Over three films, Jamie Foxx caught Michael Mann in transition

Back in 2004, Jamie Foxx did some of the best acting of his career, in a popular film involving a major American cultural icon, and was recognized by the Academy for his efforts. He also won an Oscar for his capable impersonation of Ray Charles in the movie Ray, but I’m referring to his performance in Michael Mann’s Collateral. I’m specifically thinking of his work in the film’s opening, as his character Max, a cabbie, goes about his nightshift business and eventually picks up a fare worth chatting up: Annie Farrell (Jada Pinkett Smith), a federal prosecutor on her way to an all-nighter. They banter quietly, discreetly, earnestly—first debating Los Angeles traffic routes and eventually sharing more personal hang-ups. At the end of the ride, Max visibly restrains himself from following up on the inkling of mutual attraction. We can see his regret, too, until Annie comes back and gives him her card; by then, Foxx has established his character so clearly that we also rightly doubt whether he’ll actually call her. 

Max subsequently picks up his next fare, Vincent (Tom Cruise), a ruthless silver-haired hitman, and become embroiled in more of a traditional thriller: Max must drive Vincent around Los Angeles as he (literally) executes his evening’s plans, as the two men become involved in an unlikely, uneasy give-and-take/cat-and-mouse type of relationship. Foxx is very good in these scenes, too, opposite Cruise in movie-star mode so pronounced, so domineering that he becomes almost animalistic. (The movie came out towards the end of perhaps Cruise’s greatest run as an actor, which involved frequent interrogations and reframings of his own hotshot image.) Before Cruise enters the picture, though, Foxx works through his introduction perfectly, tamping down the natural gregariousness that serves him so well as Ray Charles without erasing his charisma entirely. Just as Cruise seems to play a version of himself that would never star in War Of The Worlds just a year later, Foxx plays Max almost like a what-if for his own stardom: What if he didn’t find comedy and music as an outlet for his ambition?

It’s easy to think of Foxx’s subsequent Oscar nomination for Best Supporting Actor as a confluence of You Had A Good Year boosterism and a case of category fraud that could set records for its egregiousness; the man received a “supporting” nomination for a movie in which he has more screentime than anyone else, in a story told almost entirely from his character’s point of view. It is unequivocally a leading performance. But I prefer to think of that Collateral nomination as at least partially a testament to the thoroughness of Foxx’s work. He’s so convincingly recessive as he gathers the stones to stand up to Cruise’s Vincent that he must have seemed, to some voters, like a plausibly secondary character in his own story. In a way, the heinous miscategorization was a sign that both Foxx and Cruise were doing their jobs.

What could be a better tribute to Michael Mann than that? Mann focuses on a greater variety of subjects and settings than he sometimes gets credit for, but he’s undeniably fascinated by men in their element, performing whatever they see as their professional duties. In that way, Foxx’s Max is something of a stranger to Mann World, because while he’s a good cabbie and has (long-deferred) designs on better things, part of his character is his hesitation. (He would doubtless take way more than 30 seconds to walk out on everything if he felt the heat around the corner.) This makes it both fitting and strange that Foxx is, in fact, Mann’s most frequently employed name actor. Even in terms of character actors, Foxx is tied with Bruce McGill and Barry Shabaka Henley, with three appearances each.

Actors who have played closer to the prototypical Mann—Al Pacino, Will Smith, Daniel Day-Lewis, Adam Driver—are almost too big, and often too in-demand, to function as recurring leads. (Pacino being an exception that proves the rule; he’s worked with Mann twice, which is as many times as he’s worked with Brian De Palma, Sidney Lumet, Harold Becker, Martin Brest…anyone, in fact, besides Francis Ford Coppola on a specific trilogy and Barry Levinson in a run that includes two HBO movies. This is a parenthetical acknowledgment that I’m dying to do a Pacino Together Again and he’s given me deceptively few options.) So it makes sense that Foxx, who doesn’t particularly conform to that totemic obsessiveness, could sidestep that sense of repetition and do three Mann movies in different registers, especially as he began to establish himself as a big-screen star. Then again, it’s also strange to realize that Mann’s most prominent three-time collaborator is a guy who spent almost the entire ’90s in sketch comedy, stand-up, and sitcoms.

In fact, Foxx first entered Mann’s orbit as a relatively green dramatic actor, coming to the part of cornerman Drew Brown in Ali as a veteran of several comedy vehicles and, more germane, sports movies—including Any Given Sunday, his first substantial non-comic part. Sunday wasn’t his last film before working with Mann; that was Bait, an unwieldy action-comedy that comes across like an attempt to cross/rip-off the basics of the ’80s Eddie Murphy formula (wisecracking, fast-talking Black comedian mixed up in crimes) with the then-recent blockbuster Enemy Of The State. To knock off the latter, it even goes so far as to hire Jamie Kennedy to play a different government agent working control-room surveillance of Foxx’s character, who is being used as, yes, bait to lure out a psychotic thief who suspects, for convoluted reasons, that he knows the whereabouts of some missing gold bars. Placing a riffing, occasionally half-serious Foxx in a movie where Antoine Fuqua performs his best Tony Scott impression (which is to say, a middling one) isn’t exactly inspired, but it did prepare the star for what would be his next step in two ways, one practical and one more accidentally thematic. Practically speaking, it places Foxx closer to Mann World than, say, The Truth About Cats And Dogs or Booty Call could. And metatextually, Bait is about a bunch of serious law-enforcement folks gathering around their screens and keyboards to observe Foxx’s antics and eventually decide that he may be savvier and more resourceful than he looks—in other words, it shows Foxx endearing himself to the (mostly white) audience as he proves himself worthy of their respect.

That preparation might have felt somewhat in vain after Bait failed to catch on, and his more serious follow-up didn’t offer the expected showcase. In Ali, Foxx flashes some of his insouciant comic charm early on as Drew Brown, then starts to feel like he’s been shunted offscreen by editing-room decisions. The loyal sidekick whose addiction issues threaten to consume him in parallel with Ali’s different challenges might be a pivotal character in a more traditional biopic. It might have even begged for the wow-this-comedian-is-serious Oscar nomination (like the one Eddie Murphy received for Dreamgirls, co-starring a more dramatically established Foxx, five years later). Instead, Foxx’s screen time in Ali turns out to be relatively scant, especially compared to his second billing in the credits, and Jon Voight took that Best Supporting Actor nomination. Mann’s style doesn’t muffle Will Smith, an icon playing an icon, but it does appear to subsume Foxx; while Ali may not be quite as free-flowing and expressionist as its spellbinding opening 30 minutes suggest, it still sticks pretty close to Ali’s subjective experience of the sociopolitical dynamics that clearly interest Mann, avoiding certain expected biopic beats. So when Drew Brown slides from Ali’s view mid-movie, he slides from ours too, and much of Foxx’s big confrontation scene with Smith plays out with Foxx framed from a distance, in a mirror on the wall. 

That scene, and many others in Ali, is shot on celluloid. But this is also the film where Mann starts to experiment more heavily with digital video, which would come to dominate his 2000s-and-beyond aesthetic. Mann’s switch to his version of digital—grainy, nocturnal, more frequent and detailed close-ups—coincides with a more subdued performance style from many of his actors, with less overt Daniel Day-Lewis passion or Pacino showboating. (Can you imagine Pacino doing some of those Heat riffs with the camera in his face like in later-period Mann?) It’s a mixed blessing for a guy like Foxx. He can certainly play quiet or recessive; his biggest hit as a leading man remains Django Unchained, where he cedes a lot of scenery to a hungry Christoph Waltz and a ravenous Leonardo DiCaprio, and some of the story’s drama involves Django remodeling that learned, enforced docility into the strong, semi-silent patina of a Western hero. But digital-era Mann isn’t playing directly with genre iconography; his metaphorical cowboys only grow more abstracted and obtuse when he’s capturing their faces in grainy pixels. Mann’s last semblance of a real star vehicle is the digitally shot Collateral, and it’s about Cruise—whose image he figuratively blurs and distorts by having him play an amoral killer—rather than Foxx. Whether because of the shifting star market, Mann’s differing aesthetic goals, or some combination of the two, his post-digital projects aren’t as clear-cut showcases as his work with Pacino, Smith, or Day-Lewis.

So even in the movie where Foxx gets to go Full Mann, rather than filling a genuinely or spiritually supporting role, he’s essentially splitting the task with another lead. Miami Vice is the only Mann crime picture where the two leads are partners on the same side of the law, rather than some form of rivals heading toward an inevitable confrontation, and this adds an intriguing new dimension to the film. Maybe this is why for some cinephiles, Miami Vice is a particular highlight of Mann’s filmography; double the tragic romanticism, way more sex, and just as much nocturnal-digital ambiance as Collateral. That said, I’ve never vibed like that with Miami Vice, and I’m not sure Jamie Foxx really does, either. It has some great scenes and lines, to be sure, and an inimitable look—distinct even within Mann’s digital movies—without really taking advantage of either Colin Farrell (as Sonny Crockett) or Foxx (as Rico Tubbs), especially the latter. As much as he’s become a more nuanced performer since his early days, Foxx hasn’t really developed the kind of oddball mystique that works with Mann’s simmering opacity. Farrell has, but he’s used it better elsewhere. (Unpopular opinion from any number of angles, but Johnny Depp and Christian Bale do this stuff way better in Public Enemies, an altogether more interesting late-period Mann.) 

Reportedly, it was Foxx himself who raised the idea of revisiting Miami Vice to Mann circa the release of Ali, and it’s easy to see why he’d be eager to participate and establish just what, exactly, his brand of post-comedy, post-millennial, post-Oscar masculinity was going to look like. Miami Vice leaves that question hanging; Tubbs and the movie seem mutually wary. A decent metaphor for Foxx’s role in Miami Vice materializes in a scene where Crockett absconds for Cuba to have a drink with criminal accountant Isabella (Gong Li). Tubbs, still undercover, approaches cartel security guy Yero to rattle off some cool crime-movie guy-in-charge dialogue: “I need a vector, not a location. Ships move, that’s why you call ’em ships. Ship stops, it’s trying to impersonate an apartment building. At sea, that is very suspicious.” His banter trails off as Yero looks thoroughly distracted by the sound of Crockett’s boat speeding away: Whatever, Tubbs. What’s Crockett up to? 

Obviously that’s intentional within the scene, but it still plays out oddly, like a serious version of a scene where a goofy undercover cop tries to create a last-minute diversion. Foxx looks adrift, a look that returns when, approaching a bad guy hideout, he hastily grabs an empty pizza box out of the trash and improvises the least convincing fake pizza delivery (and the least credible “did anyone order a pizza?” reaction) in cinema history. Foxx is a professional comedian, and it’s still not quite clear whether the Ship Stops dialogue or the Great Pizza Gambit are supposed to play cool, intense, or funny. Mostly, they’re telling signs of the movie’s mood-first priorities, and how Farrell and Li handle the vibes more gracefully. (They even get their own shower sex scene after Foxx and Naomie Harris share one earlier in the film.) 

Yet Mann and Foxx aren’t a flat-out mismatch, either. They just happen to sync up when Mann focuses on a type of character less immediately identified with his work. Like Miami Vice, Collateral features a scene where an undercover Foxx must face a dangerous enemy, pretending to be a hardened criminal—and it’s more compelling than any of Foxx’s undercover scenes in the later film. Specifically, Max briefly impersonates Cruise’s Vincent, posing as him in a criminal nightclub to explain why he (Vincent) needs fresh dossiers on his final two victims. (The real reason is that Max chucked the old ones off a bridge.) Watching a soft-spoken, nerdy Foxx character pretend to be a steely badass brings to mind how much broader Foxx would play those notes not just pre-Mann, but post-Mann, too. His version of Electro in The Amazing Spider-Man 2 is basically Max’s thwarted ambition filtered through Jim Carrey’s Riddler in Batman Forever, while he plays a different version of hardass posturing as Motherfucker Jones in the Horrible Bosses movies.

Those are extreme examples in much sillier movies, but they’re also clearly part of Foxx’s image, despite his Oscar. The title of his new movie, Back In Action, implies a return to mainstream form after more offbeat turns in movies like Project Power and They Cloned Tyrone, despite the fact that he never really became a massive comedy or action star. Beyond Spidey-related outliers, his biggest hits are surprisingly old-fashioned in genre and variety thereof: a Western, several musicals, a sports drama, and Collateral. It suggests the kind of Will Smith (or vintage Tom Cruise) career where you’re expected to go see Jamie Foxx’s general star quality in different situations, rather than a particular shtick or familiar series of stunts.

Not everyone can do this as well as Smith or Cruise; to see it done even passably well can still be impressive. Foxx’s particular version of this charisma also makes him weirdly more elusive in a seemingly straightforward hero-cop role like Miami Vice than he is as a more intentionally skittish and less active part like Max in Collateral. It’s not a simple question of Foxx being one of those stars who’s secretly better suited to character parts, or Mann requiring someone as forceful as Pacino or Cruise to slam the material home. It’s more like Foxx caught Mann just as the latter started to zoom further in on his masculine obsessions, trading some of his epic canvas for pixelated anxiety. In Collateral, at least, Foxx is able to play that for all it’s worth.