Robert de Niro and us

The end of

by Michael Mann, it is also the end of our lives.

Neil McCauley (De Niro), murderer and thief, drives to the airport to escape thanks to the perfect escape plan.

A highly intelligent and obsessed inspector, Vincent Hanna (Al Pacino), has followed him for the three hours of the film, but the bad guy has won the game: he is going to evaporate in minutes, and the cop retires to a hotel “to sleep six months".

McCauley has met a girl, and the girl agrees to go with him to bury his life of crime and start over with a lot of money.

Both in the car.

The telephone rings.

His partner gives him the last instructions to catch the plane, and before hanging up he tells her — "although now I know you don't care" — the place where the traitor who foiled his last hit is hiding.

"Actually, I don't care anymore," De Niro replies with conviction.

What a superb plan.

To act is to stop doing it.

What De Niro achieves in those seconds is miraculous: he shows the process of a man being devoured little by little by his passion without remedy.

No monologue, no

without resources.

She has taken the viewer with her.

Every gesture, every blink, every breath;

the process is unstoppable: he is going to do it.

We are going to do it, we do it every day with every bad decision we make, knowing that it is.

De Niro suddenly spins out and drives the car back into town to kill the rat;

he makes himself believe, as we make ourselves believe when we spin, that he will have time to come back and catch the plane.

He is centimeters away from being saved and we are centimeters away from knowing if, had he gotten on the plane, he would not have looked for another reason to avoid a life without frights.

“If a ball goes down this slope, it is impossible for an ex-soccer player not to get up and kick it,” a colleague told me years ago to explain why Sito Miñanco, with his sentence about to expire, began unloading drugs again : because he had heard about an operation, and probably pretended not to care until he couldn't take it anymore.

I have thought seeing that ending once again, the ending of the scorpion crossing the river, how many times we say no (to meet those who do not suit you, to fuck who does not suit you, to go out nights in which you are condemned in advance although say "one and I'm going", to do what you are regretting before doing it, and, even so, you head to your destination like a ram to the slaughterhouse believing that you can get out alive), and I concluded, in addition to the inconvenience is usually me,

Many of us are De Niro driving calmly to a life of peace while the head begins to turn, probably in the middle of some boring straight, and at the moment when the phone rings and we know that we should not pick it up, and we pick it up, and we should not listen to who speaks to us, and we listen to him, we are already doing exactly what we want.

It is the inalienable nature making its way, changing a greater good for a smaller and more volcanic one that makes us be more ourselves, eating away what we must do to replace it with the only thing we can do.

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