Brian De Palma: Mission: Impossible

Though not nearly as deconstructive as De Palma's '80s pastiche and travesty, Mission: Impossible feels like a classical, identifiably "'90s," art-for-art's-sake blockbuster, a bit of formal excess that uses the implausibility of the original TV series as an excuse to make no sense whatsoever. Unburdened from the need for logic, the film unfolds as an incessant series of double-crosses, grandiose setpieces and classical techniques. That coherent aesthetic propels the film long after its narrative becomes a mire of betrayal and intrigue.

Sent to intercept a diplomat selling U.S. secrets, the Impossible Missions Force team led by Jim Phelps (Jon Voight), stakes out an embassy with precision planning. But just as everything seems to be going perfectly, tiny cracks begin to form, and in short order sabotage leaves the entire team dead save for Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise), who looks mighty suspicious when superiors inform him that they are hunting a mole in the organization. Betrayed by the true traitor and now suspected of treason by his bosses, Ethan has no choice but to flee and clear his name. These betrayals, real and imagined, are but the first in a film where the dead return and mirrored shots always reveal different perspectives.

As a work of pure style, Mission: Impossible is a tidy piece of nonsensical formalism. Its shots always work in the moment, such as the POV Steadicam movements through the embassy as characters speak to "Ethan," shots broken up by yet more POV voyeurism of the other agents scoping the floor and exterior. But when those shots are repeated in Ethan's reflections on what went wrong, the attention shifts to the background to reveal watchers of the watchmen. Later, the suspense of a falling knife works on two levels, as its own breathtaking moment of slow-motion tension and as a visual reminder of the blade that felled one of the members of Ethan's team.

Voyeuristic and identity imagery abounds: everyone is always monitoring the action on miniature surveillance cameras that the agents tote, and targets often speak to friends without realizing that it is really Ethan in a perfect face mask. Angles cant in moments of stress, and the multiple meanings of nearly every frame give De Palma's shots a depth of field that transcends the deliberately gnarled narrative.

No stranger to making films that serve as perpetual-motion aesthetic devices, De Palma nevertheless never got to do it with this much Hollywood backing, and watching Tom Cruise scrunch his face and dramatically demand answers for his crumbling life is even more entertaining when one considers that, 20 years earlier, the director would most likely have shoved William Finley out there to give a more unacceptably stiff performance. A solid cast of international heavy-hitters and domestic stars makes so little sense on paper one gets the suspsicion that De Palma grabbed all the actors he liked while peopel were still willing to work with him. I mean, in what other throwaway blockbuster will Tom Cruise rub elbows with a cast as eclectic Vanessa Redgrave, Emmanuelle Béart, Kristin Scott Thomas, Emilio Estevez, Jean Reno and Ving Rhames?

He also uses the sizable budget for some gloriously huge and ludicrous setpieces. When the IMF head (played by Henry Czerny with drawling menace, every word shaped into a missile before being fired) first confronts Ethan in a restaurant, Hunt escapes by using a gadget to blow up an aquarium, an explosion that sends one man flying across the room in clear defiance of gravity and enough water to submerge the Lower Ninth Ward. The climax occurs on-top of a TGV train speeding into blur as Ethan faces down a helicopter with not so much as a spitball, and wins.

But nothing beats he film's centerpiece, the much-parodied and copied break in of CIA headquarters in which Ethan must be lowered from the ceiling while making no noise, keeping the room temperature within acceptable range and not letting so much as a drop of sweat touch the sensored floor. It is a genuinely inspired scene, the black clothes Ethan wears as the stereotypical form of shadow war camouflage rendered almost comically useless in the brilliant white of the computer vault. Adding to the suspense is the good ol' split diopter to show Krieger (Reno) being distracted from keeping Ethan suspended by the presence of a rat crawling toward him in the ventilation duct. Judiciously timed close-ups, cutaways to the poisoned vault worker that obscure spatial and temporal relation to Ethan's hacking only for the repeated sidetracks to clarify the dimensions and a taut grip on editing make the setpiece truly thrilling even after years of overplay.

While it is not a major work in De Palma's filmography, Mission: Impossible nevertheless has aged much better than its successors, films that cater to the modernized, more chaotic action styles. For all its twists and turns, the film manages to deliver a clear message against the spy genre: De Palma and his writers, David Koepp and Chinatown scribe Robert Towne, present the villain's defection as the product of pride and refusal to give up power, of being angry that the nation might lead a more peaceful path in the wake of the Cold War and not need these trained assassins and agents anymore. The traitor actually says the president is running the country "without my permission," an arrogant broadside that suggests the power such agencies used to wield over government and the reluctance of those agencies to cede authority back to lawful bodies. That the actor who utters these lines is one of Hollywood's most prominent conservatives is but another facet of De Palma's sly politics even in this odd but entertaining franchise starter.

Brian De Palma: Carlito's Way

I used to think Carlito's Way was, to quote the popular interpretation, an "apology" for Scarface, a toned-down, mature take on that film's criminal excess that depicts a gangster trying to redeem himself rather than climb the ranks of the underworld. After revisiting that film, however, I can better see what De Palma was doing with his first, more grandiose view of the criminal underworld and, with unorthodox focus, how it affected America's rising Latino population. Nevertheless, this film, with its ever-moving but graceful camera, bold use of color and flagrant romanticism, not only proves the superior view of criminal life but also stands as perhaps De Palma's finest achievement as a filmmaker and the best balance of his confrontationally probing camera and the mainstream Hollywood elegance of which he wanted to be a part.

This mix of the daring with the quotidian might explain why so many mistook the film for a mildly original take on a tired subject. But to see how the film subverts and analyzes clichés, one need look no farther than the opening, a monochromatic framing device that spoils all pretense at suspense by showing the titular hero murdered by way of introduction. De Palma uses the sequence not only to set in motion his aesthetic approach—using his Steadicam shots as POV representations of Carlito's view, up to and including the slow pivot upside down and pull back as Carlito's soul leaves his body—but to make sure that we spend the film not wondering what happens to Carlito but why this doomed scenario occurs.

As the film moves into flashback, we see Carlito (Al Pacino), a convicted heroin dealer, getting out of prison after serving five years of a 30-year sentence. His lawyer and friend, Dave Kleinfield (Sean Penn), gets him off not for good behavior or truly appealing the case but pointing out D.A. corruption. Pacino uses the court scene to get out his hoo-hah mania he exhibited in the previous year's Scent of a Woman (a movie I maintain is Animal House with stunt casting and a sense of self-importance). He carries on about being a changed man, shouting over the judge who has to take it because he, too, was complicit in the evidence tampering that put Carlito away. "I've been cured! Born again, like the Watergaters," Carlito shouts gaily and sardonically, and it's impossible to see the sincerity underneath his spiel. But Pacino soon calms down, and his Carlito proves to genuinely wish to quit the game, to quietly exit the world where he built up a considerable reputation.

The contrast between Tony Montana and Carlito Brigante is less a means of making one a response to the other but of establishing them as polar opposites. Tony, young, brash and oblivious, climbs the ranks of Miami's criminal underworld through sheer brutality. His mantra, "The World is Yours," summarizes his approach: seize power until you sit in a king's throne, regardless of what you sacrifice to get there. Carlito, on the other hand, is older, wiser and wearier. Like Tony Dayoub says in a brilliant piece tackling the mirror effect of the two films, he is "almost but not quite the elder statesman Tony could have grown into had he outlived his impetuous youth." Tony also noted the color-coding of the two Hispanic protagonists, a key reversion of usual white-black color significance. Tony, who wears ostentatious white suits, is the villain, his clothes reflective of his drug of choice, his desire to be seen in Miami's underworld and, perhaps, his attempt to join the privileged race he thought he could by and screw his way into. Carlito, the one wants to get out of the game and go straight, wears stereotypically villainous black. But this is his futile means of trying to disappear in his surroundings, hoping to quietly move out of the underworld after becoming disillusioned with it. Carlito just needs $75,000 to retire. Tony Montana spent more on wing collars.

But, of course, one does not merely walk away from crime, and De Palma highlights the naïveté of this facile camouflage by colorizing the mise-en-scène to such an extent that the film occasionally looks like it came right out of Old Hollywood. Blue-lit nights expose him, as do the bright-red walls of smoky dives and the chrome-plated realm of the nightclub Carlito invests in to raise the money he needs to escape to the Caribbean for a new start. (Incidentally, the club, El Paraiso takes its name from the food stand Montana opened in Scarface). That club brings out the fatalistic romanticism of the movie, a weak approximation of Carlito's escapist fantasy that looks like a mock-up of a cruise liner interior and feels, for all its coke-addled disco dancers, more like a perpetual high school dance than a cesspool of drugs, sex and crime. The innocence under its veneer of tacky '70s "class" somehow makes the place more constricting and repellent, as if the building too is aware of its fate but still locked into its servicing role.


That romanticism explodes as Carlito tries to make his peace with former partners and to rekindle a relationship with Gail (Penelope Ann Miller), a dancer with whom he broke up before going to prison. He did so not to hurt her, but he broke her heart anyway, and the chemistry between Pacino and Miller subverts the usual male chauvinism of the mob world: when he first tracks her down, Carlito stands on a rooftop across from the dance studio in the pouring rain holding a trashcan lid over his head as a low-rent umbrella. In this moment, De Palma's appropriation of Hitchcock's voyeurism transmutes from obsessive quest for power into pure, innocent longing. This is not a man who feels his love "belongs" to him but someone who never stopped caring for her. After they reconcile, Carlito watches her dance with another man with a smile on his face, completely non-threatened by the harmless display, even when other men raise objections to seeing his woman dance with someone else. Carlito feels like a better man around her—note that Montana wanted to feel white around Elvira, who constantly brought up and mocked his Hispanic background, while Gail is the only person to call Carlito by the Anglicized name "Charlie"—and one almost forgets the inevitability of his attempts to escape when watching the two of them plan their retirement.

Yet Gail soon discovers how trapped Carlito is within the system, and her voiced complaints often make plain the self-evident truths Carlito cannot quite see. For all his talk of not recognizing the mid-'70s world of cocaine and disco in relation to the sociopolitical revolution he left behind, it is Carlito, not everyone else, who has changed. Bound by a code of honor not to rat on his allies and to remain loyal, Carlito never snitched on his old partner, who appreciates the gesture but feels no financial or personal debt to his old partner despite the fact that he got filthy rich while Carlito was away. For all Carlito's efforts to avoid violence and crime, such things seem to find him anyway. He gets roped into going to a drug deal with his young cousin that goes awry, and later he must deal with Benny (John Leguizamo), an upstart little shit clearly looking to make his name by tearing down Carlito. Benny is reminiscent of Tony Montana, a connection that then links back to Carlito when another gangster accurately tells Carlito "This guy is you 20 years ago."

Torn between his sense of code, his awareness of the vicious nature of the streets and his desire to go straight, Carlito can't ever seem to win: he reacts stubbornly when he shouldn't, agreeing to help an increasingly unstable Dave settle his own debts out of the loyalty he owes the lawyer for springing him. On the flip-side, he shows clemency for Benny, the man who, frankly, he should have killed, an idea that antithetical to a normal sense of morality*. But we're talking about the criminal world, where rules have been warped and ethics muddied. Bewildered by these conflicting notions of right and wrong, Carlito occasionally voices his pressure, saying, "The street is watching. She is watchin' all the time," as if the city itself is bearing down on him, waiting for his moral tug of war between desire for self-improvement and perceived obligation to others to stretch him to the breaking point before delivering the coup de grâce.

To De Palma and writer David Koepp's credit, they do not let Carlito off the hook for wanting to do the right thing. In the aforementioned drug deal with his cousin, Carlito knows instantly that something is off in the bright red pool hall where the deal occurs. De Palma's camera has rarely been better as it sets up Carlito as a knowledgeable killer. Just because Carlito wants out does not mean he was just someone who got caught up in the trade: as POV shots dart to an ajar door where a thug awaits and the camera moves around the pool table as Carlito sets up a trick shot as an excuse to keep circling and take stock of the whole room, we see how professional he is in this underworld. He's skilled enough to know what's about to happen and to position himself to kill his way out of the situation. In The Godfather Part III, Pacino's Michael growls, "Just when I thought I was, they pull me back in," but that is just Corleone's usual obliviousness to his own culpability. Carlito is not someone who just "made a few mistakes" in life, but he genuinely wants to reform where Michael wishes to have his cake and eat it too. It is Carlito, far more than Michael, who is trapped by something not of his design.

By the same token, it's almost impossible not to sympathize with him, also as a result of the most elegant camerawork of De Palma's career. He creates a tone so romantic that a conversation between Carlito and Gail through the crack of a chain-bolted door is not intimidating but teasing and charming, to the point that when he kicks the door in after a playful striptease involving a mirror, it's a comic, even loving payoff rather than a tense moment of sexual dominance. De Palma has used a circling shot more than once, but here the camera actually dips and tilts as it revolves around the kissing couple, swooning with them. The camera moves incessantly but does so with grace, a beauty that feels far more natural than the more forced and restrained formalism of, say, The Untouchables. At last, De Palma finds the perfect balance between his mainstream aspirations and his underground, morally probing aesthetics, a union bolstered by the fact that, for once, De Palma is using his camera to poke around the moral implications of his characters in a wholly un-ironic fashion. It's not the first film of his to be sincere, but it is the first to channel his penchant for deconstruction entirely into the characters and genre clichés, gently picking apart stereotypes to see the humans who inspired them.

But even with De Palma's masterful camerawork, the film wouldn't work without an understanding lead performance, and Pacino clearly demonstrates he knows exactly where De Palma is coming from for the second time. He acted like a Pre-Code madman in Scarface, but here he is so gentle that I remember the softer, vulnerable side to Pacino from the '70s. In his prime, no one had better control of what he could say solely through his eyes, and that skill returns here. His longing, anger, despair and fantasy dances across his face in beautifully understated terms, and he delivers lines with quiet force. I don't know that Pacino has ever been more heartbreaking; his whole performance is like the look of devastation on his face in Dog Day Afternoon when his lover publicly rejects him, stretched out over two and a half hours. When he first hugs Gail after reuniting, he softly smells her, triggering his memory with its most connected sense, and his ragged breath is as stoic a display of unspeakable joy as exists in the movies. When Dave drags him into a ludicrous attempt to bust an Italian mob boss out of prison, Pacino's face registers disgust more than anger at the addled lawyer's horrific change of plans and eventual betrayal, a recognition of the uselessness of the code that binds him and seems to let everyone else behave as he pleases

Reveries and dreams have always been a staple of De Palma's films, but usually in a literalized, nightmare form. Here, the dreams are less literal and more yearning, and the only nightmare comes with the impossibility of their fulfillment. A symbolic shot of Carlito trapping a cockroach under a glass and letting it go reflects the error of leaving Benny alive and outraged, but the roach might as well be Carlito, trapped at the mercy and amusement of forces so vast they feel existential. The film climaxes with a nimble cat-and-mouse chase through the subway that ends in the only dastardly cruel twist in the film, impressive considering we know the true outcome already. But as the film returns at last to its framing device as Carlito fades from this world, the last shot settling on a billboard advertising a Caribbean getaway. As Carlito dies, the subjective view of this poster alters, the woman dancer frozen in a snapshot suddenly turned into a dancing Gail, the dream fatalistically actualized in hallucination. As this shot holds over the credits, Joe Cocker's "You Are So Beautiful" begins to play, the gravel-voiced singer undercutting his ode even as the pained growls make it all the more sincere. It's the perfect swan song for the film, a plaintive yet doomed piece of (capital- and lowercase) romantic genre film, in which the last shot is both bitter and beautiful. In a sense, Carlito's Way may be the cruelest film De Palma, who delights in tricks and dramatic catastrophe, ever made, a lengthy explication of a dream that does not come true. But if it is so rending, that is only because, better than any other film in his canon, the director makes us truly care for his characters, and his cosmic sense of irony is at no one's expense, save poor Carlito's.

*Elsewhere, though, Carlito's clemency is more justifiable and even redemptive. An old associate (Viggo Mortensen), now paraplegic from being shot, wears a wire to a conversation with him as the D.A. looks for any excuse to put Brigante back in jail. By rights, Mortensen's character should be promptly shoved into the nearest river tied to a concrete wheelchair. But Carlito relents: he looks at the man who has had so much taken from him by the life Carlito has come to despise, and he pities the paraplegic wreck. Not only is it a true moment of forgiveness, it is also a practical moment of conscience compared to the fatal mistake of letting Benny go: releasing Lalin is a shrewd move that proves to cops that he really is reforming, not simply grandstanding to return to crime.

Brian De Palma: Raising Cain

One of the more depressing critical threads that wove its way through the positive reviews of the recent Transformers film was that, for the film's glaring flaws, somehow its garish orgy of grease and gears constituted "pure cinema," as if the form's zenith is achieved solely by throwing money at the screen. By the same token, I would actually somewhat agree with the idea that the most cinematic moments in film tend to be the ones least connected to reality and tethered in some fashion to camp, even trash. The florid visual melodrama of Powell/Pressburger, Nicholas Ray or Martin Scorsese capture, for me, the essence of the artform, usually in the gaudiest, most brazen of moments. But if trash is one aspect of "pure cinema," skill obviously constitutes the X factor that finds the art and beauty within cinema's capacity for otherworldiness.

Going through Brian De Palma's canon has convinced me that, in the modern age, no one is better able to make pure cinema from the unlikeliest and most repellent of sources than De Palma, not even the wonderfully garish Tony Scott. Thus far, my favorites of his films—Hi, Mom!, Phantom of the Paradise, Body Double, etc.—have been the trashiest, transgressing all boundaries of moral and aesthetic taste while still displaying a keen satiric and visual prowess. His late-'80s strain of pure Hollywood features, even the intelligent and affecting Casualties of War, lack the madness De Palma pushes to the brink of abandon, and I found myself wishing for a return to the more gauche side of his filmmaking.

Which brings us to Raising Cain. A kid brother to Body Double's transgressive deconstruction, Cain has the feel of Martin Scorsese's After Hours, a broken dreamscape into which its maker can pour all his career frustration. Scorsese got out his humiliation over Last Temptation's first major ordeal, while De Palma had to contend with the tangible commercial and artistic failure of The Bonfire of the Vanities. Cain is a return to form in a literal sense, an explosion of De Palma's voyeuristic, oneiric, insensible horror-comedy (or comic-horror) to remind everyone who he was under the new studio gloss. Its first image is a slow zoom-out on a pixellated image that slowly coalesces into a view of a father tucking his daughter into bed. It's one of De Palma's simpler opens, but also one of the most provoking, the grainy image prompting several questions: Are they on TV? Is someone watching them? Is De Palma, as ever, openly visualizing the falsity of the film from the start?

The answer to all of these is yes, and it is of paramount importance that one truly takes in the full meaning of the last question. Even more so than Body Double, with its sudden dips into lurid subjectivity and shifted perspectives, Raising Cain is a film without a sensible plot; it is wrong even to call it "labyrinthine," for that word connotes at least the possibility of escape. Cain exists within the unnavigable folds of dreamspace, a demented take on Peeping Tom that fractures Powell's dark psychological thriller further. But if this is all a dream, whose is it? Oh, hell if I know: never before has De Palma's ability to move through character perspectives in a single sequence, in a single shot even, been so thoroughly used.

In fairness, the director is kind enough to let us know things will not be as they seem from the start, with child psychologist Carter (John Lithgow) cracking within the first few minutes in the car with a friend and their children. Seeking to take her kid to a strange psychological complex in Norway, Carter suddenly chloroforms her and has a chat with a split personality, a tough, greaser-looking cad named Cain. In the next five minutes of screen time, Carter/Cain takes the car home, remembers that a passed-out woman and crying child are in it and slips away from his wife, Jenny, to go meet his insane, psychiatrist father Dr. Nix (also Lithgow) with the young sacrifice.

The rest of the film is, if you can believe it, even stranger. Scenes shift tone abruptly, going from the merely weird to the unabashedly wild, moving in and out of so many "it was only a dream" reveals that De Palma obliterates what limited meaning that stylistic device still had. In one astonishingly fluid sequence, the film moves from a midnight tryst between Jenny and lover Jack (Steven Bauer)—itself wrapped around an unsettling dream/memory injected into the love scene—into a sudden turn into karmic punishment that awakens a perturbed Jenny, only for the scene to take yet another turn when Carter abruptly asphyxiates her and drives her limp body into a lake. The swirl of guilt and betrayal mingles so strongly that it's nearly impossible to tell when Jenny's dream turns into Carter's, and later matters are complicated more when that which seems a dream becomes more real. But even that is presupposing that anything in this diegetic world actually happens.


Aesthetically, Raising Cain doesn't shatter as many boundaries as Body Double, but in some ways it benefits for its more consistent style. Where De Palma's last great anti-narrative openly took aim at the aesthetic devolution of '80s mass consumerism, Cain exists more as its own fever dream. Accordingly, the breaks are less stylistic, more untraceable. De Palma uses that to his advantage, at once unsettling the audience at all times and inviting them to be lulled into its movement, only to jar them back in a flash. This is best exemplified in a scene where Carter watches his television, dumbed by its calming glow. But when he shuts it off, it goes back to being the monitor he had in his daughter's room, where a water-logged banshee stares furiously into the camera. I nearly leaped out of my skin.

I can't think of many showcases for an actor odder than this: Lithgow is tasked with playing the mild-mannered, loving Carter; the snide, violent Cain; Margo, a matronly figure vile and domineering enough to be the spectral form of Norman Bates' mom latched onto a new host; Josh, a meek child who lives in fear of Margo and Dr. Nix; and Dr. Nix. Lithgow not only has to switch between these personalities but interact with himself, not only with the separate figure of Dr. Nix but of several manifestations of his selves; Lithgow even overdubs his voice onto a child who confronts Cain, sounding like Lucifer on helium when he ominously intones "I know what you're going to do. It's a bad thing, and I'm going to tell." (Or maybe it isn't Lithgow; at the very least, it's clearly an altered voice that's gone from low to high).

Lithgow pulls all this off, however, delivering the finest performance of his career—and easily one of the best to grace De Palma's notoriously spotting acting field—as he manages to switch accents and demeanor without slipping into lazy scenery chewing. Hell, the scenery does a good enough job chewing itself; the movie needs his performance just to maintain any semblance of form. Lithgow recognizes where his character(s) is at any moment and even adds minute detail that show clear forethought: consider the faint girlish squeal he makes when he sneezes in the car with Karen at the start. It undermines the verve of Carter's rising passion as he argues for the possibilities of extreme psychological monitoring of children, every light squeak poking holes in his increasingly disturbing spiel, only for Lithgow to openly lash out moments later.

The camerawork felt like a distraction in Bonfire of the Vanities, but De Palma is back in his element again. He turns the obligatory Psycho-esque psychiatrist explanation into visual extravaganza by putting movement in the scene and crafting an intricate tracking shot that even tilts to move parallel to the doctor and the cops. And the climax is one of the director's best moments, a multi-tiered showdown at a motel with disorienting yet stable and well-timed cross-cutting between Lithgow's fractured state above (as Carter's father) and one floor below as Carter/Cain/Margo. There's a baby carriage, some oranges and a knife to make things all the more bewildering, but a slow-motion shot of a falling child moving through the various levels of perspective clarifies the spatial relations of everything in the shot and makes perfect sense of the scene. I cannot believe I just wrote that.

It's a wild summation of the movie, and the drifting denouément is one last reverie in this demented world. It's also one that lends credence to Eric Henderson's view that the whole thing is in the daughter's head, or at least that the film is her attempt to come to terms with what happened to her at the hands of an abusive parent. But I can't help but feel that he's tackling the issue of the Gordian Knot by cutting the rope; as even Henderson earlier admits, the film has "no forum for this type of psychological exchange because there isn't a rational control group." The final shot, supposedly stolen wholesale from Dario Argento's Tenebre (a film I haven't seen), is one of the most puzzling endings in De Palma's storied career of head-scratching closers. The reveal of Lithgow in gloriously unhinged drag behind Jenny and Amy is the last reminder that nothing in this film can be trusted, that even within the inherent falsity of cinema, this film is a load of crap. Yet it's one of De Palma's most engaging pictures, if just outside his upper echelon of truly magnificent garbage, and a welcome relief from the increasingly starched style of his more glamorous Hollywood pictures. But it would not be until his next film that De Palma would find the balance between those two styles and deliver his finest work.

Brian De Palma: The Bonfire of the Vanities

Brian De Palma may be perennially mistreated by a Hollywood that doesn't fully understand where he's coming from, yet I don't know of many directors who have been given so many chances to lose his backers' money. By this stage in his own career, John Carpenter had been all but finished by an industry tiring of his diminishing returns, but De Palma was on just on the cusp of being a validated mainstream filmmaker despite his box office receipts: he'd been given a glamorous gangster picture and a moralizing war film, both of which he infused with his own film-school geekdom even as he demonstrated an ability to play by Hollywood's rules. Having established himself as the '70s film-school leftover best-suited to the decade he'd already mocked with Scarface and Body Double, he finally had his chance to climb to the top.

The Bonfire of the Vanities is the apex of the director's late-'80s rise to prominence within the industry, and damn near the nadir of his career. To be clear, it is not as awful as legend would have you believe, or at least, it isn't to me as I've yet to read Tom Wolfe's source novel. I have actually come across some people who not only defend this film but say they prefer it to the book. If that is true, Wolfe's novel must be a real piece of shit. For even without the knowledge of the book's full contents, De Palma's fiasco feels so incomplete and haphazard it's a wonder the director only realized the problems in retrospect.

If Wolfe's roman à clef was meant to be a detailed account of '80s New York in all its schismatic glory, highlighting the split between the budding Wall Street aristocracy and the terror of crack-ridden streets below the high-rise apartments, De Palma's film paints broad strokes of weak satire. No, that's not right; the film only softens one side of the dichotomy between wealthy, oblivious whites and impoverished minorities. Which side gets it easier in the eyes of majority-baiting Hollywood? Oh, take a wild guess.

Tom Hanks, not yet moved beyond his lighthearted comic image, plays Sherman McCoy, a Wall Street investor who makes millions by the minute and enjoys living the life of luxury. Hanks, only a few years out from his dramatic breakthroughs in Philadelphia and Forrest Gump, occasionally flashes an edge that he could have brought to the fore had the screenplay wanted him to truly delve into the seedier aspects of a Wall Street player. Instead, the film uses Hanks' comic charm, portraying him as out-of-touch but not particularly loathsome in any capacity, despite his general celebration of his garish lifestyle and infidelity with a Southern gold digger named Maria (Melanie Griffith). Even when the two accidentally drive into a crime-ridden area of South Bronx and run over one of two black men who accost them, the film does its best to absolve Sherman while placing any blame for the racist and classist attitudes brought up in the hit-and-run squarely on the shoulders of Maria, caricatured out of human recognition into a whining harpy.

This simplified satire might have worked had the same humanizing effect been given to the other half of the film's overview of New York. Instead, poor Sherman, in the wrong place at the wrong time, runs into the undiluted fury of the poor and minority bloc of the city, their grandiose anger exposing hypocrisies and self-defeating extremism while the privileged enjoy a charmed interpretation of white-collar oblivion. The caricature of Al Sharpton, Reverend Bacon, borders on the racist, with De Palma's low-angle shots of bulging eyes and flaring nostrils nearly framing actor John Hancock in minstrel poses.

Bacon rails against the notion of the unidentified driver of a Mercedes getting away with the cops' indifference, rightly noting that they wouldn't just drop the case if some black driver had run over a middle-class white family. But like Sharpton or Jesse Jackson, Bacon is as much a self-promoter as he is a civic crusader, and he clearly plays up for the cameras to make himself the focal point of the manipulated outrage. But he's successful, and soon he's got Weiss (F. Murray Abraham), the D.A. looking to for a way to win the minority vote after prosecuting minorities overwhelmingly, quaking in his suit. Abraham removed his name from the billing over a contract dispute, but part of me wonders if he did so after reflecting on his performance. If Hancock must make out the leaders of the black community to be nothing more than charlatans looking to crucify a white devil to maintain their stats, Abraham plays Weiss as a flagrant Jewish stereotype, greedily hunting power and also looking for a way to get one up over on the WASPs. When Bacon accuses him of letting the wealthy white go unpunished, Weiss frets over being seen as a "hymie racist pig," then muses aloud how the Italians, Irish and WASPs will love to see him squirm.

Obviously, this is satire, but it's paper-thin, and De Palma inserts nothing to offset the racist view of the city's minorities being wholly self-serving. Instead of flecking human beings with ironies and contradictions, he presents two-dimensional caricatures with comedy that isn't funny enough to absolve the troubling simplicity of their ethnic identities. Pointing out the class blindness that affects the underclass is a perfectly valid criticism, but here the blacks and Latinos come off as nothing more than a mob looking for a white scapegoat. And even when De Palma finally gets down to going after the elites—presenting them as entertained by Sherman's connection to such a pedestrian crime like Roman nobles approvingly watching enslaved gladiators torn to ribbons—he still lets Sherman almost completely off the hook. At the ridiculous trial that closes the film (presided over a black judge instead of the book's Jewish one so as to make Sherman's acquittal seem victorious rather than proof of the system stacked against non-whites), poor, frail Sherman is framed against a screaming, hissing, even singing (hymns, natch) crowd of the poor and pigmentally varied. Whether the De Palma meant it or not, and the swelling, unironic strings that accompany the verdict suggest at least someone did, the audience is meant to root for McCoy to get off Scot-free.

This is all bad enough, but various other additions weigh down the film in subtler ways. The film nearly approaches cleverness when Sherman attends a performance of Don Giovanni and clearly sees himself in the character, a point De Palma then drives him with a sledgehammer, ruining the one good part of the film. Bruce Willis, foisted upon De Palma and a noted pain on-set, plays the alcoholic reporter Peter Fallow, who desperately launches the hit-and-run case to give himself a popular story to justify the paychecks he drinks every day. Whatever role Fallow played in Wolfe's novel, he has no reason to exist here, and De Palma must resort to a framing device that awkwardly inserts him into the movie so Willis can deliver stiff voiceovers in that noncommittal drone of his.

The Bonfire of the Vanities is so clumsy that even the moments of pure De Palma fail to add some life into the film. A swirling overhead shot of Sherman and a coworker is an ingenious touch that makes great use of the striking floor design, but it only goes to show how little time the director spends in Sherman's corporate world. A split-screen between Bacon's self-aggrandizing harangues and a changing right image first showing an amused Fallow looking on then a nervous Weiss watching on TV feels like someone trying to ape De Palma with no regard for composition or juxtaposition. Even the elaborate, wildly entertaining tracking shot that opens the film, following Fallow as he arrives for a speaking engagement through the underground of a complex past admirers and pack reporters, fails to maintain its power when placed in context with the rest of the movie. When the film soon moves completely away from Fallow for an hour, the shot, maybe even Fallow's entire presence in the film, seems a self-serving addition.

After filming completed and The Bonfire of the Vanities went out to a critical and commercial savaging, De Palma finally admitted his error, even letting Julie Salamon come in and write a tell-all on the film's troubled production. I want to read that book as much as Wolfe's source novel: even a basic summary suggests studio tampering, uncooperative stars and wasteful expenditures. But hell, all of that is visible on the screen. It is stunning that a filmmaker as radical (aesthetically and politically) could make a film so firmly reactionary in its ultimate absolution of the luxury class—compare the subverted race roles of the "Be Black, Baby" segment of Hi, Mom! to the clearly demarcated racial cartoons drawn here. Almost as unforgivable, it's one of the director's dullest films. Even the "punchline"-lacking Untouchables (to take a page from Pauline Kael) felt more alive than this.

The only good thing I can say about The Bonfire of the Vanities is that it sports simply one of the greatest shots to ever appear in a De Palma film, a perfectly, almost freakishly timed shot of a Concorde jet landing at sunset as the landing strip aligns perfectly with the descending orb. It is a stunning, arduously planned moment, and it's the best indication of how much better the film might have been had De Palma and his crew been given a better cast and screenplay. From what I can tell, a more accurate representation of Wolfe's novel might have been right up De Palma's alley; he would have delighted in tearing everything apart. Instead, he made by far his most reactionary film, a lighthearted spoof of the upper class and a vicious portrayal of the poor and disenfranchised. Had De Palma not made his mea culpa later, I might have thought he did this on purpose; his other big Hollywood spectacle, The Untouchables, is also conservative. But even the wide berth I give to De Palma's irony has its limits, and if The Bonfire of the Vanities was meant to be as bad as it is, well, mission accomplished.

Brian De Palma: Casualties of War

On a first viewing, I found Casualties of War to be a fitfully intriguing, if overly quotidian Vietnam film that offered up a unique story but a predictable payoff. Furthermore, the tonal upheaval that occurs in the final act turned what had been one of Brian De Palma's most solid films into a well-meaning but sappy liberal morality play. Looking at it now, however, I see one of De Palma's better films, and a slyly literal take on the illegality of war that proposes such a simple, self-evident solution that it never seems to come to mind: what if someone actually took the horror and wrongness of war to court?

Unlike a court-martial film, Casualties of War is neither about a kangaroo court to make an example of the enlisted or a demonstration of the rotten chain of command. In fact, it isn't about the trial itself but the courage to bring one's fellow soldiers to that trial, overcoming self-doubt over incriminating one's fellow servicemen and intense pressure from everyone else to let the whole thing go. Coming off the upswing of strong (and strongly critical) Vietnam films like Platoon and Full Metal Jacket, De Palma's film sticks firmly with the men on the ground. Less forgiving than Stone's semi-autobiographical film and less heady than Kubrick's movie, De Palma's feature shows the same breakdown of sanity and humanity not as the result of an officious, out-of-touch command but of the absence of any clear structure in an environment so confusing the trees themselves seem to be hostile.

De Palma opens in the present on a subway, but he soon moves into a flashback in medias res, wading through the jungle at night with soldiers who are already paranoid about potential tunnels under their feet. Suddenly, the VC ambushes the American squad, throwing the film instantly into pandemonium before we've even learned the names of all the characters. De Palma finds unexpected means of generating tension by layering the different horrors of field combat in Vietnam into one sequence. As mortar explosions burst and roar around the men, Max Eriksson (Michael J. Fox) inadvertently runs over the roof of a tunnel, which collapses and leaves the soldier dangling precariously as mortar fire draws closer to his position. Meanwhile, Vietcong move through the tunnel, and the one in front spots Eriksson's swinging legs and moves in for a silent kill. At last, Sgt. Meserve (Sean Penn) pulls him out just before the mortars reach the position and as the VC underneath lunges, wringing the last drop of suspense from the moment. Everything is in chaos, and when Meserve punctuates his killing of the Vietcong soldier in the tunnel with a tossed-off "Some mad fucking shit, isn't it?" he doesn't even scratch the surface of the lunacy.

Unlike the dreamy depiction of Vietnam's horrors of Apocalypse Now or the moralizing reflection of Platoon, Casualties of War goes for a much more straightforward approach, tempering the director's romantic tendencies. But it certainly doesn't spare his more vicious side: enraged over the death of a member of the unit and frustrated because of leave being cut short for redeployment, Meserve stops at a hamlet as the men move out and kidnaps a young Vietnamese girl, Oann (Thuy Thun Le), to use as a sex slave.

De Palma's camera is clearly repelled by the actions of the men, all of whom—the twisted Meserve, the downright evil Cpl. Clarke (Don Harvey), the feckless and weak Hatcher (John C. Reilly)—rape the woman over Eriksson's desperate protests. Even the new replacement, Pvt. Diaz (John Leguizamo), gets roped into the beatings and rapes, intimidated by the sinister pressure placed upon him and Eriksson to fall in line to ensure total complicity among the men. Fox, perfectly cast to look mousy and meek against his comrades, can only squeak out pleas for sanity in the middle of an insane land. De Palma, usually so up close and personal with his camera, pulls back into the stylish objectivity he used with The Untouchables, but to far more troubling and memorable effect.

For a director frequently (and sometimes justifiably) accused of misogyny or at least a fetishization of the male gaze, De Palma shows a key restraint in his filming of the abuse heaped upon Oanh, never letting his camera linger upon the acts even in horror lest he inadvertently oversell the shock. Casualties of War features a number of zoom-ins and foregrounded mise-en-scène but few genuine close-ups, almost never moving nearer an actor's face than a medium close-up that leaves enough of his torso in the frame to ensure some personal space. For example, when Eriksson moves to see what Meserve is doing with Oanh and spots him about to ravish her, the camera cuts back to a medium-long shot for Fox's reaction of disgust and panic, maintaining focus on him but also arranging the grisly act in the background, an objective moment that almost plays out as a brief glimpse into Eriksson's head as the image of Meserve's violation burns into the back of the private's memory. In this way, the director's removed framing has the unexpected result of being more affecting than easy, exploitative close-ups and male gazes.

De Palma's distance also serves another purpose, leaving a grim suggestion out in the open that the horror of the Americans' treatment of Oanh is unremarkable and unworthy of special attention within the larger context of the Western presence in Vietnam; by some standards, in fact, what Meserve and the other four do to the girl might be nothing more than a literalization of the war itself. Nagged at by latent guilt for his actions and driven paranoid with terror of his crimes being discovered, Meserve orders the men to kill the girl—notably, he does not do the deed himself, Penn's voice cracking with the death throes of his humanity, his war-torn sense of decency holding on just enough to keep him from pulling the trigger. But as American choppers fly in to support the squad's fight against a band of VC, the four men at last deal with the problem, riddling the woman with bullets as Eriksson cries out helplessly.

It's a ghastly end to a sordid affair, but the film has an entire act left, which it devotes to Eriksson's quest for justice with the military authorities. Here, De Palma gets to work enhancing his political statement, which brings up a fair amount of his old radical stances through a more subdued visual approach. At last we meet the officer corps, and sure enough, they want to hear none of this story. Where so many anti-war films follow a top-down hierarchy of responsibility for atrocity, starting with detached generals making foolish demands for personal glory and bloodily trickling down to the enlisted man, Casualties of War muddies the culpability. Here, the soldiers move outside of communication with brass, lose their minds in war's atmosphere and commit horrible crimes, and then the leaders take steps to cover up the actions to maintain morale, decorum and image.

De Palma is perhaps the first director who, what with his metacinematic and pop culture flourishes, filters war through an understanding of its meaning in modern media. It's not that he's saying soldiers are rapists or baby killers or what have you, but he's not lazily foisting all responsibility onto the military heads. Westmoreland didn't order the My Lai massacre, but he damn sure participated in the cover-up to prevent word of the atrocity spreading. De Palma's understanding of the post-television landscape of war's popular front gives Casualties of War a resonance beyond its demented, moral chasm of a narrative: the cover-up the military unsuccessfully mounts against Eriksson could be seen more recently in the Abu Grahib situation.

As if to prove that he does not seek to simple saddle the average soldier with the psychic weight of Vietnam's horrors, he smartly cast young actors in the roles of the squad soldiers—ironically, the oldest, Fox and Penn, both nearing 30, actually look the youngest of them all. Thinking about this now, I suddenly realize after years of trying to pin down what it is about Saving Private Ryan (a film I recently talked about in a less-than-positive review) I find so irksome: Spielberg's film asks if the current generation can ever match up to the Greatest one, but he does not even give youth a voice, instead using actors well into their 30s and looking like career Army men. Only a few characters in that film actually seem like kids plucked from their hometowns to fight Hitler. De Palma's complex look at the moral casualties of war is all the more potent and believable because he recognizes how mere kids were thrust into the insanity of this situation and expected to behave as noble warriors. When Eriksson takes his case to a captain (Dale Dye), the career man tries to gently dissuade the private from prosecuting his comrades, finally exploding when he reminds the private that Meserve is only 20-years-old and in a place he no doubt finds as bewildering and terrifying as Eriksson. It's a sobering point, and one that takes some of the steam out of Penn's wide-eyed, sputtering fury though he's not even in the scene.

But De Palma also knows that the adult thing to do is not to lump blame or let someone off the hook, and as top-heavy as the film can feel, this final act becomes more evidently vital to me with every viewing. Complete with a coda in the present-day as Eriksson tries for a fleeting connection with a Vietnamese-American girl who reminds him of Oanh, Casualties of War at last emerges the maturation of the director's radical '60s politics, a coming-to-terms not only with his his own waning fury but his generation's moral failure to contemplate and process the illegality and atrocity of Vietnam. My main issue is that the trial for the four soldiers feels too grandiose to fit into De Palma's appropriately humble sense of scope, something he only half-successfully works back into the film after the verdict is read and that same captain hisses in Eriksson's ears that none of the men would serve anything close to their full sentences. (That, by the way, was true; the actual soldiers who really did commit these acts all received shorter sentences; Hatcher even got out completely on an appeal.)

Nevertheless, Casualties of War holds up as a solid, if wisely non-showy, display of De Palma's most mainstream style. But it's that older, wiser but still irascible view of Vietnam that gives the movie its power. I used to think of the film as nothing more than an average exercise: good, but Teflon-coated against any connection, much the same way I viewed The Untouchables. But if my opinion of De Palma's gangster film has only lessened, my approval of this war film grows with each new viewing. There are flashy snatches of direction—that initial skirmish in the jungle, the grandiose horror of Oanh's murder—but De Palma's generally tame approach might give off the impression of rote repulsion. Still, the director uses his omniscient frame to pose serious, reaching ideas on the lingering issue of Vietnam on the national psyche, and I can finally say without hesitation that I would rank it among the finest movies ever made on that turbulent, ever-relevant conflict.

Brian De Palma: The Untouchables

No one in The Untouchables, either cop or criminal, seems to have anything in the way of a moral code. Their lives are far more existential: the criminal steals because he is a thief, and the cop upholds the law because it is his job to do so. When a reporter asks Bureau of Prohibition agent Eliot Ness (Kevin Costner), dedicated defender of Prohibition, what he would do if the government repealed the 18th Amendment, he replies without hesitation" I think I'll have a drink." Until that day, however, "It is the law of the land."

As for everyone caught in-between, life under a system of legislated morality has seemingly divorced individuals from a sense of right and wrong. Ness' efforts to conduct raids on bootleggers fail because of corrupt cops tipping off Al Capone's men in order to get a few drops of the material they're helping to hide. The title refers to the team of uncorrupted policemen Ness and Irish beat cop Jim Malone (Sean Connery) recruit straight out of police academy to ensure their unblemished records, but it just as well describes Al Capone and his empire, which has such control over the desires of the common American that the boss can openly chat with reporters about bootlegging.

In comparison to the hedonism of Scarface, The Untouchables does not show anyone particularly enjoying the thrill of illegal consumption. Flapper-filled speakeasies seem to be in some other dimension entirely from the world Ness and co. traverse to take down Capone. Those smoky, alcohol-serving dens are in the underworld, but the point here is that the cops need not descend into it to find law-breakers; the most flagrantly criminal people live topsoil. Not only that, they leave in lavish mansions fit for holding the aristocracy at court for the winter.

In such matters, De Palma's attention to detail and suggestion has never been better: period costumes and set design are immaculate, and the director clearly shoots for an accurate representation of the social turmoil caused by Prohibition, not simply in the resulting crime spree but in a skewing of values that led to romanticizing that crime. For example, he immediately juxtaposes the scene of Capone chumming with sympathetic reporters as he assures them he just runs a business and does not use violence with the bombing of a bar that refused to sell Capone's wares, killing everyone inside (including a young girl).

However, De Palma's capacity to let wooden performances go uncorrected has rarely been so apparent. Divorced from his Brechtian satire, De Palma crafts a remarkably straightforward Hollywood picture with The Untouchables, but that only means that the actors have nowhere to hide when one examines their work. Costner, who would go on to convey something resembling human emotion as a crusader in JFK, here barely modulates his voice, speaking in a flat tone even when yelling. Connery, playing an Irish cop, appears to have decided the best approach to the accent would be to speak in his normal voice but occasionally make it a bit more nasal. Thankfully, he only tries to keep up this charade for about five minutes, at which point he simply speaks like Sean Connery, full stop. Only Robert De Niro, who plays Capone like a more unassailable and confident version of the fat Jake LaMotta in Raging Bull, puts any effort into this.

De Palma, too, uses little of the prowess so freely on display in his usual style. The film has its share of Steadicam and crane shots, including a first-person roam outside Jimmy's apartment that has all the trappings of the director's voyeuristic, playful élan. But so much of the movie feels stiff, too mannered, as if the starch in everyone's suits bled into them and into the film itself.

This is all the more perplexing given that it was written by David Mamet. Though certainly not as madcap as Oliver Stone, Mamet nevertheless works best as a vulgarian wordsmith with an ear for detail, and only a few isolated moments of wit ever surface. The rest of the time, we get treated to farcical sub-slapstick—"Where's your warrant?" "He's my warrant!" comes the response with a sucker punch that makes the criminal's eyes bug out cartoonishly—that clashes with the somber tone of the rest of the film.

In fairness, the shootouts are fun, even if the famous rip-off of Potemkin's Odessa steps sequence feels like just that, lacking the creativity De Palma usually puts into his quotations. The lead-up to the fight is masterful De Palman suspense, and the actual gunfight in slo-mo is also entertaining, but where Obsession, Dressed to Kill and Body Double warped, inverted and experimented with his love of Hitchcock (to say nothing of minor variations on influences sprinkled throughout his work), this just feels like plagiarism.

I honestly don't know what the point of this movie is. People call Carlito's Way an "apology" for Scarface, but I would point to The Untouchables as the likelier candidate for a direct response to that film. If Scarface dove headfirst into the underworld (and potentially cracked its skull on the bottom), The Untouchables never really ventures anywhere outside the respectable world, but the point De Palma was making carries no weight without seeing how the respectable members of above-ground society are precisely the ones to sink into dens each night to get plastered and dance. The open wealth Capone enjoys is the only hint at the transparent garishness of the wealthy during the Great Depression, a financial catastrophe caused in part both by massive income inequality and the effective second economy created by Prohibition that made men like Capone so wealthy that, when the law cracked down on bootlegging, it collapsed the legitimate economy in addition to the illegal one.

But this is all projection. The Untouchables lives up to its name in that even the director seems reluctant to grab a hold of these people and really throw them into the muck. It runs in the opposite direction of Scarface, presenting a sterile view of crimefighting not even fully alleviated by the presence of blood. De Palma and Mamet do suggest that the characters want to be in a more violent movie, however: when one of the team, Wallace, starts tracking the accounts of every business tied to Capone and suggests getting the mobster on tax evasion, Ness waves him off, unwilling to take down a murderer with a prosaic approach.

After under-performing or flopping with most of his '80s features, The Untouchables proved a much-needed hit for De Palma, though I can't help but lump it with the likes of Wise Guys instead of legitimately good mainstream fare like the director's next film. By the end of the film, Ness has eroded his law-abiding façade, killing an unarmed man and lying to a judge to ensure the outcome he wants in Capone's trial. Had the rest of the film put more effort and care into crafting a moral viewpoint, this downfall would only enhance the irony of Ness' final statement, the aforementioned quip about post-Prohibition what-ifs. As it is, these end-game occurrences are merely the first signs of life after two hours of watching De Palma fuss over everything but what's important. At least it secured him a few large budgets for his next couple of features. When not even an Ennio Morricone can liven your film, you've got problems.

Brian De Palma: Wise Guys

After the veiled satire of Scarface and the open assault of Body Double, Brian De Palma finally caved to pressure and made the sort of film he'd spent the last few years tearing apart. It is unclear whether Wise Guys is the more devastating indictment of '80s mainstream cinema. No, that's mean: there isn't enough to Wise Guys to pick on one way or another. Everything about its concept and execution (not to mention the presence of Joe Piscopo during his brief flare-out in Hollywood) suggests it was one of the first films to deserve the critical shorthand "would have worked better as a Saturday Night Live sketch than as a full movie).

The premise is, admittedly, amusing: in the insular, self-contained underworld of the mafia, self-sufficiency must be such a priority than even worthless errands cannot simply be done by someone else without ties to the Family. Then again, enforcers and soldiers aren't going to waste time fetching the don's laundry or getting him groceries, so the poor schmucks assigned with these tasks must be so low on the totem pole they must be the part buried in the ground.

Cue Harry Valentini (Danny DeVito) and Moe Dickstein (Joe Piscopo), an Italian-Jewish double act who got lost in a Scorsese movie on their way to open mic night at Carolines. De Palma almost communicates despair in the film's opening shots, as Harry stands before his mirror reciting the "You talkin' to me?" monologue from Taxi Driver, something that felt tired even in 1986 and shows how half-heartedly the director applies his usual love of quotation and reference. Not even the sound of Harry's young son synching to dad's moment of fun as an unwelcome means of emulating his father (or plagiarizing his plagiarism) that it offers a light chuckle.

That's about the highest level of the comedy in this film. Every now and then, and always in spite of myself, I let out a breath sharp enough to count as a titter, though one could also interpret it as a gasp of sudden, fleeting pain, as if I shifted in my seat the wrong way and pinched a nerve. De Palma's comedies—for as confrontational and arch as they could be, his early films can only be described as such—have always been manic variations on banal people, but Wise Guys instantly sets up an unwieldy dichotomy between its pedestrian setting and drama and the arm-flailing, ham-fisted approach to acting. People in this movie only stop shouting when they make a face so big I can only imagine that they squeezed their vocal cords shut from leaning their heads back too far and cut off air.

Despite the low status of the two men, Harry has fits of grandeur and believes that he can climb the mafia ladder by disobeying his boss to benefit him more. Entrusted with $10,000 by Don Castelo (Dan Hedaya) to bet on a bum horse, Harry dismisses the don's terrible selection and chooses a horse he won money on in the past. Of course, mobsters don't just throw money down on a horse with long odds without currying fate's favor, and Harry's and Moe's jubilation as their horse runs far ahead of the pack gives way to horror when the boss' stallion comes from behind to win. When Castelo finds out, he tortures them and convinces each to murder the other.

Rarely does anything in this film look or sound like De Palma shot it and not any old hack who happened to be hanging around the studio. A split diopter lens makes a shot of Moe and Harry returning to their adjoining homes mildly eerie, the off-kilter dual focus highlighting how the two are as close as brothers but now have a gulf between them as each braces himself to kill his best friend. Later, De Palma heads inside a casino, where the mirrored ceilings recall the fractured visuals of the reflective club walls in Scarface—it's also a cheeky take on his voyeurism, the idea that those ceilings exist for managers to oversee the business instead of the more personal spying De Palma usually does; both kinds are just as seedy, it seems. A handful of other camera shots and movements have spark to them, but the remainder of the film feels like a modestly talented studio hand shot it.

Rather than exploit that tension he packed into that one suggestive, troubling shot of Moe and Harry trying to come to terms with killing the other, De Palma soon dispatches with this thread by letting his two characters in on the punishment, thus making them instantly forget that each seriously considered going through with the assigned task. That leaves about an hour of screen time and no serious way to fill it, so Wise Guys instantly collapses into a cross between GoodFellas and Vegas Vacation. They steal the big mob bruiser's car and run up a huge hotel tab on his credit card, har har har. Maybe their suicide wish would be more plausible if they didn't spend just as much time in hysterics over the inevitability of their horrible deaths.

For the most part, the actors do as well as possible: DeVito has no funny lines, but he commits as if he does and nearly overcomes the obvious, tired nature of the lines, while Hedaya has moments nearly as sinister as those of his conniving husband in Blood Simple. Most surprising is Harvey Keitel as an old friend of Harry and Moe; Keitel, normally a fountain of energy and intensity, acts with fatherly calm here, and his presence prompts a welcome cool-off for the hyperactive movie. Lou Albano, who plays the massive fixer Acavano, actually gets some genuine laughs with his boisterous fury. With his huge frame and flowing suits, he almost looks like Orson Welles in Get to Know Your Rabbit, and his frothing, half-coherent retorts—"I'm a guest of your ass!" he shouts when a polite hotel employee tries to assist him—are so wild they actually match the speed De Palma wants the film's premise to operate upon. Only Piscopo is as bad as the material, his whiny voice and desperate hamming trying to overcome the fear in his eyes, as if he sees that giant vaudeville cane off-camera ready to reach out and drag him to the abyss.

The only remotely rewarding interpretation of Wise Guys is that it shows how cosmically linked Italians and Jews are, despite centuries-old animosity over religious strife. De Palma displays this in primarily reductive means—juxtaposing hectoring wives and a sense of guilt—but if DeVito and Piscopo had more chemistry, they might have dug into that aspect of the film. As it is, there's not much point to Wise Guys, and it lacks any of De Palma's usual redeeming features. It was only a matter of time before the studios won in his war with them, and watching this film, one must thank heaven that the director would finally climb out of the hole with his next, last-ditch effort.

Brian De Palma: Body Double

In some respects, Body Double may be the quintessential Brian De Palma film. This is not to say that it is his best, and it may not even mean that I even like the damn thing (there are too many clashing perceptions to sort out a coherent view on the first go). Instead, it summarizes the director's strengths and flaws to such an extreme that the film does not veer between brilliance and garbage so much as jump between the two without transition as if using wormholes for transportation. Only one film removed from Blow Out, Body Double develops the ideas of that film to their apex, mixing De Palma's anarchic form of brutalized Godardian experimentation with his corkscrewing thrillers.

If Scarface represented a sort of warning shot across the studios' brow, Body Double is outright war. De Palma views his opening shots as a means of putting the audience on-guard, never easing them into a movie via what he views as the boring, wasteful helicopter shots of city skylines or montages of neighborhood life.* Here, he opens in such transparently schlocky terms that for once no one can seriously believe what we're watching is not a put-on. With dripping blood titles and midnight-feature mise-en-scène, De Palma goes for broke, establishing a film-within-a-film so unbelievably campy that it's all he can do not to walk out like Alfred Hitchcock at the start of The Wrong Man and warn the audience what they're in for.

This reflexive opening shot moves over various tacky props that awkwardly and amusingly mix Western Gothic with Eastern mysticism before setting on a vampire sleeping in a coffin. As the music builds, he raises up in one of those cheesy vampire "blah" poses, and he freezes. The moment is uncomfortable: is this intentional? Why is this being held so long? Suddenly, we hear "Cut!" and a film crew takes the man out of the prop coffin, and we learn he's suffered a panic attack from claustrophobia. De Palma wastes no time building on the reflexive layers by suggesting the man had an attack less from the confinement of the coffin but from opening his eyes and seeing a camera a foot from his face. He also highlights the trashy nature of the upcoming film when he follows the actor, Jake Scully (Craig Wasson) back home: De Palma frames him beside a ludicrous hot dog joint luring in customers with a mock-up of a wiener nestled in the bun from the side, making for an image so transparently sexual it scarcely counts as innuendo. Dejected and afraid he'll be replaced by his double and then cut out of the part entirely, Jake returns home, only to find his girlfriend in bed with another man. He's been replaced everywhere.

To do much more than give the most basic of plot information following this bizarre sequence would not only be a sidestepping of critical responsibility but also damn near impossible. This is a savage, uncompromising film, one that replaces the satiric wickedness of De Palma's early films with a brutal desire to shove his aesthetic and intellectual choices down the audience's throat. He tried playing their game with Scarface, giving the plebeian hordes all the blood and excess they could ask for with that movie and getting ignored in the process. But if the critics were going to willfully miss what he was trying to do and crowds would follow suit, then De Palma might as well tell them what he really thinks. In addition, he must have suspected he might be tossed out of the studio system, so he also strives to get in one last exercise of his pet themes.

Body Double folds in on itself routinely. Jake heads to an acting class to try a form of acting therapy to overcome his claustrophobia, and when he freezes up the instructor berates him with cries of, "You have to act!" But the artistically impotent and physically cuckold Jake is useless, and De Palma channels Wasson's exceedingly limited range and his lack of movie-star looks (he resembles a young Bill Maher with the least charming traces of Steve Guttenberg thrown in for good measure) to ensure the audience never connects with any one dimension of diegetic reality.

Having taken his suspense prowess to its zenith with Blow Out, De Palma sets about not only deconstructing suspense tropes and building blocks but demolishing them. Jake runs into another struggling actor, Sam (Gregg Henry) who just happens to need a flatmate for a house that no actor fishing for bit parts in B-movies could afford for all the sexual favors in the world. It looks as if someone made a house out of one of those tacky rotating restaurants designed to make eaters feel like royalty (or gods). Sam takes out a telescope to show Jake a woman across the way who dances erotically every night with her blinds open. It's obvious the woman dances for someone, obvious that the Rear Window framing of this voyeurism will lead to some kind of trouble and obvious that Sam, who disappears from the film completely for the next hour or so, is a bit too eager to point out this lady and get the hell out of Dodge.

If one is to connect on any level with Body Double beyond frothing disgust, it is necessary to step back and see how defiantly De Palma refuses to let the audience engage with this film. I admit, it's a tedious process; the "it's meant to be bad!" argument has become so ubiquitous I begin to suspect that bad movies no longer exist, only ironic ones. But De Palma has enough reflexive cred to back up the notion he wants the audience to see the film as it is being constructed and not simply accept the images before them. Wasson's inability to find the tragedy in his Vertigo-esque claustrophobia lends his Edvard-Munchian facial contortions an open comedy, and De Palma ensures that every panic attack breaks up the film: when Jake chases the (other) man stalking the woman he loves from afar into a tunnel, he seizes up, and the man stops as if waiting for him. When the woman, Gloria Revelle (Deborah Shelton) catches up and thanks Jake for recovering the purse the thief left for him, their kiss instantly shifts the background into poor-quality rear-projection that broadcasts its falsity.

To even sort out the titular issue of doubles, one must be prepared to find multiple splits within each major character. It starts off literally, with Jake fretting over his double replacing him on-set, then he becomes a double for the creepy man watching Gloria with murderous intent. When the assailant finally strikes, Jake soon finds another woman, a porn actress named Holly Body (Melanie Griffith) who dances the same dance that transfixed him. Tracking down Holly leads to a number of role reversals and newly fabricated personae (Jake, heretofore unable to act his way out of a paper bag, instantly slips into the role of porn producer). On top of all that, when you get a good look at "the Indian's" face, the garish creepiness of it is undercut by how it is obviously the result of makeup and masks.

These in-film splits define the constantly shifting nature of its meaningless reality, which De Palma uses not only to peel back the layers of film but expose how cynical the '80s love of materialism really is. By preventing the audience from looking at this movie as anything other than a movie -- from its splintered fragments of plot and genre to its outrageously bad ensemble casting, using not only unskilled actors but ones that don't even play off each other -- he points out the seediness of Reagan's America. This is especially true when De Palma does location shooting, the malls and clubs in which he films looking not all-together classier than the putrid pastels and leopard prints dotting the porn set Jake visits. The glass elevator of a mall ties in with that absurd Modernist house in which Jake lives, presenting the idea that yuppies deserve to be seen looming over those unworthy of bourgeois delights, while the gauzy nightclub where Jake goes with Holly could be another porn set.

Building off that, De Palma mercilessly takes the extremes of sex and violence to new nadirs here, rubbing the mainstream's nose in its shit. The sheer amount of screen time devoted to breasts suggests he felt the only way to get away with this heady exercise in lowbrow sleaze was to make it as sleazy as possible, and he frames the violence in outrageously suggestive terms. When "the Indian" comes for Gloria, he kills her with a power drill, and De Palma frames the fatal blow from behind to show the drill pushing down between the man's legs into the woman, and we see the grisly aftermath below as Jake sees the bit drive through the ceiling and blood spurt through the hole. This comes before Jake's descent into the porn world, but it stands as the most concise, vicious summary of De Palma's equation of the pornographic underworld with the seedy one that's taken root in the mainstream.


At least there are a few lighter jokes and sly allusions here to buoy the intensely confrontational nature of the blacker comedy. As Jake watches Gloria through a window in the mall, the store's owner calls security, but when a guard asks Jake, "Can I help you?" our man simply says "No thank you" and walks away without consequence. Later, when Scully moves into porn acting to get close to Holly, his bad acting in "legitimate" movies inverts when a producer responds to his ridiculous questions with, "What are you, some kind of method actor?" I also wondered if Gloria Revelle was a play on "se réveiller," meaning "to wake up." Of course, without the reflexive it would mean more along the lines of "to get it up," which she certainly does for Jake.

Throughout, you can see De Palma tearing down everything, and I found myself confronting my disdain for irony as a defense mechanism with this film, which is so bad on so many levels but clearly seeks to be unpleasant. But the difference between De Palma's style at its best and the sort of approaches I find tedious is that De Palma doesn't stand outside his movie and act as if he's above it. Instead, he puts himself right in the shit with the actors (and the audience), embodying all that he hates and digging deeper into his themes and issues because of it. It's essentially another iteration of the split between A Clockwork Orange and Straw Dogs: both are movies condemning fascistic violence in supposedly evolved social structures and privileged characters, but one looks down the with condescension while the other truly gets inside the moral abandon to find motivation. De Palma, like his clearest successors, the Neveldine/Taylor duo, works best when he throws his camera into the fracas and treats even the most brazenly reflexive moments with fierce conviction. He certainly like to have a laugh at his own films, but there's nothing more serious to a comedian than comedy.

By the end, everything collapses, the circular motion of the film from the coffin at the start to the open grave at the end proving what a self-involved exercise it all was. And when the villain starts screaming "You've got to act!" there's no way to find some kind of coherent logic to all this. The pieces don't add up, intentionally so, and you can practically De Palma asking "Oh, what do you care anyway?" as the credits roll over one last shot of breasts. This may be the most contemptuous I've ever seen a movie be to an audience, which is all the more disturbing because it might be, on some level, deserved.


*De Palma says this in an interview recorded between him and director Noah Baumbach for the Criterion Collection's superlative DVD and Blu-Ray release of Blow Out, which includes, among other things, a remastered, hi-def version of Murder à la Mod.

Brian De Palma: Scarface

That Scarface enjoys a position in the pop culture lexicon that only strengthens with each passing year serves as a validation of its deliberate excesses and its transparently critical view of upper-class decadence in the '80s and the yuppie love for this outrageous lifestyle. Scarface updates Howard Hawks' 1932 original in a way few remakes do: it truly guts the original and places the update firmly within its own time period not only in its references but its aesthetics. In the process, it continues the mounting sociopolitical dissatisfaction creeping its way back into Brian De Palma's work, peeling back the veneer glossed over the whole decade and marking the start of the director's open hostility to the changing social landscape of the 1980s.

What De Palma does best with Scarface is demonstrate that those old gangster films (which his protagonist openly acknowledges as an influence on his young mind) were as much glamorizations of violence and decadence as anything being shunned by contemporaneous critics. Those pre-Code pictures came out during the Great Depression, times of hardship and desolation; yet the films showed well-dressed criminals living the high, fast life. When the film came out in 1983, America was just starting to recover from its worst economy since the depression, and De Palma films inside ritzy clubs and absurdly lavish mansions. And like the mainstream culture looking to flashy pop culture touchstones like Miami Vice for comfort, so too did the masses in the '30s enjoy those gangsters up on the screen (hell, they liked real-life gangsters like Dillinger). Scarface was De Palma's way of showing the public face of the '80s, and it's no wonder so many viewers hated being shown their cultural "values" in such harsh terms.

By making the protagonist of the film not an American crime lord but a Cuban immigrant working his way up through violence and smuggling, De Palma gets to pull back and view his social targets with a clearer view. Montana arrives as seemingly the ideal anti-Communist, a man who viciously decries Castro's takeover and the rise of a society where the individual is told what to do. Yet Tony's entire life is a story of taking and giving orders; if he hates the Communist system, it is because he never gets to be the one telling others what to do. In America, if he pays his dues, he can call the shots someday.

De Palma portrays this irony as a condensation of anti-Communist hypocrisy, the idea that the rule of the rich is acceptable because of lingering belief in the exaggerated American Dream, in which the poor and ignored put up with abuse in the hopes of attaining that one-in-a-million Alger Hiss story that puts them on top. Tony, a ruthless criminal before he gets off the island, comes to Miami with this perverse goal of making it at all costs, and he soon rises to the top by sinking to the bottom of the underworld.

Though not nearly as fine-tuned as Scorsese's later take on similar material with GoodFellas, De Palma updates the operatic web of intrigue propelling the Godfather films from Shakespearean deceit and Machiavellian schemes to the brutal back-and-forth between coke-addled, paranoid psychopaths who can order deaths without batting an eye but turn into quivering blobs of jelly when the tables turn. Well, not all of them do, but is that any better? Is it better to get in one last attack like a caged animal or to try to play on human empathy in one's final moments?

Coming out of that recession, De Palma views wealth and lauded social status with even more distrust than usual, practically equating extreme wealth with crime. When Tony, now a major player in dealer Frank's (Robert Loggia) operation, tracks down his mother and sister, Gina (Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio), his mother knows instantly that the money Tony can so casually hand over from the pockets of his ostentatious suit came from criminal activity. Even taking her son's past into account, she leaps to the right conclusion so quickly that the film makes its point about Tony's richness being vile long before he explodes at the buttoned-down old money at a restaurant late in the film when he points out that the only difference between them and him is that he doesn't hide his face behind lazy plays at false modesty. Perhaps, however, De Palma is commenting on the setbacks put into place against immigrants and the poor, that the only way to advance out of the slums is through hollow acts like crime (or fame, which ties into the film's second life as a pop-culture icon for the hip-hop community).

According to actor Steven Bauer, during the premiere of Scarface, Martin Scorsese leaned over to him and whispered, “Be prepared, because they’re going to hate it in Hollywood. Because it’s about them.” He was right; already stumbling from the disappointing returns from Blow Out, De Palma suffered a harsh critical blow, though the commercial impact has been largely overstated. Considering that the director nearly found himself shoved into directing Flashdance before he manages to attach himself to this project, one need not reach far to come to the conclusion that De Palma had an axe to grind with some people signing the checks in town. Thinking of Scorsese's interpretation, we can see Tony Montana as a studio head, a coked-out madman caterwauling and passing final judgment on others to maintain his ludicrous sense of power.

Not nearly as savage an attack on the studio system as his following feature, Scarface nevertheless eats at the studios from the inside. Compared to his union of metacinematic satire and tragically Romantic thriller with Blow Out, Scarface plays it straight, straighter than De Palma ever had. He uses mostly crane shots to float around the area, no longer mired with his characters but coolly observing. Apart from the acknowledgment of old gangster movies and the general tenor of Pacino's performance -- outlandish in homage to the flamboyant styles of those classic gangster actors a good decade before Pacino started overacting as his stock-in-trade -- De Palma does not involve his usual trickery as much, his most "directorly" moments still working within the narrative and not examining the extra diegetic space around it.* The commentary is clear, but he hides it in plain sight.

Note the racial makeup of the cast, not just in the leads but -- and this is vital -- the supporting cast. For the big roles, De Palma casts Caucasians, from the Italians Pacino, Loggia and Mastrantonio to the half-white Abraham and Shenar. But he uses actors of Latino descent for the backup characters, like Manny*. If Pacino's entire performance hearkens back to Paul Mini's melodramatic work in Hawks' original or the ever-fiery playing to the rafters that typified Cagney's singular approach, his and the other major castings show an old Hollywood mentality. Could De Palma have gotten major distribution with a recognizable face in the lead, one that audiences could be reassured was really white under than tan and accent?

De Palma's direction shows a mild aesthetic satire not on the level of his experimental features, but he takes his advantage of the dwindling clout he'd barely built up with studios in the previous decades. In fact, I wonder if the film's budget and size is as much attributable to the rising star of its Oscar-winning writer, Oliver Stone, than its director -- as a sidenote, much of Scarface seems a dry run for Stone's own aesthetically and morally provocative social filmmaking stretching from the second half of the decade through the mid-'90s. De Palma has the most fun with a nightclub set he returns to throughout the film, a hall of mirrors constantly reflecting faces and bodies around these paranoid cocaine addicts as their mental breakdowns get visualized behind them. The best of these sequences, featuring an attempting hit on Tony, show off De Palma's mastery of suspense technique, using slow track pans on cranes and zoom-ins to keep narrowing the frame until Richard Belzer's bad jokes are as tense as the electronic music.

"Nothing exceeds like excess," Elvira remarks dryly to her husband's loud rants about her habits, and that's as much a maxim for the film as its ironic use of "The World Is Yours" in flashing lights in the sky and as the grim closing shot. Tony lines his mansion with red carpet, as if he's always showing up to his premiere. It presents a world where, as with the case of the real Scarface, a criminal can kill, smuggle and intimidate all he wants, but he can lose it all if he doesn't give the government its cut in taxes. Furthermore, for all Tony's hideousness, his one act of humanity seals his fate, not his countless acts of evil. This is a film where no one can be trusted, where Cubans fight each other over political allegiances, different Latino nationalities war for supremacy and the underlings plot against their bosses and vice-versa. As with The Godfather, the most sinister acts occur in the boardroom, where horrifying and detached decisions are made for a few dollars more. Man, how couldn't this be about the studios in the '80s?

*The one exception I spotted came when Tony's bored, coke-crazed wife Elvira (Michelle Pfeiffer), exasperatedly shouts at her husband, "Can't you stop saying 'fuck' all the time? Can't you stop talking about money? It's boring, Tony." It's not overt enough to be winking, but there's just enough suggestion in Oliver Stone's lines to imply the director and writer understand the absurdity of it all.
**A more in-depth look at the supporting cast and their roots in Latino TV and film can be found in Tony Dayoub's excellent and personal double-post on the film and Carlito's Way.