makes for a terrific performance that rises above mere mimicry. Mann and his co-writers are intrigued by what makes Ali hold fast to his principles, yet never pretend to provide answers. Evidence accrues. Early scenes with Malcolm X (a tender performance by Mario van Peebles) offer as many clues as his later playful battles with broadcaster Howard Cosell (Jon Voight, unrecognizable behind layers of makeup yet brilliant).  His trust in troubled friend Bundini Brown--played memorably with both hilarity and pathos by Jamie Foxx--is another facet. Yet Mann offers the viewer rare trust, never explaining, only suggesting. “It’s always one sucker can beat another sucker, that’s the boxing game,” ring master Angelo Dundee likes to say. In the case of Ali, it was always a struggle against not being the man he felt he had to be: for himself, for African Americans, for the world. “You got support, but baby, you only got you,” one of his wives tells him.

Ali is filled with scrupulous location work and reenactments of fights. I ask the notorious perfectionist about how close to documentary he felt he had to get. "There’s no margin," Mann says. "We don’t know if we got it right, I mean, we make no assumptions. You work on something like this as intensely as we all did, we confess it was intense, for a couple of years, you don’t know if you got it there or not. We knew going in, that to get 95% of the way there would be abject failure, that you can’t do Muhammad Ali otherwise. You’ve got to get all that down, forget it, [then] build the man inside yourself,  that’s gotta be there when Michael says, 'Action!' It couldn’t have been without less than an entire year of preparation before we shot one foot of film. You can’t fail. You can’t. That’s what you tell yourself, you can’t fail."

The cooperation of Ali and his family was important, too. "What [Muhammad's family] were averse to was the sentimentalized kind of Hallmark-greeting card version of Muhammad Ali," the Chicago-born director says in his . "What they did want and were very verbal about is, we don’t want to see Muhammad as a religious icon and everyone gets all teary, and all that. What was profound to them about t Ali’s struggle is struggle. That is human. Struggle is filled with error, it’s filled with missteps, it’s filled with mistakes."

The camera spends much of its time darting and weaving, yet the style demonstrates as much formal control as Mann's more magisterial testosterone epics with stately framings. Ali is often isolated against fields of white or gray, yet also consumed within crowds, a man of, and among, the people. "I was asking myself in the preparation, and of course, in the making of the film," Mann says of this choice, "Where do I want to position the audience? It’s a fundamental question and it affects everything that comes after. As much as possible, I wanted to position the camera so that you feel that this is experience that’s happening around me, and I’m around it. That decision also applies to period. We wanted an audience to feel that they are here now, as opposed to experiencing 1964 as something distant, which is something you get with nostalgia. I was looking for ways both to block action and to move the camera which gives you your perspective, that felt like you’re moving with newsmen, that this is actually happening, this is not something that’s been staged. We’re moving with newsmen just as it would have felt if we were all cameramen or soundmen and we were doing hard news and this is a fast-breaking news event, 'Hey, Muhammad Ali is coming out the Illinois Boxing Commission, what are you going to ask him?'"

So what should this succession of moments and hopes and dreams leave an audience with after two-and-a-half hours? "At this point, what they take away, all the work that we could have done and we would like them to leave with, an understanding of who this man was and his complex relationships and complex situations he finds himself, I could ask you the question, what is that moment at the end of the film [when he has regained his title and the respect of the world]? there’s a whole future that’s gonna proceed, but there is a reminder of a connection, and a fulfillment of his connection to people."