Collateral

Oct 3, 2005
Collateral- Tom Cruise and Jamie Foxx

Warning: Some spoilers included.

The review is a lot delayed because of a number of reasons… the most important being that it made me think and it is not always easy to put thoughts in words.

The film is dark, intense and makes you wonder if the director is glorifying negative, evil and violent. But by the end of it, you wonder if you really know what is negative, evil and violent and what actually is glory. Cruise’s character is named Vincent in the film and there are quite a few philosophical yet amazingly simple but uncomforting utterances that he manages to throw without being preachy. The credit for it goes to the director. Sample this; “The lights of a million stars, millions of galaxies of hundreds of millions of stars, in a speck on one in the blink of time ... that's us, lost in space, who knows, it's all meaningless” (Vincent). In the summer of my discontent, I was actually left wondering that in the millions of universes what actually is the aukaat (standing) of a human being that has created so many prejudices, complexes and runs the shameless business of relations.

As we are introduced to the characters, we start making up mind, this is a hero and this is a villain, only to end up confused and extremely uncomfortable in our surroundings that make us go through life without a perspective and a shade of concern beyond our own immediate life, and yet we develop these ideals of world morality, righteousness and what ought to be. It makes us realize that we are like a frog that lives in a well and thinks that that is the world.

Max, played by Foxx, is also a complete yet struggling character, who drives a cab while his ailing mother thinks that he runs a limousine company. On that one fateful night Vincent hires him and the never ending drams begins where Vincent, a contract killer, refuses to let go off Max until his job is done. Both characters show multiple shades of grey.

By the time that the film concludes one is left feeling relieved that Max made it out safe, but extremely drained that Vincent ended up in anonymous loneliness that perhaps he dreaded the most.

The way Vincent questions the morality of the world that ignores the millions of people dying around the world depending on race, religion, region is remarkable. He utters these sarcastic words in the same nonchalant manner in which he kills. The mechanical way in which we live is perhaps best symbolized through Vincent character yet we find more comfort of that mechanical normalcy in Max's character as it does not look too raw.

After the long summer, I have been challenged to think about moral issues in Indian society where any personal commitment is weighed against the social, sexual, religious "morality" as hi-jacked by shiv sainiks and mullahs in the east and bible-beaters in the west. The film though dark and gloomy was strangely comforting and makes us wonder if we look for validation from a society that lives in a well and sees it as a world, and if we don’t get it, we feel incomplete and inadequate.

I think it was Mead who said that we form a sense of self based on what we think that the society thinks about us…. Well, that’s something we cannot really know. The film in that regard makes you uncomfortable about where you are headed and why…