Collateral

It is a rare movie these days that can move beyond the medium's obvious entertainment appeal and prompt one to think long and hard on the deeper issues of life. Last year's Collateral, starring Tom Cruise and Jamie Foxx, is such a film.

Foxx plays Max, a Los Angeles cab driver who dreams of something better, but his ambition is not matched by his determination. And so he fills his days ferrying busy professionals around the city, charming them with his homespun wisdom and shortcuts. When he first steps into Max's cab late one night at the airport, Vincent (Cruise) appears to be just another businessman who needs a ride to just another meeting.

But Vincent's business is death. This is revealed in dramatic fashion, as Vincent's first "business meeting" ends in a body falling several stories and crashing onto Max's cab. Max pleads with Vincent to take the cab, but Vincent's pointed gun can be persuasive: He has several more stops to make, and he needs a driver. Thus begins an strange, surreal odyssey into the urban night, a place populated by crime lords, federal agents, and curious detectives.

Vincent is an intriguing character--a man who is at once engaging and frightening. His occasional pleasantness masks a deep inner sadism that, when it appears, makes the contrast even more striking, and tragic. Like Max, the audience is only left to wonder: What motivates Vincent? What could possibly drive a man into such hopeless nihilism?

While watching Collateral, I was reminded of the writings of the 19th-century American Romantic philosopher, David Thoreau. During the times of tumultuous change brought on by the Industrial Revolution, when urban centers expanded and the poor flooded into the dirty streets in search of work, Thoreau lamented the corrosive effect that city life had on the soul. How ironic it is, he noted, that when people are working and living in the closest possible quarters, it is then that they are most isolated from each other. Such men walk about in "quiet desperation," he famously wrote, living lives devoid of any meaningful existence.

These dark themes linger below the surface of the film, never far, and yet rarely voiced. While the cinematography and sprawling urban backgroups give Collateral an ultramodern, almost sci-fi feel, there is a sense that for all his trappings of civilization and urban sophistication, man is not far removed from his violent, tribal past--that is, if there is any remove at all. Humanity's tenuous grip on civilization is artfully alluded to during a scene in which Vincent and Max stop at a red light. After Vincent mocks Max for his concern for the thugs Vincent has been hired to kill, a coyote darts across the street, serving as a silent reminder than beneath the veneer of civilization lies a darker side of human nature, one that is barely controlled, but always present.

The finale is both suspenseful and melancholy, as a character we barely knew dies alone on a deserted metro train, wondering in his final breath how long it will take for the city's jaded commuters to notice his dead body. And that, in the end, is what Collateral is all about: A cry for meaning, a plea to be noticed, in a world that seems too busy to stop and care.

But we know that there is One who cares, and can give us meaning.