FILMOGRAPHY
Greetings (1968)
Hi, Mom! (1970)
Sisters (1973)
The Phantom of the Paradise (1974)
Obsession (1976)
Carrie (1976)
The Fury (1978)
Dressed to Kill (1980)
Blow Out (1981)
Scarface (1983)
Body Double (1984)
The Untouchables (1987)
Casualties of War (1989)
Bonfire of the Vanities (1990)
Raising Cain (1992)
Carlito’s Way (1993)
Mission: Impossible (1996)
Snake Eyes (1998)
Mission to Mars (2000)
The Black Dahlia (2006)
Redacted (2007)
Passion (2012)
Domino (2019)
FILMOGRAPHICAL SUMMARY
Brian De Palma, born in Newark, NJ in 1940, but raised in Philadelphia, spent his early years exhibiting interests in science and technology, tinkered with computer design, and eventually enrolled in the Physics program at Columbia University. Indications of a curious intelligence and way, perhaps, of explaining a career where De Palma the artist and De Palma the student seemed to work in parallel, and on the very same films, like the conjoined twins dually manifested in his early Sisters (1973).
De Palma took real risks, and real risks can have consequences. In a 2015 documentary revisiting his extraordinary career, his large and care-free laugh seemed always to settle into a somber grimace, as though relaying any anecdote about filmmaking was to relive a certain pain. He was the least darling of the “Film Brats,” and box offices he frequently damned. Your average moviegoer occasionally learned his name only to soon forget it. While Spielberg and Lucas directed entertainments, and Scorsese and Coppola earnestly probed masculine derangement and cultural violence, De Palma deconstructed film genre and cinematic technique with a mischievous flair. He was daring. His films were defiant of convention and authority– both in the movies and in life– and fascinated with undressing with sexual brazenness Hollywood’s disingenuousness regarding its own perversions. Watching the first twenty minutes of Carrie, for example, is almost like being introduced to a cinematic deviant, one who seems never to have been read the rules. After the final twenty, one might realize that the rulebook has been rewritten.
De Palma was the working embodiment of auteur theory, and its very antithesis. For over five decades he wrestled with both audiences and a studio system that seldom understood him. His career was schizophrenic, like many of his characters. It included triumphs both artistic and commercial, such as Blow Out and Carlito’s Way, and stupefying cul-de-sacs, like the awful Bonfire of the Vanities and the overblown Casualties of War. It was, often in turns, both submissive and renegade. But it was never boring. As the years passed, and as defining his “project” became more tantalizing as a result of the controversial idiosyncrasies in his work, reclamation scholars and admiring cineastes alike arched over his films like vampires, inducing more delusions of grandeur in film writing than would a drunken semiotics professor regarding Hitchcock.
Hitchcock, it so happens, was De Palma’s biggest infatuation. He seemed to argue in his insistence on endlessly appropriating his aesthetic modes that the legendary director cast a shadow over the cinema from which it could never escape. De Palma seemed most interested in exploring Hitchcock’s violations– both in the cinema and in the culture– that cut through norms. Often, his characters would slice directly into them, with the requisite bloodletting. He also appeared fascinated by how Hitchcock fed the beast– that is: Hollywood– and in exploring to what degree the artist is complicit in whatever social, moral, or cultural crimes they unwittingly peddle.
A self-admitted admirer of the theater of Bertolt Brecht, many of De Palma’s films reframed Hitchcock, among many other influences, in a style of alienation. His aesthetic appropriations from Hitchcock were often purposely perverse. He in a sense maximized Hitchcock, employing numerous techniques each even more garish than the legendary directors own language– split screen, split diopter, frame-rate modulation, extravagant musicality, often blended together into operatic ecstasy — that visibly strove to pull the viewer out of passive spectatorship. And his films were more challenging for skirting (pun intended, perhaps) what they were about. They were slippery. They forced the viewer to wrestle with not only their own conceptions of taste, but their ability to interpret what they were seeing. They toyed with point of view, were disinterested in pure continuity, and were relayed with a stylistic brio that manipulated the audience’s gaze and, often, shocked them out of a purposefully manufactured dream torpor. Also a student of Michael Powell’s unique brand of alienation, that gaze was often disturbing in its leering voyeurism.
When these techniques worked– and they usually did– Brian De Palma rendered cinematic moments and sequences that soared in several dimensions, not the least as aesthetic symphonies. See: “Be Black Baby” in Hi, Mom!; the conflagration of Carrie; Travolta literally splicing the mystery together in Blow Out and then later spinning out of control as he realizes he’s been sabotaged; Carlito on a Manhattan roof, and his later eccentric and enchanting moment-of-death; the backroom tour de force that is Scarface Tony Montana’s interrogation of Frank Lopez; the literal juxtaposition of opera and murder in Passion.
When he failed, the notion of “De Palma as Brechtian” served as an auteurist crutch. There was a kind of irony in the fact that he– maestro of murder– failed most egregiously where he attempted to render and to comment earnestly on real human pain, such as in his two anti-war films, Casualties of War and Redacted.
Greetings (1968), shot on a shoestring budget and starring a budding Robert De Niro, was funny and fascinating. Funny in its satirical, neurotic musings on the social troubles and fascinations of the late 1960s. Fascinating in how clear a roadmap it was for the continuing preoccupations of De Palma as a filmmaker.
Hi, Mom! (1970) was even funnier. Not so much a sequel to Greetings as a spiritual extension, De Niro and several others reprise their roles and the satire is pitched to a fever, especially in an extended sequence involving the performance of the protest-play “Be Black Baby” by an afro-militant theatre troupe that took a degree of brazenness bordering on insanity to render. The sequence is not only the most affecting and most jarring in all of De Palma’s work– it is unique in the Cinema.
Get to Know Your Rabbit (1972), pending.
After this failure, De Palma’s career in Hollywood reached a plausible conclusion. He returned to New York and wrote Sisters (1973) after reading an article in Life magazine about conjoined twins. It became the first (and least) in a series of deranged fascinations De Palma would probe that would culminate in one of the Cinema’s strangest masterpieces. Sisters, however, was no masterpiece. Grisly, poorly acted, implausible and in many ways pushing homage to the breaking point, it is notable only for its aesthetic brazenness.
The Phantom of the Paradise (1974) was a campy, schlocky rock opera that, even for its audacity, was a complete failure. Though admittedly de gustibus, the music was seemingly intentionally embarrassing, satirizing an industry that needed no help in doing so, and eventually becoming (a study perhaps for bored sociologists) a fairly sizable cult phenomenon only in Canada.
Paul Schraeder in 1976 wrote a very good script for Martin Scorsese, but De Palma got the other bad one, and rewrote Obsession (1976) into a different, uniquely awful experience featuring a Cliff Robertson performance so disengaged it was as though he was just roused from a coma. Only Genevieve Bujold and John Lithgow breathe any life into the affair, and little at that.
That same year, De Palma adapted the young writer Stephen King’s breakout novel into his first strange masterpiece, Carrie (1976). It stars a young woman who served as a set-dresser on his earlier Phantom, Sissy Spacek. She and De Palma both pour salt and acid into the wounds of anyone who has ever suffered the humiliating vicissitudes of adolescence and school-age social cruelty. The film was the first to feature the fullest exhibitions of De Palma’s abilities as a film technician, aesthetician and conductor. It was wildly daring in its depiction of youth, and of budding sexuality. Its camera movement and musicality was almost overweening, like an exaggerated symphony, and it culminated in a sequence that is close to the apex of evocative cinematic horror, so thoroughly it earns its murderous outrage.
The Fury (1978) was a fun extension of the box office successes of Carrie, and even more egregious in its sanguine revenge fantasy.
Dressed to Kill (1980) was rather like a sequel to Sisters in its spirit. This was the second of those De Palma films obsessed with reframing ‘the moment of Psycho’ (to borrow a phrase from David Thomson), directed in a kind of masturbatory delirium, a crazed mélange of styles that takes that convulsive moment of Psycho and re-imagines it over and over again as a series of slightly altered filmic orgasms. In the case of Dressed to Kill, De Palma better captured the languid interludes of Hitchcock, particularly in long, winding, placid tracking shots, such as a bravura sequence in a museum, of such sexy visual dexterity that it rendered the film’s dialogue– like with bad sex-talk– almost intrusive to the experience.
Magnificent in many parts, Blow Out (1981) turned De Palma’s voyeuristic obsessions into a conspiratorial fantasy about a political murder that, hearkening now all the way back to Greetings, was like something Gerrit Graham could have dreamed up. Technically magnificent, it featured a few jaw-dropping sequences that sung brilliantly about the film’s themes. There are many who considered the film to be De Palma’s masterpiece, but it came off as neither sincerity nor satire, but rather a messy mix of both.
Scarface (1983) was released to an underwhelming response, but as the years past– particularly after its adoption by the hip hop community and as the subsequent aesthetic template for the Grand Theft Auto video game series– it became a cult sensation. Much of this is owed to a sensationally violent, almost amoral screenplay by Oliver Stone, and a larger-than-life performance by Al Pacino as “Tony Montana”. His marble-mouthed characterization of the murderous Cuban gangster became a part of American movie folklore, even when the film frequently failed to reach such a stature.
The zenith of that unspoken project that included Sisters and Dressed to Kill, the accidental masterpiece2 Body Double (1984) defied taste, sense, and description. Financially, it fell flat on the screen upon release. This was no surprise. The film has hardly been resuscitated since, except by those willing to read more both into and around the very frames De Palma and cinematographer Stephen Burum shot. It was utterly baffling. But it brought a sense of the uncanny more vividly to life than anything De Palma had yet attempted and its very charge anticipated Lynch’s Blue Velvet and his later Mulholland Drive. It was also De Palma’s most reverberating appropriation of Hitchcock, in a sense reframing the filmmaker and his industry by exaggerating them into stranger forms. Lunatic, garish, and bizarre– there was still a coherence to the film that defied its incoherence. It was both a send up of bad movies, a bad movie itself, with a great and resonant movie hidden, lurking in the reeds around Mulholland reservoir, in a sleazy penthouse, in the parking garage of a Hollywood mall. It featured a marvelously delirious and misunderstood performance by Craig Wasson: Jimmy Stewart as play-acting sex pervert. And another breakout by Melanie Griffith: Porn-Industry Barbie. It looked cheapened, underfunded, slapdash, sordid, and yet, upon closer inspection, was actually rendered with exceptional care. Most importantly, it was extremely funny and in a way that implicated the viewer for their every laugh. It showed most vividly what De Palma could do.
De Palma was then requisitioned by Paramount to direct the David Mamet screenplay of the Elliot Ness/Al Capone saga, The Untouchables (1987). It was in turns compelling and pedestrian and boring. De Palma seemed torn between his renegade instincts and his desire to do his job well. It made a star of Kevin Costner, and even got Sean Connery an Oscar.
Casualties of War (1989) exhibited that De Palma’s disgust and anger could push his filmmaking into precarious positions. A broad statement, but the more obvious the emotional charge, the worse the esteemed stylist seemed to do. The kind of filmmaking that begs you to feel, that implores you to astonishment and outrage, that rings you for your pain and tears, the film was a very well-intentioned, embarrassing mess.3
Bonfire of the Vanities (1991) exhibited most boldly De Palma’s weaknesses with humor. It wasn’t that he wasn’t funny– he most certainly was– but his humor was best approached obliquely. Like Wise Guys before this, the direct approach always failed, and never more than in this unmitigated disaster.
Raising Cain (1991) on the other hand was a success in two ways. As an exercise in self-sufficiency, De Palma made this small picture on the cheap and with his wife as producer. It was small scale success with a nicely modulated strangeness. It was also another example of that ‘oblique’ approach at humor– disturbingly funny, in fact.
The brilliant Carlito’s Way (1993), working once again with Al Pacino, reframed and matured the energies of Scarface and contained passages of superlative filmmaking and film acting. Whole swathes of the film were magnificent, some of the best material De Palma ever shot. It was ultimately hampered by a screenplay (and probably its source material) that too conveniently shoved its subjects into the films quandary-laden plot and themes. Most notably, however, were that its peaks were both subtle and sumptuous and also thrilling and suspenseful. The breadth of the picture’s tone was extremely impressive.
Mission: Impossible (1996) was a pretty damn good reboot of a television franchise with Tom Cruise and was by far De Palma’s biggest financial hit.
Following that box office success, De Palma then directed an idea he always wanted to try: a thriller at a Casino. Recalling Blow Out, Snake Eyes (1998)— starring a Nicholas Cage beginning to capitalize on how manic were the whites of his eyes– was a stitched assemblage of superlative camera moves that attempted to relay a messy plot involving a political murder.
Mission to Mars (2000) was afforded a nine-figure budget and a host of terrific actors. It was almost old-fashioned in its wonder and thoughtfulness– for space and weightlessness, for the possibility of extraterrestrial life, for human brotherhood. But it vacillated between tones so abruptly that it seemed De Palma was out of his element– never more obvious than in his unsurprising impatience with CGI.
The Black Dahlia (2006) began, sadly, the notion of De Palma as afterthought. By this point, other directors were advancing on his aesthetic the same way he advanced on Hitchcock (see: David Fincher’s winding, obstinate Zodiac, but a year later). This retelling of the famed east-side L.A. murder featured De Palma himself as a proto-casting-couch creep, with a menacing sense of humor, across a magnificent Mia Kershner, in scenes that were brilliantly discomforting evocations of the seediest side of Los Angeles. But the rest was an overstuffed and ghastly mess.
De Palma then reframed the central outrage of Casualties of War using (and abusing) a tragedy from the contemporaneous Iraq War with Redacted (2007). It suffered from problems similar to that earlier drama, and yet a few more, not the least being that the event in question resulted in criminal sentences that argued for progress in civility. The film’s wide-eyed earnestness about the notion of war crimes as a continuing possibility were as naive as the acting, though probably less purposefully so.
Passion (2012) was a delirious rehash in the vein of Raising Cain, but set in a modern milieu that De Palma did not seem to fully grasp. It grew more interesting when it dropped all pretense and dispensed with taste in its latter half. But even though that half contained one of De Palma’s most inspired juxtapositions, something je ne sais quoi was too often missing.
Sadly, and finally, Domino (2019) never fully came to be because of investor issues. There was a film of a few sequences of interest, but it felt salvaged.
WORKS
Greetings (1968) is like a treasure map to the career of Brian De Palma. It follows the classic “hang out” film formula, but instead of being backlit by ennui, or boredom, De Palma borrows his dramatic thrust from the violent facts of the 1960s. An episodic pitch-black comedy, he uses the backdrop of the Vietnam War to comment on the absurdity of his time. The cheery salutation “Greetings” is how a Vietnam draft letter began, and De Palma begins his film to a jaunty faux-Merseybeat number so named. Two young men, Jon and Lloyd (Robert De Niro and Gerrit Graham) coach a third, Paul (Jonathan Warden), on how to pose as a homosexual in his psychological exam in order to evade being drafted. They tell him to tuck in his shirt so that he can exhibit lace panties through his open zipper. “Fags are really blatant,” Lloyd insists. But Paul can’t pull it off. He’d rather be dead than gay. Meanwhile, it turns out Lloyd is completely obsessed with debunking the Warren Commission’s report on the JFK assassination. He even uses his sleeping girlfriend’s naked body as a mannequin, to draw entry and exit wounds, so he can analyze bullet trajectories. The film consists of these kinds of sketches. Jon, an aspiring filmmaker, invents a new approach to porn where tiny smut films are projected in the windows of a scale model apartment building. “You’ve heard of pop-art, right? Well this is peep art!” Jon, it so happens, is played by a 25 year old Robert De Niro. He exhibits all the charisma without derailing the laughs. In moments like these, the movie can be extremely funny. It is less so where it obviously tries to be. There’s a scene where Jon convinces a date to act in one of his “peep” pics and directs her as she undresses. You get the impression the film is trying to avoid just being chit-chat. But you watch the chit-chat and you wonder where De Palma’s obvious talent for verbal comedy later went to hide. There’s a scene mid-film where a man walks into a bookstore and engages Lloyd in a conversation. He claims to be the nephew of the landlord of Lee Harvey Oswald and as he rattles off facts about the assassination, Lloyd nods in increasing agreement. Then it dawns on them that if the man is almost certainly going to be the 17th killing perpetrated by the FBI in order to maintain the cover up, it only stands to reason that Lloyd will be number 18. “18!” De Palma flashes on the screen in red. Later, a conversation between Jon and a smut-peddler is a hilarious, queasy revue of sleazy manipulation. Allen Garfield, who plays the man, has the best comedic timing in the movie. Not far behind him is Ashley Oliver, who sits Paul, her computer date, down on the coach to show him how much care and concern went into the execution of every item of clothing she has on, even down to her girdle. She scolds him: “And you just threw on a sweatshirt.” She could be a young Angie Dickinson from Dressed to Kill. Finally, when Jon has his own draft interview, he’s flummoxed. He did everything he could to convince the army psychologist of his racist psychopathy: “I’m an extreme rightwinger I tell him. I’ll kill my quota of chinks every day. I ask to see the psychiatrist and he says ‘well, you’re just a little overzealous, that’s all.” When he gets to Vietnam, he’s being interviewed by a reporter in the bush. They spot an attractive young Vietnamese woman. He directs her to sit, at gunpoint, and begin undressing for the camera. De Palma was only 28 when he made the picture, and he’s essentially mapped out the themes for the rest of his career. (w: Charles Hirsch, Brian De Palma, c: Robert Fiore)
Hi Mom (1970) is not so much a sequel to Greetings as a spiritual extension. De Niro reprises his role as Jon, the inventive pornographer who created “Peep Art”. He’s like a proto-Travis Bickle, an American Psychopath seemingly borne from endless, Clockwork Orange-like screenings of Birth of a Nation and Rear Window. Inspired, De Palma expands on the funniest scene from Greetings and casts Allen Garfield as a porn producer, Joe Banner. Banner hires Joe to realize his art to the fullest, and lends him $2K for a camera. Where this goes is even funnier, more acerbic, and far more insane than Greetings dared. It turns out that Joe, like De Niro, is quite the actor. He inserts himself into one of his own pornographic escapades by acting as though his dating service sent him to the wrong door. The woman who answers, Judy (Jennifer Salt), he manipulates by spinning her own anecdotes into his own fabrications. She lives across the way in the other apartment building, within perfect view of his lens, so he even precisely times these sociopathic episodes so that their sex coincides with his camera’s timer. Unfortunately, it tilts on its tripod and the camera instead films the neighbor downstairs, painting his nude body black. Why? Because the man (Gerrit Graham) has a play he’s running, with his afro-militant theater troupe, called Be Black Baby. After Banner fires Jon, he joins in, taking the part of a cop. This hilariously untroubled plot turn leads to what is– without qualification– maybe the most visceral depiction of American racial reality ever set to film. Be Black Baby is experimental, experiential theater, run by black actors in whiteface, that takes white suburbanites, paints their face with shoe polish, force-feeds them soul food, and then subjects them to a string of injustices and indignities up to and including sexual assault. De Palma shoots it all in hand-held POV formatted in the shape of a television. It’s genuinely terrifying stuff. “It made you feel what it felt like to be a negro,” Lara Park explains when they get out. The “theater-goers” phony graciousness in learning more about “negro life” is such acute black comedy one wonders how De Palma wasn’t made instantly famous from the sequence. (w: Brian De Palma, c: Robert Elfstrom)
Sisters (1973) is made out of an assemblage of Hitchcock references, Italian Giallo Horror, “believe-it-or-not” tabloid detritus, and overweening musicality– the aesthetic upon which De Palma built his controversial reputation. It is a viscerally grisly and surreal tale of murder, this one excised from Psycho‘s shower and relocated onto a pull-out couch in a Staten Island living room. Bernard Herrman even does the score, and it plays rather like a conflation of Psycho/Vertigo motifs: muted strings, pizzicatto, sul ponticello, tremolando, and much very sumptuous vibrato followed by almost droll, deadened no vibrato. The same broad cross-section of allusions apply visually, as De Palma “borrows” liberally from Hitchcock’s vocabulary, and they stretch all the way down to tiny details, such as by the fact that Danielle’s street is perhaps the only one in all of Staten Island with a grade comparable to San Francisco. The ‘Bates’ here is Danielle, the surviving twin of a pair of once-conjoined sisters, played by Margot Kidder. The other sister, Dominique, died during the operation, an event traumatic enough that her being is enkindled (like Mrs. Bates) from within a possessed Danielle soon after Danielle has sex. Danielle’s victim is not a comely white woman, but rather a gentlemanly black man named Philip. In the murder, De Palma goes for more than just insinuation, thrusting the knife deep into Philip’s groin and squirting thickly viscous blood, so that he streaks it across the white carpet as she hacks at his crawling body. De Palma points out what Hitchcock does right by doing it all garishly wrong. Strangely, he includes the frantic post-murder clean up, but denudes it of all of Hitchcock’s measured, uncanny sedateness. One of the marvels of Psycho‘s pivotal moment is that the insinuation of orgasm is sealed by the sedate quality of what comes immediately afterward. By using split-screen to juxtapose it with yet another character’s intrusion into the plot, and by the very fact that the clean up is itself completely impossible, the material comes off as self-conscious and self-satisfied. That character, an idealistic journalist named Grace (not Kelly, rather Jennifer Salt) witnesses the dying Philip through her own Rear Window. She is also self-conscious and busy. In the eyes of the authorities (such as the cops she immediately calls), Grace is an uncompromising militant feminist lunatic bent on tearing down the establishment– which is just one of the ways De Palma seems to try to invert his source material’s charge: instead of Jimmy Stewart’s implicit credibility, we have the rantings of a “crazy bitch”. The film is often credited for being some kind of social commentary on the women’s lib movement, mostly through academically desperate readings De Palma himself would probably satirize. The reason for Danielle’s deranged and murderous duality is slowly revealed through Grace’s stubborn probing, through which she descends into the vertiginous horrors of surrealist psychodrama, where women are the subjects of men’s hideous sexual hierarchies even to the point of body horror. De Palma’s imagination of this underworld where sexuality and insanity meet is rendered into something like a Felliniesque nightmare on bad acid. I wouldn’t make so much (nor probably would critical and popular consensus) of the constant references and homage if they were not so abundant and so blatant. De Palma has claimed this tendency is overstated, but there are passages here so obviously referential the film may well don a subtitle: Variations on Themes from Later Hitchcock. Movies are made out of movies, but when they say nothing tractable about life and fate, even murder can be made boring, something that would probably be a kind of irreligious act in Alfred’s cinema. (w: Brian De Palma, Louisa Rosa, c: Gregory Sandor)
The Phantom of the Paradise (1974) is a campy rock opera with music from Paul Williams and central performances from William Finley and Jessica Harper that is a satire of an industry that in its songs, personalities, and mores is essentially already a satire of itself, and always was. The movie picks on the music but it consists of little else. The plot conflates Phantom of the Opera with the Faust legend and the Picture of Dorian Gray, and probably nine other things one might miss. William Finley plays the Phantom, donning a mask that makes him look like an aluminum toucan. Paul Williams, who can’t act and is one of the more unprepossessing people ever to make it to the screen, plays Swan, the diminutive, satanic record producer for “Death Records”. The cinematic pace is frantic, everything seemingly pitched to maximum energy, yet the color tones and sets are nearly always gothically dark. The music, which is of course de gustibus, is an affected combination of ballads, schlock rock, and theater numbers that could drive certain people to walk into oncoming traffic. There are scenes where cheese collides from every direction. Take a central number (the film often plays like a mimed concert film) wherein the character “Beef,” played by Gerrit Graham and in costume comparable to that of Michelangelo’s David anticipating The Rocky Horror Picture Show, is murdered by the Phantom. The faux Black Sabbath rock number has him assembled from diced up body parts like Frankenstein’s monster, placed inside of a dumpster, elevated above the stage, and ‘electrified’ into being by a neon lightning bolt. The thing lowers and the number transmutes into something like McCartney’s Helter Skelter, but only vaguely like it– all the songs here are like not-quite-right approximations of better songs. He hops out and struts about the stage, not even remotely actually singing, nor playing his instrument, but rather humping the air with his guitar, contorting his face, flapping his arms like a chicken, until the Phantom swings that same lightning bolt at him so that he’s zapped like a cartoon marionette, bursts into flames, and dies to the Phantom’s maniacal laughter. There are enough shabby ideas in this one scene to exhaust a viewer, yet the whole film is like this. And it apparently is meant to progress the story, because the Phantom then swings the spotlight over to Jessica Harper, who breaks out into a bad-Streisand number, and we’re forced to listen to her sing the entire silly thing. Narrative lucidity is, of course, not actually the point of the scene or of the film. But De Palma could hardly have picked a more boring forum to inject his innate cinematic madness. (w: Brian De Palma, c: Larry Pizer)
Paul Schrader and Brian De Palma team up with a catatonic Cliff Robertson for Obsession (1976), a film apparently born from a conversation about Vertigo. While still too obvious, it is not nearly as plagiaristic in its homage as Sisters. It’s an often gorgeous movie. The photography by Vilmos Zsigmond is warm and sumptuous, gothic and beautiful and not at all overwrought. Often it looks like clouded memory. The score by Bernard Herrmann is massive in both its ideas and execution, often languorous when coupled with Zsigmond’s imagery, though De Palma’s application of it is occasionally questionable. The films mutual settings, New Orleans and Florence, are rarely captured so beautifully. So it’s a shame that it is the kind of stupid film that can only happen in movies, where talented technicians can be both vacuous and boring while exhibiting real skill. Paul Schrader apparently walked away from the project after De Palma truncated his already severely lousy screenplay. The film is even crazier than Vertigo, which is not a good thing. The plot is elaborate and not worth recounting. It involves a very (very) long con involving Robertson and a superbly drawly John Lithgow. The centerpiece of the ploy is Genevieve Bujold, who outshines everyone as both Robertson’s wife and his adult daughter. There’s a moment mid-film, in Florence, where he ‘mysteriously’ meets her in the very same church where he met that now deceased wife. She is the spit and image of her. Robertson has her try on new walks so as to more completely embody the dead woman. She humors him and struts some paces, doesn’t shake her hips as much, while he ogles her like he wants to eat her. That she doesn’t break out into a sprint and flee to Rome should give up the ghost of the central mystery. It does. She also says silly, nearly impossible things like, “Listen, I am good catholic girl! I do exactly what the Pope says!” to blunt his advances. Their romance progresses and he absconds with her back to New Orleans. They plan a marriage. At one point, in a dreamy-eyed line-delivery one would expect from a mental institution, Robertson’s Courtland says to her of their coming wedding: “Everything’s got to be very special. Very special.” His demeanor makes some sense: the film is called Obsession. But when the line ends, De Palma blares a portentous queue from Hermann’s score so as to do something Hitchcock also often did: use style to deflect our attention from the fact that the material is total nonsense. The film culminates in a revelation and a subsequent bit of action so silly that it nearly obscures many of the film’s grimmer possibilities. When, finally, Bujold bursts out with, “Daddy! You brought the money!” and they embrace, one might squirm, wondering: was she a good catholic girl the whole time? (w: Paul Schrader, c: Vilmos Zsigmond)
De Palma’s stylistic powers elevate Carrie (1976) beyond the ‘penny dreadfulness’ of Stephen King to nearly the apex of evocative cinematic horror. De Palma takes a more direct tact than Kubrick later did in interpreting King’s innate vulgarity. Instead of completely upending the novel’s themes, he exaggerates them. The film opens with a surreal scene. It’s audaciously risky. High school girls prance about in the nude, directed by a 35 year-old ogler. They do so in slow motion, in steam, in gauzy photography, to a Pino Dinaggio piano piece of wistful reminiscence. The camera settles finally on Sissy Spacek’s Carrie, who is washing her breasts in the shower, and it goes someway beyond merely sexualizing her. It practically strokes her, eventuating in a shocking angle that tracks down her thigh the blood from her first menstruation. Spacek was in her mid-20s at the time, but she is a convincing 16 year old, and it’s discomfiting. But the blood is critical. When Carrie sees it, she melts down the way only a victim of perennial abuse would and then an order of magnitude yet beyond that. The girls laugh at her and pelt her with tampons and chant “plug it up!” It makes no sense and yet complete sense and so encapsulates the movies energy: Everything here is a magnification of familiar experience. The film is aggressive with every representation. When it is languid, it’s almost woozy. When its terrifying, the looks of horror that strike Carrie’s face are straight out of Kabuki theater. Her occasional expressiveness is a stab where nearly the whole performance lies in her appearing as a non-entity. Spacek is captivating in every place and position De Palma puts her, and there are many tones. We have all known Carrie to one degree or another in our lives. Her condition is insufferable because the actors in her environment make it so. Cruelty and cliques are practically synonymous, a side effect of the configuration of the American school system. Those actors have among them John Travolta and Nancy Allen as vicious idiots, accompanied by a gum-chewing twit (PJ Soles) so purely cruel one wonders how Carrie is the only one that thought to kill her. The rest are varieties of movie ghouls and movie fools. Carrie’s mother (a fantastic Piper Laurie) is a fire and brimstone lunatic, a child abuser of a particularly macabre kind, a religious fanatic in a cult of one. Carrie’s manufactured love interest, Tommy (William Katt), and his actual girlfriend (Amy Irving) could almost have been made interesting if they weren’t first cliches. The plot is razor thin, its first hour almost simply a set-up for a crescendo. This musicality is overt. Dinaggio bastes the material in motifs. He draws out sequences adagio and punctuates their horrors tremolo, and again and again the ostinato themes of youth. Carrie is like an Opera and De Palma, for once, is symphonic in his direction. Its apex takes place at a school prom. The entire sequence simmers in grim expectation and the film reaches heights of giddy terror. His camera swirls about, he indulges slow motion and split screen, all wonderfully spliced by Paul Hirsch. For about a 15 minute stretch, toward its climax, De Palma for the first time in his career achieves a perfect synthesis of style and content, the latter of which culminates in the kind of blind rage that comes from the cruel caprices of the often purposefully and purposelessly cruel world of adolescence. (w: Lawrence D. Cohen, c: Mario Tosi)
With The Fury (1978), from a novel and screenplay by John Farris, De Palma takes the paranormal youth of Carrie and imagines them in a national conspiracy, rather like a sanguine combination of Stephen King and Robert Ludlum, or a proto-Marvel movie. It’s a film of overskilled lunatics directed by one. Kirk Douglas stars as Peter, that kind of “ex-government agent” who has specialized skills for every situation, such as the ability to do parkour in fire escapes. His retirement is spoiled by his maniacal colleague, Childress (an excellent name), played serviceably and with maybe noticeable bemusement by John Cassavates. Childress kidnaps his son (Andrew Stevens), because the kid (what age is he?) has telekinetic abilities, and definitely not for his personality. As does Amy Irving, a psychic high school girl named Gillian. They make people bleed on accident from mere touch and De Palma relishes the blood. John Williams provides a pounding score of horrific dread, which at turns blends into something strangely pastoral, especially in a terrifically choreographed ballet of mayhem with De Palma’s typical preternaturally unusual staging, framing, and frame rate oscillations that takes place in broad daylight. A theremin occasionally punctuates the paranormal spookiness. Another wonderfully directed scene is a conversation on a bus between Douglas and Irving where the whites of his eyes make him appear as crazy as the material. Many films in, De Palma is a sure hand. Ghastliness is also a great strength of his. Much of the plot’s flimsy mechanics seem like excuses for yet more blood soaked mayhem. The film’s insane climax features a human blood sprinkler, followed by an exploding man, as if the director wasn’t able to have as much fun as he’d like with Carrie’s conflagration. It’s safe to say that it’s all a bit much. (w; John Farris, c: Richard H. Cline)
Dressed to Kill (1980) is a successful example of De Palma’s obsession with teasing out all the manifold possibilities of perversity in the cinema. It succeeds mostly because he is a brilliant stylist. But only as a movie. Many respond to it on terms on which it probably never meant to stand. It is a batshit film that announces its lunacy right from the start, with a sly inversion of (yet again) Psycho. Whose gaze is this? The film’s truncated star Angie Dickinson suds up her body and leers at her lover with a look so excessively lubricious she might be opening a soft-core porno directed by David Zucker. But the film also has an erotic cinematic serenity, long placid tracking shots, such as a bravura sequence in a museum, of such sexy visual dexterity that it renders dialogue– like with bad sex-talk– almost intrusive to the experience. Ironic, then, that its central character is an armchair therapist (Michael Caine). The film dispatches with its heroine in Hitchcockian form, and the murder bends homage all out of proportion. It is an absurd scene (the whole plot is absurd) and well aware of it. De Palma, endlessly misunderstood and misinterpreted, seems to find humor in what can be posed as Brechtian alienation, but which may in fact just be the gulf between his photographic and dramatic talents. I certainly do, and have indicated as much about many of his films. He so indulges in the asymmetry that it finally emerges here as a language of its own. His technique is often criticized for being unmotivated. This is wrong. It is directed toward a kind of masturbatory delirium, a crazed mélange of styles that takes the convulsive moment of Psycho and re-imagines it over and over again as a series of slightly altered filmic orgasms. Those who would analyze it for its sensitivities or its values have walked into the wrong theater. A key might be that the film’s no-nonsense hooker (Nancy Allen) always has an ear out for investment possibilities. Perhaps this is De Palma’s way of saying, “This after all is what this filthy business is really about.” There is a young man played by Keith Gordon, the son of Dickinson’s Kate, who creates elaborate proto-computers that operate on their own internal logic and, like De Palma’s photography, spit out conclusions that are mathematically correct without regard for moral import. De Palma as a young man built similar contraptions, and then later rendered them into films. The lustrous energy in the picture, however, is Dickinson, who, like Janet Leigh before her, shows why the cinema seems to rely for its life on the photographic possibilities of the human face. De Palma has a fevered conflation of his own aesthetic deviancies slice her to pieces. (w: Brian De Palma, c: Ralf Bode)
To this point in his career, nearly all of director Brian De Palma’s films have taken place in worlds just beyond earthly reckoning, on internally referential movie-planets where his stunning stylistic flourishes and dramatic derangements served to paint older stylistic formalities and dramatic conventions in new, garishly colorful (but almost always somewhat sanguine) combinations. Blow Out (1981) brings his material further down to our planet, and into the light outside of the movie theater. A paranoid hallucination that is a better homage to Hitchcock than all of his prior attempts, it is also one of the most resonant films he’s ever made. Here, though he may have Blow-Up and The Conversation to call inspiration, the picture is finally about seeing, hearing, and imagining– namely filmmaking– and thus its heart is with L.B. Jefferies, seated by his Rear Window. The story is set against the backdrop of a political assassination. It recalls the Kennedy assassination and the Zapruder film obsessions of Greetings. It features a stunning central performance from John Travolta, as a b-movie sound technician who, after recording the sounds of an accident, grows embroiled in a vast conspiracy that he– as though producing the ultimate film about corruption– stitches together reel by reel. Travolta balances a giddy, youthful energy with an attitude of increasing distrust and disdain and he plays out all of this fantastical paranoia with an expressive understatement — all the way to the film’s heart breaking and cynical final moments– that seals his character’s truths and saves the material at more than one turn. His sequences of obsessive cutting and splicing and synching better illustrate the film editing process than probably any film ever made and create a new template for the conspiratorial imagination in the cinema. Nancy Allen and John Lithgow are also predictably wonderful, the latter so believable in his sociopathic understatement he makes minor comedies out of sequences that are not the least humorous in nature. Both actors and their characters seem extracted from De Palma’s prior universe. As do sequences, spliced in like contradictory reels. In a riotous example, Lithgow mocks the Zodiac, calling the police from a payphone and pretending do be a daffy psychotic, all because his seemingly autonomous political assassination gig has somehow also expanded into serial killing. The picture can oscillate between a virtuoso sequence in Travolta’s studio, as he frantically tests newly erased sound reels– where De Palma swirls the reels, their sounds, and our point of view into a kind of minimalist cinematic revery– to later a ridiculous action sequence with sprightly musical accompaniment, where Travolta drives his Jeep directly through mounted police, and then literally underneath Philadelphia City Hall, only to crash into a storefront with a noosed-up suicidal mannequin. Though the charges are completely different, both shots are small miracles. But this is such an impressively beautiful movie that it’s hard not to be fulsome, and that never wavers. (w: Brian De Palma, c: Vilmos Zsigmond)
The story of a Marielito psychopath whose temperament, taste for violence, and deranged sense of honor accords perfectly with the corrupt Miami drug world of the 1980s, Scarface (1983) is a “crude opera”1 dressed up as an American Epic. Al Pacino (who developed the project) stars as the titular scarred one (it runs across his left eye), Tony Montana. Montana, a fevered, fantastical confabulation, is more of an undirected force than a recognizable man. He speaks in a kind of marble-mouthed, Cuban drawl, adding syllables to words the same way he adds punctuations to his many murders. Even superiors he addresses with a glower of unmasked hostility, completely ambivalent of risk. He is willing to, and does, threaten every threat before they can– a formula for success and longevity only possible in the movies. A complete hedonist, he tries to filch his boss’ junky girlfriend (Michelle Pfeiffer) in plain sight, asking her on an unscheduled visit, “Do you like kids?” and when she affirms, adding, “Good. I like kids too. I like boys. I like girls. I like them all,” before he’s barely said hello. This idiosyncratic sense of humor is both the humor of an idiot, where it can be funny (“Ohh, the pelicans fly!” he sings to the pelicans on his TV in the middle of a grotesque tirade) and idiotic: “This town is a pussy just waiting to get fucked” and “You know what capitalism is? Getting fucked.” Tony is a one-note symphony. Thus the film has no arc. With Tony, the cartel plane never leaves the tarmac. He begins miserable, is miserable, and ends miserable and drugged. But the crudely operatic crescendos of the film are draped in blood and bluster. Screenwriter Oliver Stone early-on writes your typical drug-deal-gone-bad into– in De Palma’s unshaking hands– a glimpse of the kind of human hell this unholy trade has wrought, where a cartel sadist uses a chainsaw in a way that causes all of our eyes to avert– Tony’s and even the camera itself. Later, a long, unhurried scene in the back room of auto dealership– against a mural of a the Miami Skyline as a tangerine dream– is so frightening in its deliberate psychopathy that when Tony finally offers a job to the only enemy in the room without a bullet in his head, I burst out in deflated laughter at his new associate patting him on the back, “Hey man, you got a job!” That mural is part of an aesthetic approach to set design (Bruce Weintraub) that makes gauzy and candy-coated furniture, buildings and backgrounds seem like glowing heat, or the licks of flames, and with a care for make-up (Steven Abrums) where the sweat glistens on brows even in interior. Tony swelters, and though the young Pacino is seldom disembodied from his character, the beads of sweat point out the gulf between this and Dog Day Afternoon, where in his eyes was a terrified intelligence that Pacino turned into a symphony, instead of eyes of pure avarice, which is here merely a pulse. “The eyes never lie, Chico,” Tony at one point says. That backroom revue of murder, however, is strange in that it is the culmination of a sequence that takes place entirely over a single evening, one that lasts over half an hour of runtime, and contains probably more than half of the film’s dramatic revelations. One of them, the kind of contradiction that thwarts his ever being a meaningful dramatic creation, is that Tony betrays his own self-professions of street-wisdom by being dumb or arrogant enough to droop drunkenly in a club booth surrounded by enemies. The sequence ends on a moment where composer Giorgio Moroder borrows Wendy Carlo’s woozy synths as Tony watches a blimp fly overhead, flashing his sociopathic anthem, “The World is Yours” across the Miami Skyline. There is the impression that the film is more about bunching up isolated (and often strong) ideas like dirty laundry. And just then, the picture gallops into a montage that covers untold time and that is surprising for two reasons: it truncates essentially all non-violent items of interest in Tony’s development into a music video, and is totally arrhythmic though it’s set to composer Giorgio Moroder’s pulsing (and silly) disco-dance number, “Push it to the Limit”. Finally, the film ends in metaphoric mayhem. Tony snorts a cardiac-incidents worth of cocaine before being riddled by bullets. But his marionette body is animated by it into a kind of dance of death, the most literal death-in-life moment this grisly movie indulges. (w: Oliver Stone, c: John A Alonzo)
Body Double (1984) is almost certainly intentionally absurd. And I mean that to read: intentionally absurd beyond its obvious surface absurdities, probably in an effort to point out (and reprove) a collective absurdity. The film seems to suggest that all of Hollywood’s produce is sickened, that its “entertainments” should be nigh unwatchable, but that we “like to watch”. There are further ways than this bite into the movies neck like its pervert hero Jake Scully (Craig Wasson) does to his nude shower companion during the closing credits. The script, at least, is so objectively terrible that it’s practically impossible it’s not serving as something other than just a mere movie. The movie is maybe the fullest expression of what could be only very humbly submitted as “De Palma’s project”. A conflation (again) of the spirits of Rear Window, Psycho, and Vertigo, the movie takes place in a Los Angeles devoid of normal inhabitants– a Los Angeles that is a stage only for actors, and many of them only sex workers barely even qualified as that. A city-wide porno set. There’s a deranged plot: Jake Scully, a thespian in horror Cheapies, has been inexplicably stricken by claustrophobia. He’s now a vampire who can’t bear to lay in his casket and has to be helped off the set by his director, Dennis Franz, who feigns kindness only when it serves his movie. He goes home and finds his girlfriend in bed with another guy. He leaves her. It was her apartment. He goes to acting class, and the very funny implication is that, in this movie hell, even therapy is only accessed through performance. He meets a man there named Sam, who generously offers Jake to take over his house-sitting gig for a wealthy friend. The pad is dressed by production designer Ida Random as the ultimate prospective porno set. Incidentally, Sam points out, Jake can watch a real life porn unfold every night, simply by using conveniently placed binoculars to peep over at the neighbors house. “Like clockwork,” he tells him, where on queue a lithe female undresses and starts fondling herself for no possible actual reason. The score, by Pino DiNaggio, that sweeps in is languid smut music, an electro ditty with a siren humming over top. It’s transfixed, like Jake, like “LB Jeffries” before him. This clean set-up belies the rest of the film. The rest of it moves so haltingly that its sudden starts and skips reveal it as nearly a screwball comedy. Jake begins following the exhibitionist woman. So does a man who looks like a Botox Frankenstein. Inexplicably, he’s regarded later as “an Indian.” Jake stalks her in a shopping mall in what is essentially a cheaper copy of the museum sequence from Dressed to Kill. He watches her trying on panties in a changing room, leering through the window. She can’t even be bothered to close the curtain, and he can’t be bothered with decency. After she drops her old panties in the trash he recovers them and puts them in his pocket– a macguffin Hitchcock never dared. But when they finally meet he can hardly explain himself before they are petting feverishly, approaching public undress, whereby De Palma (intentionally?) obviously relocates them to a soundstage so he can rear project the setting with a swirling camera. This recounting is tiresome, but I do it only to relay the deviant hilarity that undergirds it all. The woman speaks in a Marion Crane husk. She’s eventually murdered by being repeatedly stabbed with a massive drill, which De Palma shoots from the floor below the action, from Jake’s horrified POV, the bloody drill penetrating the floor in the most grisly recombination of Psycho, Carrie, and splatter-porn possible. The film then doubles back on itself (get it?). Trickery is exposed. Impersonation is involved. Hilariously, the character at the heart of it, played by Melanie Griffith, later describes herself as an “expositionist” (she means “exhibitionist”) in a slip of the tongue. As if such a thing was really plausible in this insane story. De Palma eventually indulges in a full-blown musical sequence set to “Relax” by Frankie Goes to Hollywood. It’s part of a porn shoot in which Jake is now an actor. Griffith later finds it too obvious he’s a phony– he didn’t even know what a cum shot was. How we get here is not entirely explicable using bald logic. But then, nothing is. Suddenly, now masquerading in the porno biz, Jake affects a Jimmy Stewart voice and slicks his hair back. None of this, by the way, looks superficially good. It is cinematically great, but everything looks sleazy– even sticky. Because of this, and it’s too florid music, and ludicrous, nearly pornographic female-only nudity, the humor in it all is easily missed. It is confusing. Many would shirk it. If you have pre-existing opinions about De Palma, it may settle them. It eventuates in a “redemption” for Jake that– after the sheer ridiculousness of its climax– can be read in such a way: Stop being such a goddamn coward and get back in that shower and sud up those tits, we have trash to peddle. (w: Robert J. Avrech & Brian De Palma, c: Stephen H. Burum)
The Untouchables (1987), a film about the legendary investigation that took down Al Capone with Kevin Costner as Elliot Ness, Robert De Niro as Capone, and Sean Connery as Agent Jim Malone (Ness’s fictional Irish partner) has De Palma looking like someone trying to keep his job, albeit with a budget of $25 million with which to do so. The film has some vicious visual interpretations of David Mamet’s by-the-book script, but it’s often surprisingly rote. And the film never settles on a tone. It vacillates between tacky and unusual in De Palma’s combinations of angles, music (Ennio Morricone, mostly) and set-design. The film feels designed to feel like a film designed to evoke its era. It has a plastic quality. Even the actors– half puffy-or-angular-faced villains, half goodly gents with alluring eyes– play their characters plastically. DeNiro turns Capone into a gangster-film impersonator. Connery’s accent is about as Irish as ramen. Costner can’t stop ruminating on morality even to smirk. The film opens, alluringly, on a bird’s eye view of Capone getting a shave. It has a trapped-in-time quality and that’s a theme for much of the way he films Capone’s material. It’s very ornate, cold, and isolating. But De Palma often strains with his compositions. The photography is often fussy in a way that doesn’t elegantly translate. One could get the impression De Palma is in the wrong playground, playing with the wrong kids. His filmmaking was never just about relaying the material, and he seems impatient with it. The most extreme example is his decision (apparently a last-minute change) to recreate the Odessa Steps sequence from Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin as a shoot out. It is, in its own way, wonderful and odd, but it also stunts the film’s momentum. The whole film ends up feeling incomplete and halting. The worst example is a scene mid-film, where Capone gives a speech to a group of gangsters, using Baseball as a threatening metaphor for cooperation. The scene does nothing and is written and photographed so blandly, it’s shocking how many talented minds conjured it up. It seems to exist solely for those who might still have been wondering if Capone was a bad guy. The film ends as a non-entity. There’s no sense of wonder in the victory, no sense of complication in the outcome. Even its seeming moral– which one could translate to: “to make an omelet, you gotta break some eggs”– is benign. It’s ultimately a very boring movie. (w: David Mamet, c: Stephen H. Burum)
There is a subtlety that is easy to miss in Casualties of War (1989). In the opening shot, Michael J. Fox sees a young woman seated on the other side of his bus. He squints a bit–she looks familiar. It is night. The subtlety is revealed at film’s end, and it’s about the only one the film has. This is a movie that will have you pondering narrative cinema’s capabilities. David Rabe’s screenplay is based on an 1969 article by David Lang for the New Yorker detailing the kidnapping, rape and murder of a young Vietnamese woman, Phan Thi Mao, by an American Squad under the command of Sgt. David Gervase, who here is portrayed by Sean Penn as Sgt. Tony Meserve. It starts with a jungle combat sequence. Here Fox is Ericsson, a Private serving under Sgt. Meserve. They are on a nighttime patrol when they are attacked by the VC. De Palma and cinematographer Stephen Burum bathe the night combat in low key lighting, to imply a moonlight sheen, but with a stranger luminescence. Coupled with the costume and makeup, it feels like a sound stage. De Palma shoots the sequence like a formalist. His pans are whip clean. Even tracking shots of VC soldiers crawling through underground ant-colony tunnels are as smooth as butter. But the performances are gigantic, like Ennio Morricone’s score, which seems fashioned for (yes, of course) Hitchcock: a rhythmic cello that plods under dozens of busy flourishes– it seems like the whole orchestra gets a solo. And there is “suspense”. A mortar burst propels Fox halfway through a hole, so that his legs dangle into the cave below. “Help! Help!” he screams in his childlike register, as underneath a VC soldier moves glacially toward him, like a cat about to pounce. He’s rescued by Penn, who shoots the assailant with a unhinged scream of his own, followed by the laugh of a man on the edge of madness: “Some mad fuckin’ minute, huh, Jerry?” This is the excess in the nature of the film. The point is not made– it’s carved in with a combat knife. As we move into a village during the day we hear now clearly the strange, ultra-affected arhythmic New Yawk-speak Penn has chosen for his despicable character: “You wanna die a sud-din harr-ih-bul death, Jer-ry?” What or whom is this performance serving? The “Sean Penn Question,” perhaps. The material is, obviously, brutal. The kidnapping is Meserve’s idea and Ericsson is against it every step of the way. De Palma makes extra sure we understand this, using Fox’s natural good-kid boyishness as a cudgel. He is an eminently moral actor. There is a scene mid-film, after the gang rape, where Ericsson is alone with the young woman. Everything about the scene makes emotional sense except for how strained it all is. Every single beat seems elongated, every expression relayed with an extra heft, every breath Fox takes is ‘acting’ to the nth degree. Morricone’s score swells up to the heavens and a pan flute motif whispers through it. Fox reads, “Oh God. I’m sorry,” like an actor trying to confirm the intensity of his material. He puts his hand to her forehead and narrates his own action: “You’re burning up.” He does this again and again, as though we need help in seeing how tragic and complicated the situation is. And Thuy Tu Le, who portrays Mao, acts primarily with her eyes– but they never seem to settle on a sense of awareness, only terror. Yet still, elsewhere, there are a few triumphs in the film. Some of the photographic captures are stunning, particularly an extraordinary shot as the soldiers first carry their victim from her home, with them marching in silhouette against a cataclysmic sunset, an image that alone says as much as the whole picture. Later, Mao is stabbed in a shot using De Palma’s overused split diopter technique. It’s the most resonant use of the technique I can recall. After her stabbing, as she stumbles down a train bridge soaked in blood, De Palma destroys his fiercely resonant staging by having Penn scream, “She’s getting away!!!” as she, literally, stutter-steps in front of them. But Casualties of War, while very clumsy, is not a wrongheaded film. It tells us very (very) cleanly what it is about. Its themes include salient considerations. “Because we might be dead in the next split second, maybe we gotta be extra careful what we do. Because maybe it matters more than we even know,” Fox at one point literally explains. It does, though, serve as one of the clearest case-studies in the cinema to challenge whether certain modes of representation are worthwhile. How should historical atrocities be represented on film? It makes one question whether or not the medium is the correct forum, even a capable forum. It also relays a tremendous amount of disdain for the military establishment. This is unsurprising. The material never once challenges its own outrage. But surprising is its gracelessness and its naive awe at the possibility of atrocity. So finally it’s only grace-note: When we rejoin Fox on his bus at film’s end, it pulls out of a tunnel. It was not night after all, but a beautiful day. We see the familiar woman again. It is Thuy Tu Le, the very actor who portrayed Mao. The line is completely– even naively– unnecessary, but David Rabe of course writes it for her anyway: “You had a bad dream didn’t you?” (w: David Rabe, c: Stephen Burum)
The worthless Bonfire of the Vanities (1990) is adapted from the bestselling 1987 novel by Tom Wolfe. It’s funnier (relative usage here) moments probably come from the book. They are few. The film exhibits a shocking frequency of poor decisions that kill it from the first. Tom Hanks is woefully miscast as Sherman McCoy, a bond trader with a family and a mistress and no essential personality whatsoever that gets implicated in a hit-and-run incident. The driver of the car was that mistress, Maria (Melanie Griffith). The scene in question is so tonally and instinctually awful, it’s as though Brian De Palma is lost at sea directing it. Sherman and Maria make a wrong turn and accidentally end up in the South Bronx. (I wonder what New Yorker hasn’t done this?) In attempting to lampoon the over-reactive idiocy of his haughty white subjects, De Palma for some reason portrays the South Bronx as a burning battlefield full of criminals, psychotics, and hookers. “Sherman, where are all the white people?” Griffith asks. Is it supposed to be Sherman and Maria’s deranged, exaggerated view of things? No, they are accosted from the first. This is really the film’s view of the Bronx. Too obvious satire or no, I expect the root material is probably maladapted (the script is by Michael Cristofer). Consider this wit: “I’m from the South and I’m beginning not to like this so much.” It’s a shameful sequence– not that it was shot (sometimes a director just screws up) but that it ended up in the film. The movie is narrated by Bruce Willis, who plays the writer– a suicidal alcoholic who looks fantastic– of the series of stories that uncovers the incident and implicates Sherman. The tone of his stuff, coupled with the whole cast mixed up with it (the Mayor, a black preacher modeled off of Al Sharpton), is bilious and unfunny. The script is so dim it even paints the hit-and-run victim’s mother as a callous opportunist. And where it might be slapstick it never sticks. The few scenes that work are mostly between Hanks and his father, played by Donald Moffat. There’s one mid-film, where the greater McCoy family are gathered around a table. Sherman’s daughter asks what exactly it is that daddy does. They explain bond trading to her. “Daddy passes someone else’s cake around and then picks up all the crumbs. And Daddy likes all the crumbs,” her mother explains. The sting of diminishment is very funny, but you still likely won’t laugh. I guess this movie is just above all that. (w: Michael Cristofer, c: Stephen Burum)
After the immense commercial and critical failure of Bonfire of the Vanities De Palma teams up with the ever-charismatic John Lithgow for Raising Cain (1992). The film is a return to De Palma’s preoccupations with Hitchcock, but its tone is sniggering. It is not a thriller but in structure– it’s just too delirious. And its structure is up for debate. There are two cuts of the film available that consist of essentially the same exact filmed material, but which are strikingly different in their relative effects. The second cut, now advertising as the “Director’s Cut” is, in fact, a fan edit that Brian De Palma approved. Neither cut elevates the film beyond what it is: a fun, paltry deconstruction of the psych-thriller format with a revue of performative tics and tones by Lithgow. But in unweaving the material, the re-cut exhibits just how plastic narrative film can be, and what can be done by resituating the audience’s point of view. In this re-cut version, which purportedly hues closer to De Palma’s original vision, the film’s first third plays as a dreamy soap opera (even the playground that is the center of the plot has ethereal branches of light cutting through its trees), the reality of which is not so clear, given that the sequence is punctuated twice by its heroine, Jenny, (Lolita Davidovich) waking up from a dream. The point of view is entirely Jenny’s. Contrast this with De Palma’s decision in the theatrical cut to move up in the film the hitherto unseen synchronous activities of the deranged Carter Nix (Lithgow). By pushing those activities back, the re-cut reframes them as an extended flashback that unspools as a retelling of the same timeline but from another point of view. By pushing them back, the film reveals tones similar to Dressed to Kill. The fact that this section’s point of view consists rather of points of view– Nix’s personality splits off into Cain, and into a 7-year-old boy named Josh, and, perhaps, his father, Dr. Carter Nix– destabilizes the film completely. It raises greater questions about, what, precisely, the film is conferring as reality. The film’s reality is revealed eventually, and there is no great and resonant picture here. But as an unintentional case study, it is illuminating. (w: Brian De Palma, c: Stephen Burum)
The brilliant Carlito’s Way (1993) has Al Pacino with Sean Penn, a screenplay by David Koepp, based on a pair of novels by Edwin Torres. It is the tautest and most elegant film of De Palma’s career, a sly reconfiguring of the themes of Scarface as a noir paean to hopelessness– a world, perhaps, that is the resultant culmination of Tony Montana’s rapacious philosophy. Pacino plays the titular Carlito Brigante– a highly intelligent and hyper-alert ex-con, ever on the knife-edge of quietus– like a counterargument to Montana, an example of reason in a lunatic profession. He’s trapped in this nightmare and he’s likely to die trying to get out. I won’t retell the plot, as here De Palma actually achieves propulsive suspense cumulatively, as opposed to the set-piece orientation of most of his material. The script by Koepp is a cleanly organized genre document– tightly structured and with clear (if often cheap) motivations, an elegant voice-over motif, sharp street-wise dialogue (“When you can’t see the angles anymore, you’re in trouble, baby.”). But the script is also much less than what De Palma often renders here. There are visual arrangements coupled with inspired musical choices that reveal newfound poetries. De Palma’s career was always schizophrenic, but it’s very difficult to consider that this is the same man who directed Bonfire of the Vanities. Take a moment mid-film. “You pray for one face that didn’t change. One face that still knows ya,” Pacino narrates. He’s referring to Gail (Penelope Ann Miller), who does not know he is out of prison. They both expected he’d be in the joint for 30 years. He follows her down the rainy New York streets and, when she enters a door, he runs into the building across the street. Up on the roof, he grabs a trash lid to cover his head from the downpour and moves toward the edge. As he does, a ballet class comes into view from the top floor across the street, and Patrick Doyle’s sumptuous score transmutes into Leo Delibe’s ethereal “Flower Duet”, blooming and contracting in synchronicity with the dancers expanding forms. Stephen Burum’s camera pushes in slowly on Carlito, and similarly on the gothic windows, where it falls on Gail, so that eventually she stands in repose with her arm resting on her head in a mirror image of Pacino. It is a New York nighttime streetlife evocation of rapturous delicacy. There are moments like this (not quite of this beauty, but close enough) woven into the film, examples of De Palma’s natural impatience with genre tropes. Later: “You ain’t a lawyer no more, Dave. You a gangster now. On the other side. A whole new ball game. You can’t learn about it in school, and you can’t have a late start.” Carlito is addressing Dave, his lawyer, who is played by Sean Penn with a degree of smarm that is so transparently vile it is incredible when Carlito calls him a “brother”. There are dramas that accrue their cumulative power so organically they come to sear, and then there are those that cheat. Carlito’s Way cheats often, so that you finally are compelled mostly by how brilliant is the craft that relays it. There’s a later set-piece in Grand Central Station that is for the ages. And the film’s beginning and its end are stunning depictions of the moment-of-death. That final moment blends into an eccentric denouement so enchanting (and sardonic) you might be convinced you’ve watched De Palma’s masterpiece. I’m half-convinced. (w: David Koepp, c: Stephen Burum)
Snake Eyes (1998) pairs a classic crazy-eyed Nicholas Cage revue with a crazed De Palma camera to lend some energy to a very silly screenplay. Channeling some of the spirit of Blow Out, but with none of the delicacy, the film involves a political assassination that takes place at a boxing match at a casino in Atlantic City. Cage stars as Detective Rick Santoro, and his waltz onto the fight floor is a 10-or-so minute bravura Steadicam “long take” of hidden wipe cuts and angular turns. It kicks things off with a marvelous, muscular energy that continues through the film’s first wonderfully staged fight/assassination sequence. Here De Palma does what almost no post-2000 directors trouble themselves with: He situates the viewer where they can actually read the situation visually. Sadly, that’s about the extent of it. We don’t see the boxing in the first scene, but when we finally do it’s as though De Palma has never even watched Raging Bull, much less a real fight. A bit later a beautiful Carla Gugino is introduced. She does her strenuous best with the material, which has her bra-clad in a mirror, washing blood off her neck and chest not once, but twice. Gary Sinise is also serviceable as a really bad guy. He’s killing senators to bolster a missile program for Israel that shoots inaccurate rockets. There’s almost a layer of optimism to De Palmas cynicism– could you imagine murder would be required to get such weaponry approved? Mid-film, when he’s hunting Gugino down, De Palma cranes his camera up to a birds-eye view and floats above several hotel rooms like a roving god’s eye. It’s quite snazzy. Backstabbing, treachery, and deceit, culminating in a hurricane in New Jersey. (w: Brian De Palma, c: Stephen Burum)
The relatively thoughtful science fiction film Mission to Mars (2000) is wildly uneven, vacillating between unintentionally funny boilerplate silliness and some sequences of genuine interest that underline De Palma’s relentless obsession with obvious homage, this time Kubrick. The French, it seems, loved the film, ranking it #4 on their Cahier Du Cinema ‘best of 2000’ list. And surely some of this can be very elegant and very antithetical to the violent Science Fiction cinema of today. It may be refreshing that the tone here is so unpretentious, but it’s also far too pat. The performances (particularly Tim Robbins) are keyed to a hammy script that seems to strive tonally for something akin to ’30s and ’40s ‘gee whiz’ radio hokum. The special effects are just as unbelievable, but yet De Palma still indulges in some pretty grisly violence. Like everything the director does, the film is a such a mixed bag of influences and sensations that it becomes idiosyncratic in the aggregate. (Jim Thomas, John Thomas & Graham Youst, c: Stephen H. Barum)
The Black Dahlia (2006) based on the novel by James Ellroy– the first of his “LA Quartet”– would seem the perfect material for De Palma. It occasionally is– so perfect in fact that De Palma places himself right in the mix– but it’s also a ghastly mess, in ways that, on occasion, defy reason. Based at least ostensibly on the famed “Black Dahlia” murder in LA’s Leimert Park in 1947, the film stars the mumbling and reluctant Lothario Josh Hartnett as Det. Bucky Bleichert, and Aaron Eckhart as Det. Lee Blanchard. Bucky and Blanchard are tasked in hunting down the murderer of the titular Elizabeth Short, who is portrayed brilliantly by Mia Kershner, and whom we meet splayed out in full grisly detail. Short’s murder was peculiarly strange and vicious– she was disemboweled and her face cut from ear to ear in a “Glasgow Smile”. De Palma accentuates the strangeness by featuring her only in black and white pornographic interview footage. With a keen self-awareness for the register of his own voice, De Palm a himself voices the proto-casting-couch creep, with a menacing sense of humor. The scenes are rather brilliant in their discomfort, and Kershner is stunning. One might be reminded of Body Double and regard the film as a stab at satire. I’m not so sure. There are like a half-a-hundred other characters and plot entanglements that render Bucky’s hunt not only increasingly boring, but puzzling. It’s as though, instead of finding a reasonable through-line, the screenwriter, Josh Friedman, just miniaturized every element of Ellroy’s novel. So Blanchard– a hardened detective– becomes obsessed with the murder in such a short time you’d think he’d never worked one. It’s later somewhat explained why this might be, but by this point I hardly cared. His girlfriend sits around fretting about the release of a man he put in prison, and though Scarlett Johansson, who plays her, is a comely and sumptuously costumed fatale under Vilmos Szigmond’s lights, one wonders why she’s even there. Bucky gets entangled with the daughter of a Scottish millionaire. That’s important to the plot, but it’s given as a psychological explanation that he does so because she so looks like Elizabeth Short. You tell me if Mia Kershner looks like Hillary Swank. I might be blind. Eventually, Blanchard is himself offed, by a lunatic William Finley and a shadowy figure that is very obviously somebody we’ve already met. De Palma gets to the Dahlia murder. By this point, it’s impossible to tell if the film is a satire. There’s some faint hint in scenes with Fiona Shaw, but she plays her character with such a comic intensity she seems imported from an entirely different film. At last, in the final stretch there is yet more dramatic complication. By this point whatever energies the film had have long faded. (w: Josh Friedman, c: Vilmos Zsigmond)
The treacherous Redacted (2007) reframes the central tragedy of Casualties of War as a “found footage” movie in Samarra, Iraq, in 2006. The director recalls that prior work in several resonant ways– at least the kind of resonance that comes from a bad movie recalling another bad movie. De Palma uses non-actors– or at least unrecognizable ones who don’t exhibit they can act– and the ‘affectedness’ of their performances can be explained away as a function of their knowingly being filmed by a camcorder. Music is used ironically– Handel’s “Sarabande” in counterpoint to the vile brutality on display. These approaches hold the viewer at a remove, largely because there is a reading the film is positively begging of the viewer, which is to take the material as a commentary on images of human suffering freighted with moral implication but which, in their endless proliferation, desensitize the viewer to horror. De Palma, a self-professed student of Brecht, has always weaponized the gap between truth and perception, representation and reality, presentation and meaning. And he has always been cynical of motive, both in the movie industry and the society at large. His opinion of the methods and motives of the American military has certainly not improved since Vietnam. That’s his own business, and not without some reason: why would it? One of the problems of Casualties was how plainly astonished it was by evil. It was levied as if we weren’t aware of– were ignorant of the murderous potential of– the human animal. Redacted is similarly astonished, but more so by the repetitious reality of both nationally organized and disorganized slaughter, and it seeks to implicate the viewer for apathy, or, even worse, complicity in this reality. There is no recognition of some 2000+ years of religious and philosophical wranglings with the nature of man and society– to say nothing of “representation”– not to mention how these necessarily reframe complicity. “Just because you’re watching it, doesn’t mean you’re not a part of it,” the character Salazar (Izzy Diaz) says to his military psychologist at one point. He is shooting all of this nightmarish camcorder footage as a ticket to USC film school. In case you miss De Palma’s point. If Redacted has a crystalline resonance with Casualties of War it is what I wrote of that film: This is a movie that will have you pondering narrative cinema’s capabilities. The script is based– loosely it seems– around a rape and killings that took place is Mahmudiyah, Iraq in 2006. A quick study of the circumstances and perpetrators of that awful human crime is quite enough to get the picture De Palma so strenuously impresses on us. And there is infinitely more implication in the realities. De Palma changes many key facts that might have saved his film from its own damning contradictions. In the actual incident, five men were involved. No one was at the site of the crime who did not participate. They were later implicated from talking about their crimes when they returned to the base. There’s no evidence that those who brought it forward were persuaded not to report the crime, and all five of the men were later verbally eviscerated in court, and sentenced to lifelong prison sentences, in two cases only barely avoiding the death sentence. No one, for example, called their father to inform them of the crime and were then told not to report it because it would be another “Abu Ghraib”. Though it never was of the public magnitude of Abu Ghraib, nor was it hidden away in some historically inaccessible Pandora’s box. Nor was there a morally vague “amateur documentarian” involved, which the film puts forward as the main witness. Nor was he later kidnapped and beheaded (read: redacted). Because there was no “morally vague amateur documentarian” among the very deranged young men who raped and burned the 14 year-old Abeer Qassim Hamza al-Janabi there is not nearly as much context framing the crime. We’re not sure of the degree of brazen idiocy and outright, unrepentant viciousness of these men. What would the implications be if they were not as punishingly stupid as the perpetrators here? There is no explanation for why and how five American men would rape and burn a child together. There are only approaches toward an explanation. There is certainly no footage of it. The movie takes stabs at more questions then this. They are hard to glean. At the end of the film, De Palma introduces a photo reel as: “Collateral Damage: Actual photos from the Iraq War.” Right before he does this, he presents us with the thoughts of an unhinged moral scold. She’s an undernourished-looking, tatted leftist with a nose-ring and with a Che Guevara poster on her wall. She and her points are every bit as oversimplified as the man she’s condemning– the rapist ghoul in the prior scene suggesting he rejoin the front lines. She suggests he be strung up, and that al-Janabi’s remaining family be furnished baseball bats. Then we move into the photo reel: There was much to-do about the fact that the film’s producers “redacted” the eyes or faces of the victims presented in these photos. Very likely, they were fearful of lawsuits. I don’t blame them. By this point, the nagging sense of distrust in the material presented culminates in a feeling of genuine frustration at manipulation. If the horrors of Mahmudiyah can be so crassly repurposed and distorted, what are we to make of context-denuded imagery? Why would we trust anything we’re shown? Certainly this can’t be the whole point of the film. (w: Brian De Palma, c: Jonathan Cliff)
Passion (2012) is a rehash of the old hits, not quite as artfully done, but delirious and trashy nonetheless. This erotic thriller starring Noomi Rapace and Rachel McAdams satirizes the essential soullessness of the corporate marketing world, with De Palma’s signature toolkit. He uses a new cinematographer, Jose Luis Alcaine, and, like a renegade, continues to shoot on 35mm. Rapace and McAdams are two American advertising professionals working in Germany. When Rapace, the “creative” one, comes up with a “brilliant” smartphone ad, McAdams, her boss, takes credit and this launches into a game of one-upmanship that eventuates in murder. These traded humiliations can be sharp (an embarrassment using a bit of security footage and a car crash) and ridiculous (a silly sex-tape blackmail bit), in turn. Both the performances are challenging to read given De Palma’s soapy, erotically bonkers direction. The first half of the film is the weakest– the performances are at least off-kilter scene to scene, and De Palma’s musical choices are frequently terrible. When it descends into its deranged second-half, the film grows far more interesting. De Palma uses a psychotropic addiction to free himself of the constraints of logic or taste and his aesthetic goes mad. There is a brilliant use of the directors signature split screen technique that juxtaposes a knife murder with avant garde opera that suggests a dozen readings, not the least being a kind of encapsulation of the filmmaker’s whole project. And then, of course, the classic dream-within-dream trope both pokes fun at De Palma’s past and even 2010’s Inception. It ends up fun. (w: Brian De Palma, c: Jose Luis Alcaine)
It is hard to know what was truly intended with Domino (2019) because it was subject to a host of production problems and because it was cut down by more than 30 minutes and eventually shoved directly onto streaming services. There are essentially two running parallel narratives, one with Nicolaj Coster Waldau and Carise Van Houten as interpol detectives chasing down the murderer of their partner and lover (respectively). The other plot involves Guy Pearce as an American CIA operative looking to track down an ISIS leader using the very man who did the killing in question. Who knows, after the cutting, what the film would look like. As it is, Waldau and Van Houten’s stuff is terribly undeveloped and frankly a bit silly. This is a shame for many reasons, but mainly that a film that boasts such great set-pieces and by a great filmmaker should have been so undernourished. The first of those sequences takes place in a Danish apartment complex and extends out onto a roof, directly recalling the opening of Vertigo. The last has both plot strands meet at a bullfighting arena where De Palma, as he does throughout the film, insinuates that the project of ISIS is only partially one of terrorism, but is more precisely about winning hearts and minds through propaganda, facilitated by our modern communications technology. The sequence features a drone which is purposed to film a suicide bombing, but ends up as the bloody punctuation to the most batshit Hitchcock sequence in De Palma’s entire career. (w: Peter Svalan, c: Jose Luis Alcaine)
ENDNOTES
1A nice phrase Oliver Stone used to describe the film, after recounting the miserable experience of its production in his memoir, “Chasing the Light”. In fact, he describes it as a “juicy, crude Opera.” I omit the juicy because, though he is correct in earlier stating “The War on Drugs was bullshit from beginning to end,” as I don’t see how that’s best explored by limiting that view to a psychopath with a “code of honor of his own (…) as fucked up as he was,” I fail to understand what he means by “juicy”. “…he was true to that nature till that end. He was a free man,” Stone continues. His freedom at what cost? Scarface is never for an instant mindful of its victims in the manner of, say, Platoon, or Born on the Fourth of July. It’s not interested in the politics of drugs beyond barely implicating some bad actors. It never chases its own greater implications, like Traffic. What’s worse, it does less with its titular hero. There is no, or not much, juiciness to Tony Montana. He’s vulgar, sure, but his vulgarity is neither illuminating nor very funny. An odd line like, “Who ever says you was a cop?” to a narcotics agent, has a bit of a resonant sting to it. Far less though then the question Pacino levels at one in Dog Day Afternoon, “Have you ever been to prison?” Even as vulgarity it is not often more than just vulgar, nor does it push any limits. What, for example, would Tony’s opinion be of the mothers of crack babies in the inner-cities? How much personal responsibility would he claim or deflect? It would be colorful, I’m sure. We never hear it.
2Body Double levies questions at the audience that run the gamut during the watching. And they are not all encouraging questions. I expect it is difficult to get through the film without at some point asking, “Why does this make such little sense?” or even “Why should I keep watching this?” But I submit that there is another way to read the film that can only be done upon recollection: Body Double in its totality, makes emotional sense. An emotional sense that brings the artist closer to Hitchcock than any prior attempt. It is the sense of the uncanny. How else does one feel Vertigo and Rear Window, or Psycho, immediately following the murder? De Palma comes very close to anticipating Blue Velvet without ever approaching subtlety, probably because the film does so by accident. There is absolutely no subtlety to Body Double, but some hours or days after you view it, you could be surprisingly subtle in your regard for it. I think it is a very easy film to “miss”. I definitely did the first time I watched it. Ironically, when I compared my notes on the film after my second viewing, very little descriptions and assessments had changed. It is lunatic. It is incoherent. Its energies are often beyond bizarre. But there’s a coherence to the film that defies its incoherence. That this incoherence mimics the means and methods, the moods and tones and energies, of the product of the industry it satirizes, is where a notion of De Palma as a Brechtian becomes most clear. De Palma is almost always asking us to receive his material at a remove. But, to my mind, receiving Body Double at a complete remove discloses it’s sense. It’s true brilliance is that, if this sense is real, the stab of its condemnation is even sharper than De Palma could have anticipated. The film is mishap as masterpiece.
3 The critic Pauline Kael, who could be– and was in De Palma’s case– highly supportive of filmmakers she championed, wrote reviews of Body Double and Casualties of War late in her career. Writing of these films, she seemed schizophrenic. In the first and in a fit of blindness (or exhaustion), of Body Double, she writes: “Paradise made everything you’d heard about the rock industry as a gigantic casting couch come true, Carrie was about the dread of menstruation, Dressed to Kill was about your qualms that sexual pleasure would get you into trouble, Blow Out was about your apprehensions that you were a coward and would fail those who counted on you, and so on. But Body Double has no subject other than the plot contraption that De Palma and his co-writer, Robert J. Avrech, thought up—unless there are a lot of claustrophobes in the audience.” That “Carrie was about the dread of menstruation” was her read of that particular film indicates that this was not her first time missing the point. Yet still, the review is literally about her consternation with the film and is rife with comments about “waiting” for her “expectations” to be fulfilled. Meanwhile, later, her comments on Casualties of War, such as “De Palma keeps you aware of the whole movie as a composition. Like Godard, he bounces you in and out of the assumptions about movies that you have brought with you to the theatre”— as if this was not only the whole operating mode of strong cinematic storytellers, but practically the very point of Body Double. Couple this with a read accompanied by a personal anecdote: “This is basically the theme that De Palma worked with in his finest movie up until now, the political fantasy Blow Out, in which the protagonist, played by John Travolta, also failed to save a young woman’s life. We in the audience are put in the man’s position: we’re made to feel the awfulness of being ineffectual. This lifelike defeat is central to the movie. (One hot day on my first trip to New York City, I walked past a group of men on a tenement stoop. One of them, in a sweaty sleeveless T-shirt, stood shouting at a screaming, weeping little boy perhaps eighteen months old. The man must have caught a glimpse of my stricken face, because he called out, “You don’t like it, lady? Then how do you like this?” And he picked up a bottle of pink soda pop from the sidewalk and poured it on the baby’s head. Wailing sounds, much louder than before, followed me down the street.)” Here she seems to miniaturize and transmute the point of the film. Firstly, Erickson’s dilemma is no universe resembles this silly, vaguely classist anecdote where “wailing sounds” “follow” her down a New York street. Again, it also misses the point: Erickson does, in fact, act. And many times and in many ways. That, in fact, is the principal weakness of the film, not helped at all by Fox’s innate boyishness: the picture seems not so much astonished by the crime than astonished by both the possibility of the crime and the possibility of a universe in which “justice” is an insufficient construct both practically and philosophically.
films and filmmakers 