Dionysus in '69 (Brian De Palma, 1970)

I never got around to this in my De Palma retrospective, so when Spectrum Culture decided to do one of its own, I knew I had to cover it. The results are...middling, like so many early De Palma efforts, though as a concentrated experiment in sustained split-screen usage it remains an intriguing work. De Palma's highly cinematic techniques ironically enhance the theatricality of the filmed performance, though soon he would be employing the methods for even more lavishly stylized effect. Nothing more than a curio, perhaps, but De Palma has made far worse.

My full review is up now at Spectrum Culture.

Brian De Palma: Redacted

The mainstream view of Brian De Palma's 2000s output is anything but flattering, with all four of his films made in the new millennium bowing to intense critical pans and commercial indifference. However, I've found his contemporary work to rank among his best. Mission to Mars captures the boundless enthusiasm (and unabashed cheesiness) of old Disney space adventures, shot to favor near-poetry over scientific accuracy and all the better for it. Femme Fatale threw people with its narrative mulligan, but it made the strongest case to date for the director's actual feelings for women, which are far more complex than the lazy accusations of misogyny that have dogged him for so long. The Black Dahlia is, if anything, the only one of De Palma's films that can even stand with Carlito's Way in terms of sheer aesthetic and Romantic beauty. Its sloppy elements and awkward acting choices only add to its deliberate, yet gentle, attack on Hollywood. It may also be the most neatly contextualized of De Palma's films in his strange canon, fitting neatly with the more formal, big-budget experiments and the uncompromising anti-mainstream tone of his '70s and '80s work.

Then there's Redacted. In 1989, De Palma made Casualties of War, one of his most sincere films and perhaps the only one to lack any postmodern flourishes. Redacted seeks to rectify this: it swaps Vietnam for Iraq and swaps the classical filmmaking of Casualties for a collage of styles and media. De Palma constructs his film as a hodgepodge of footage sources. The intent is clear: by stylistically and narratively repurposing Casulaties' true story of a rape and massacre being arduously brought to light, Redacted uses its own dramatization of real events to demonstrate that, in a war that can now be documented by anyone with a cell phone, truth has never been further from the public's grasp. If Casualties of War found worth, even moral victory in doing the right thing, Redacted nihilistically sees no point in even trying.

For that very reason, all the incisive ideas percolating through Redacted's slim running time cannot prevent it from being one of the most abysmal, unbearable movies De Palma ever made, ranking among the dregs with Bonfire of the Vanities and Wise Guys. It's a shame, too, for Redacted occasionally flirts with greatness, suggesting a vicious assault on oblivious American mindsets since the "Be Black, Baby" segment of Hi, Mom! But from the first moments, one can tell that Redacted will be a miserable chore, not a galvanizing screed.

The film follows a company of soldiers stationed in Iraq, where they already chafe under the hot desert sun and tense relations with the indigenous population. One soldier, Angel Salazar (Izzy Diaz), decides to film life on the base, believing that his work will get him into film school when he goes home. There's a grim irony to this thought process, the home videos a young Steven Spielberg used to make where he and his friends reenacted war now replaced by a taping of a real one. But his journal reveals the first, and deadliest, flaw of the movie: Salazar, and his comrades, could not be more simplistically written or agonizingly two-dimensional. To a T, they make casually racist comments about Iraqis and show no remorse for their lethal screw-ups. A green soldier ends up killing a woman at a checkpoint when her car speeds through, and not only does he not struggle with it, he brags into Salazar's camera.

Only Salazar and another soldier, Lawyer McCoy (Rob Devaney), ever even hint at a basic humanity, and they are no more nuanced than their rapacious brethren. They are moral simply because the script calls for someone to be at least partially decent, and their protests to increasingly horrific behavior have all the conviction of a bored high-schooler forced to read a play aloud in class and doing so with a flat, get-it-over-with monotone. The squad leads a raid on a local home that they suspect contains intel, where they arrest a man for no reason as a reporter for an Al-Jazeera-like news organization asks the soldiers what they are doing. Later, some of the soldiers decide to return to have their way with a 15-year-old girl they saw in the house, killing her and her family in the process. Salazar is forced to witness it, and a protesting McCoy is thrown out by his comrades at gunpoint.

That's the basic gist of the story, but De Palma tries to dress it up with his use of multiple styles. Unfortunately, the result is an interminable mess. De Palma's asides with a group of French documentarians parody stuffy, emptily moralistic war docs, the camera slowly zooming in and out on soldiers' faces as the orchestral arrangement of "Sarabande" from Barry Lyndon plays. At least, I assume it's a parody; these segments are so tedious that De Palma must be making fun of such films, but his target is unclear. Likewise, we see various YouTube clips of terrorists sneaking bombs under the clueless eyes of the Americans, or of newscasts showing angry Iraqis swearing vengeance for what has happened to them. Everyone knows what the Americans are doing, but no one will listen.

It might be an compelling array of conflicting, yet harmonious, elements were the transitions not so jarring, the morals not so disgustingly black-and-white, and the judgment not so haughty. Casualties of War grounded its characters' sadism in an understanding for their predicament. It vigorously condemned the actions of the soldiers, but it could also at least see how they were driven to the point of feral madness. Redacted feels like an old man's rant about "kids these days," only the kids here murder a family in cold blood and set fire to a teenager after raping her. It just accepts the horror of the soldiers' actions as a foregone conclusion. Salazar blanches at the atrocity, but he also wants to reveal the truth in a way that will make his film project a hit; better to get back home and piece together a dynamite cut than get justice now. And all McCoy can do is feel bad, even up to his last moment on-screen, which openly mocks him.

War is unpleasant, and the Iraq War more unpleasant than most, given its falsified justification and mismanagement. But De Palma's usual talent for immersion in seediness fails him here. He does not capture the repulsion of war; he only makes a repulsive film. As if to ward off the pointlessness of the exercise, De Palma has his characters occasionally spout aesthetic maxims. When Salazar jokingly tells McCoy that his camera doesn't lie, McCoy replies, "That's bullshit because that's all that camera ever does." Later, Salazar more insistently urges, "Just because you watch it doesn't mean you're not a part of it." Naturally, both of these utterances are key positions of De Palma's entire approach and philosophy, but so hear them said aloud here cheapens them. Especially the latter quote; De Palma is a master of implicating his audience, up there with Alfred Hitchcock and Michael Haneke. But this film does not implicate anyone because it is so morally rigid. Casualties of War shows a situation slowly spiraling off its axis until the breaking point isn't visible. These men broke before they even left home. What, then, can we learn of them?

And why is the movie so unsparing? As with the Incident on Hill 192, the real-life Mahmudiyah killings were punished. In fact, they were punished far more severely than the incident that spawned Casualties of War. The soldiers who raped the Vietnamese girl and destroyed her village had their sentences drastically reduced, and in some cases dropped entirely. The three soldiers involved in Mahmudiyah, however, have received multiple life sentences. To end the film on an uncertain note is just bullshit posturing, an offensive recalibration of reality to fit a tidy, repellent premise. The problem with this film is that De Palma, though still a provocateur, cannot now conjure the same anarchist energy of his earliest days. When he inserts an embarrassing YouTube rant by a single-minded teenage liberal, he does not broaden the scope of his critique of contemporary culture. He merely chucks in one more stereotype to be lazily jabbed, nothing more than the wink of a shock comic grown too old.

There are so many good ideas in Redacted. The fat soldier's first raid through the house borders on the Orwellian as he seizes documents he cannot read for evidence so that he can give them to a translator to determine if they are actually evidence. The blood stains left by the dead recall those thick lines of permanent marker blacking out sensitive information, erasing the full detail of the person who was there while still leaving an unmistakable trace of malfeasance. The cross-format collage of video sources presages Film Socialisme in a Derridean attempt to chase truth through the multitude of options now available to us and coming up shorter than ever. But the lapse of De Palma's subtlety results in a film that feels like a repository for every charge ever leveled against him, from misogyny to cheap cynicism to hollow rip-offs (the music lift from Barry Lyndon and a recreation of the scorpion and ants shot from The Wild Bunch add nothing). Many of De Palma's films have vile traits, but they are usually intentionally added, well-illustrated travesties cleverly dismantled by De Palma, who can be in the thick of it and above it all at once. This, however, is the only one of his films I've ever found truly disgusting, and I hope that he gets back to work soon to erase the memory of it.

Brian De Palma: The Black Dahlia

Building off the moral investigation of film noir that characterized his Femme Fatale, Brian De Palma's The Black Dahlia is a grim, stylish examination of the whole genre, not merely one of its most vital foundations. An adaptation of a fictionalization of a real murder committed in Hollywood, The Black Dahlia is ripe for De Palma's approach, but his film is less a deconstruction than a demolition, its elegant, formalist structure nonetheless betraying jagged edges that rip apart film noir. At its face value, the film is perhaps the director's most aesthetically pleasing, with its golden hues and plunging shadows casting Hollywood as its own cinematized fantasy and nightmare. More importantly, however, it is easily De Palma's most profoundly disturbing film, as transgressive in its own way as Body Double, only more formal and emotional. Body Double assaults the senses, but The Black Dahlia hits where it hurts.

Narrated in terse, strained voiceover by Dwight "Bucky" Bleichert (Josh Hartnett), The Black Dahlia feels like a noir from the start, even as it introduces its detectives via their alternate gig, boxers for the force. If Femme Fatale delved into the characteristic female type of noir, The Black Dahlia breaks down the male cop archetypes. We meet Dwight "Bucky" Bleichert (Josh Hartnett) as Mr. Ice and Lee Blanchard (Aaron Eckhart) as "Mr. Fire," their accomplishments as police officers nothing more than mere fodder for hyping this exhibition match for the precinct. It casts the two as leading men not merely of the film but of its diegetic world, headliners revered for their crowd-pleasing qualities. This presentation fundamentally weakens the two men as serious police officers, but De Palma will spend the rest of the movie undermining them even more, digging into the grim, unheroic truths beneath their aesthetically captivating shells.

Blanchard and Bleichert make perfect foils for each other. Blanchard, sporting Eckhart's magnificent chin and Aryan hair, looks like the national perception of the "All-American" and resides in a house so big that even his colleagues must want to investigate his tax returns. Bleichert, smaller and brunette, returns to his cheap apartment to care for his dementia-ridden, German immigrant father. Bleichert takes a dive in their fight in order to put his dad in a home, but his voiceovers suggest that he knew Blanchard had to win anyway. For the good of the department, the son of a Jerry was always going to have to get pummeled by Captain America.

Yet Blanchard proves to be a sport about their rigged match, and the two become close friends. The merciless staging of the boxing scenes—filmed by De Palma in ways that make Raging Bull look tame—fades into an equally exaggerated view of camaraderie between the partners. De Palma even suggests that the two have bonded so thoroughly that they practically share the same woman, Blanchard's girlfriend Kay Lake (Scarlett Johansson). But as quickly as De Palma casts Blanchard and Bleichert as the purest form of the buddy cop cliché, he sets about rending them apart. Muttered half-revelations hint at dark secrets that inform the odd sort of love triangle between Kay and the two officers, and when they get drawn into the investigation of the infamous titular murder case, their collective type crumbles.

The discovery of the "Black Dahlia," Elizabeth Short (Mia Kirshner), occurs in the background of a stakeout Blanchard and Bleichert plan for a serial rapist/murderer, and De Palma thickly lays on the grim irony of this white woman's death instantly taking precedent at the precinct over the tailed violator and killer of black children. Bleichert himself tries to get this across to Blanchard, but his partner swiftly forgets about his initial target to focus on the case of this gruesomely disfigured corpse. Bleichert, who perhaps feels at least some form of kinship with the neglected elements of society as a second-generation immigrant, is more repulsed by the idea of children dying regardless of race. Blanchard, though, wants to find the person responsible for the killing of an attractive white woman. And as clues filter in about her sexual past, his dedication morphs into obsession.

If De Palma's previous film tacitly criticized the Nice Guy™faux-chivalric male, The Black Dahlia fully attacks it. Bleichert gradually pieces together Kay's past out of vague, fearful allusions until he realizes she was a prostitute tortured by her pimp. Blanchard rescued her, but as Kay tells Bleichert, he's never slept with her. Male judgment of female sexuality pervades the film, and Blanchard's visceral reaction to sex illustrates this most clearly. His dedication to the Elizabeth Short case exhibits his need to protect women, but also his revulsion of them. The discovery of seedy "audition tapes" featuring Short only further feed his rage. De Palma sprinkles misogyny throughout—Short's own father practically says she deserved what she got for dressing the way she did—but the treatment of Blanchard bitterly deconstructs the seemingly noble impulse to save or avenge the wronged damsel to its roots, which are no less hateful.

Bleichert, on the other hand, lacks Blanchard's fierceness but makes up for it by feeling all the lust Blanchard denies himself. His friendship with Kay flirts with inappropriateness, with Kay's repressed sexuality eking out around the man, whose own feelings are stirred in her presence. However, Bleichert pulls back when he senses himself growing too close, prioritizing his relationship with Blanchard over the one with her. More intriguing, though, is the romance Bleichert ultimately enters into with Elizabeth Short's doppelganger, a pampered rich girl named Madeline Linscott (Hilary Swank) who likes to slum it in some of the lesbian bars Short used to visit. De Palma has long loved his doubles, but what makes Madeline unique is the relative lack of definition of her "real" self. The Black Dahlia is a wisp of memory, a vague outline of corrupted innocence that represents perhaps the most purified and cynical end to the poor rube who came to Hollywood to follow her dream. Madeline is, of course, the reverse; her family helped build Tinseltown and in turn made boatloads of money. But she, like everyone else in her mad clan, is perverse and exploitative, the sort of person who corrupts the corruptible like Short.

But Bleichert doesn't care. He plays Blanchard's id as much as Madeline (a Vertigo reference, perhaps?) plays Elizabeth's, and the two soon enter into a sexual affair. Madeline adheres more faithfully to the femme fatale type that De Palma so brilliantly subverted with his last film, yet he adds a class twist to her schemes that run counter to the usual motive of greed. Instead of manipulating people for personal gain, she seems to do it just to get some kind of thrill. Cloistered in aristocratic misery with her internally squabbling family, Madeline gets her jollies seducing a woman who looks like her, or twisting this hapless detective around her pinky finger. All of the loathing Blanchard pours onto the image of Short would be better directed at this embodiment of all he hates about her, but it's his partner who ends up sticking it to her, in more ways than one.

In contrast to the men and their projection of women, Short herself is complex and heart-wrenching. This is all the more striking given that the audience only "interacts" with her via old those old tapes of grimy audition reels. Kirshner brings out depths of tragedy to the woman in fragmented bursts, playing Short with just enough cynicism to try to seduce her off-camera mocker but too much innocence to do it with any more conviction than a child aping something she should never have been allowed to see. Adamant in her desire to be a star, Short is nevertheless so timid and fragile that the misogynistic accusations thrown at her memory evaporate. A tragic air pervades the film, but elsewhere it is subdued in cold shock. Whenever Kirshner appears in black-and-white, half-heartedly rousing herself against the horrid casting director (De Palma himself, off-screen), her barely contained despair jumps through the diegetic camera and then through De Palma's lens. Her looks feel like addresses to the audience's decency, and the unbearableness of it drives Blanchard insane.

The Black Dahlia is based on the book by James Ellroy, whose L.A. Confidential is regularly cited as one of the great American films of the last 20 years. That film frames Ellroy's unsparingly critical view of Hollywood with a formal perfection, its layered narrative nonetheless neatly arranged and its direction generally crisp and uncomplicated. De Palma's film is precisely the opposite of all that. It's messy, self-annihilating and convoluted. Yet it is De Palma's movie, not Curtis Hanson's, that visually embodies the tone in which Ellroy's writing casts Hollywood. Vilmos Zgimond's gorgeous cinematography uses golden hues and deep shadow to duplicitous effect, at once highlighting the nostalgic and idealistic glory of show business and its jaundiced, rotting underbelly.

In addition, De Palma understands that Hollywood, like the rest of America, was erected by immigrants and frontiersmen, often moves back past noir into German Expression itself. The stylized L.A. never truly settles into any form of realism, and by the end it's morphed into an outright fever dream of despair and confused longing on behalf of Bleichert, whose flat narration prevents one from easily guessing that the whole movie is his delirious nightmare until the final moments. De Palma regularly checks the great Expressionist film The Man Who Laughs, not only as a recurring image but a key plot point. He even throws in his own tragically yearning and disfigured character, and anyone who knows their De Palma will know instantly that such a character simply must be played by William Finley.

The dizzying, extended climax to The Black Dahlia is at once one of the most controlled freak-outs in De Palma's canon and one of the most unsettling. Bleichert, still reeling from a stunning second act finale, falls fully into madness, and the plot suddenly speeds up to accommodate his plummet. The Expressionist touches turn into full swaths of stylized acting and staging, most memorably the grim fate of Madeline's mother, whose gagging dignity made for such great comedy in an earlier dinner scene but suddenly seems frightful and insane. Other influences beging pouring in as well, from a confrontation with Madeline that makes the Vertigo connection more than plausible to what even appears to be a lift from F for Fake.

But nothing compares to the last scene, the most elegant, Romantic obliteration since De Palma caught up to Carlito's Way's foregone conclusion. Bewildered and enraged, Bleichert returns to Kay for comfort, seeking shelter from what he has seen and uncovered. Kay opens the door in a flash of heavenly white, the whore become the Madonna as she beckons the man inside. But before he can move, Bleichert hears the caw of a crow behind him and turns to see Betty Short's mutilated corpse lying on the lawn, illuminated by Kay's glow, the object of his ecstasy also a reminder of his agony. In that moment, Bleichert finds himself frozen between equally garish reminders of his two biggest failures, to the case, and to his friend and partner. It's worth noting that when Bleichert shakes his head and the ghastly image of Short disappears, so too does Kay's aura. This flash of lucidity breaks up the subjective haze of the film's last 15-20 minutes, yet Bleichert's conscious decision to retreat from the world with Kay may be more unsettling than any of the stylized actions that preceded it.

Earlier I mentioned the stylistic ways that the more graceful Black Dahlia diverged from the full-on porn assault of Body Double, yet if anything, it's the 2006 film that is more merciless. Body Double spits on what Hollywood had become; as Bleichert enters the house with Kay and shuts himself off from the horror around him, The Black Dahlia makes clear that Hollywood was always the most loathsome, horrifying place in the world.

Brian De Palma: Femme Fatale

After the reception of Mission to Mars took some of the wind out of De Palma's sails, Femme Fatale represented a more modestly scaled return to the director's well of head-trip thrillers. But fresh off the (perceived) defeat of his least ironic bid for a winsomely broad-audience movie, De Palma came up with what may be his densest, most complex work. Taking a page from the Body Double-esque travesty he trotted out every few years since that 1984 masterpiece to remind everyone who's boss, Femme Fatale is defiantly nonsensical and deliberately self-annihilating. Like all the rest of the pure style exercises the director's made since Body Double, Femme Fatale doesn't reach the same heights of anarchic frenzy, but De Palma makes a key choice to move away from mere stylistic flourishes to try to make his flashy neo-noir say something.

Femme Fatale follows Laure Ash (Rebecca Romijn), who embodies the titular concept to such a pure degree that the first we see of her is a reflection of her face in a television as she watches one of the quintessential femme fatale movies, Double Indemnity. By the end of the extended and wild opening, she's already seduced a woman and double-crossed her gang of dangerous criminals, and she'll only prove more manipulative from there. But even as De Palma brings out the distilled essence of that character type's destructive properties, he also contextualizes it with equally outsized depictions of the misogyny that surrounds such a character. The head of the criminals she works with at the start (Eriq Ebouaney) slaps her before their mission even begins, and I don't think he ever once so much as refers to Laure throughout the film without using the term "bitch." De Palma, who fielded accusations of misogyny throughout the '80s, makes Black Tie's vulgar harassments so unpleasant that he makes clear his disdain for the masculine brutality that drives so many of his characters. De Palma the offense-baiting provocateur this is not.

But I'm already afraid I've given off the impression that the film isn't a riot, which it is from the start. Echoing the vicious feed-hand-biting of Body Double, the opening sequence, a diamond heist set, of all places, at the Cannes Film Festival, is a deliciously wry slash at the movie industry. Even the most prestigious film gala in the world is not immune to the ouroboric culture of tabloids and calculated buzz: the diamonds targeted by the thieves are worn in an absurd metal contrapion that barely warps around a starlet's supple frame in such a way as to make Princess Leia's metal bikini look like a chador in comparison. Vaguely resembling the director's data theft sequence in Mission: Impossible, this setpiece is outlandishly directed with the usual focus on surveillance and divided frames, but none of the tricks is as amusing as that ridiculous diamond getup. It's telling that the film being shown at the festival is utterly incidental to everything happening around it, and that would be as true if there were no heist to focus the audience. For everyone at the ceremony, all eyes are on Veronica and her only occasionally covered nipples. So, while the rest of the film may not go after the industry with the same rabid mania as Body Double, it nevertheless expands that movie's range of attack to slam the foreign market that has been equally corrupted by promotional interests and empty succès de scandale.

After Laure double-crosses her accomplices, she hides out in Belleville until she can get a fake passport to escape the country. She cannot stay hidden for long, though, and De Palma slowly introduces a wrinkle into the proceedings with a split-screen segment that juxtaposes two very different kinds of surveillance of a wigged Laure. On the left, we see Nicolas Bardo (Antonio Banderas), a sometimes-paparazzo who just seems to be interested by seeing the disguised Laure meeting with a contact wearing fashionable camouflage. On the right are the betrayed criminals who've tracked her down. The two contrasting shots reveal different angles, observations and emotional tones. Though Nicolas peers down from above in a more threatening position, his POV is playful, tracking that which catches his eye. It is the more ground-level view of Black Tie's second-in-command that exudes the feeling of being watched, of being plotted.

Laure retreats into the church nearby, but De Palma maintains the divided screen showcasing two watchers. What changes is who's doing the watching. The right half of the screen continues to show the perspective of a jilted accomplice, albeit a different one. But now the left half belongs to an old French couple who look back at Laure with wide-eyed recognition. Between Nicolas' mysterious curiosity and this pair's even stranger response to Laure, De Palma generates confused, ambiguous moods that only become more disorienting and suggestive when placed against the more simplistic feelings of vengeance and lingering hatred of the criminals. As my blogging buddy Ryan Kelly put it in his own fantastic review of the film, "It's all a matter of perspective."

Ryan rightly pinpoints the film as a moral examination of noir, and he references the hazy, equally nostalgic-yet-critical Mulholland Dr. in De Palma's staging of an extended dream sequence and the way that it dramatically alters the thematic focus of the film. Here, the central divide between dream and reality (or dream and other dream) is the suicide of Laure's doppelganger, the troubled daughter of a French couple who take Laure in after mistaking her for their child. By placing the film on such a dramatic crux, De Palma also invites comparisons to Run Lola Run, an action film in which the protagonist is given do-overs save herself and others. In a sense, Femme Fatale is a more emotive, insightful take on Raising Cain, with its constantly upheaved nightmares deliberately shattering any connection to the narrative. A similar postmodern slyness is at work here, but the abandon of Cain and Body Double is replaced by a nuanced take on a common genre element.

De Palma ingeniously finds a way to make Laure adhere to all the manipulative and sexual traits of a femme fatale while undermining the type's context. The aforementioned misogyny of Black Tie's gang does not necessarily justify Laure's behavior, but it does at least provide a contrast for the usual condemnation of the duplicitous jezebel as an agent of feminine evil. But aggressive sexism is not the only male target of De Palma's lens. Later in the film, when Nicolas stumbles into an insane situation in which he sees himself as Laure's deliverer, she gets one over on him too. De Palma does not spare the condescending, faux-chivalrous knight in shining armor from mockery, undercutting the traditionally acceptable position of a man placing a woman in a position of weakness for the purpose of "saving" her. Ryan links this situation, in which "the woman is the one in charge and the man is powerless," to De Palma's larger canon, but this is powerful even for De Palma; I can't think of an example where he emasculated his male character so incisively.

Romijn handles the role magnificently, suddenly leaping into a double life as the dearly departed Lily and subtly bringing her old self back to light when Nicolas comes back into her life as a different kind of male obstacle. Her toothy smile looks almost bestial at times, sadistic glee crossing her face when she succeeds in getting one over on another man. Her handling of Brado, incessantly revealing her superior planning just when he thinks he's won. But Banderas himself is multifaceted (he even gets to play a double life of his own in a hilarious scene), and Nicholas is cleverer than he seems. If he still finds himself constantly thwarted by Laure/Lily's wiles, the photographer nevertheless is the only man resilient enough to consistently return for more. If De Palma does not let Nicolas off the hook for his presumptuousness, nor does he seek to destroy the man with the same zeal as Black Tie's band of vicious misogynists. There is a willingness to forgive and start anew wholly absent from the director's early, more freeform days.

That new mindset informs one of the most beautiful second chances in cinema, a narrative mulligan that uses the reflexive, even absurdist nature of the story's structure to stage a purely moral reset. I don't know that I agree with Ryan regarding his thoughts on the film's treatment of "fate." I would say that the recurrence of images and events owes more to De Palma's delight in mirror imagery, though the film's final shot certainly supports the idea that, while we can choose our own paths, every possible outcome is at least somewhat guided. But the choices made by Laure after the third act upheaval seem to me more a rebellion against that fate, Laure confronting not only the pre-ordained order of events but her own existential trap. The final shot speaks more to the dream logic of the film, but even if this is all a strictly ordered exercise in style, its redemptive final moments place it among the most moving and intelligent of De Palma's films, the perfect marriage of his deconstructive style with the flecks of deep Romantic maturity that informs his best late work.

Brian De Palma: Mission to Mars

Brian De Palma's Mission to Mars is the film you'd least expect from the maker of gory, cynical deconstruction who delighted in adhering to genre tropes as much as he did tearing them apart. A PG-rated space adventure released by Disney, Mission to Mars looks on its face like the ultimate sellout move, an embrace of everything De Palma hated now that he could be trusted to make a profit off his work. Certainly critics and audiences found it easy to go with their gut; the film eked out a box office so thinly above the budget it likely falls within the margin of error, and it received scathing reviews from professionals and amateurs alike.

But I see a remarkable film, one that puts all of De Palma's generic immersion and aesthetic strength to use at the opposite end of the emotional spectrum. Here is a film so unabashedly optimistic that De Palma can open on a barbecue with red, white, and blue colors used without a drop of irony, no mean feat for man who loves his American flags huge and imperialistic. And even if one wants to play the usual simplistic game of "Who is De Palma ripping off today?" the closest you'll get is Star Wars by way of 2001. Considering that those two films stand at polar ends to each other, suggesting De Palma is just playing the plagiarist holds even less water than it always has.

That barbecue is a private party on the eve of the titular mission, as American and Russian astronauts celebrate with their families and joke with their colleagues. De Palma establishes the basic character relations through pure exposition, but there's a giddiness on the faces of Tim Robbins, Don Cheadle, Connie Nielsen and the rest that gives the stiff lines a jubilant quality. Even when Jim McConnell (Gary Sinise), the former pilot of the mission taken off assignment when his wife died, arrives, the somber tone still carries flecks of idealism and camaraderie. Cheadle's earnest condolences and reassurances cannot fully overcome how staid the dialogue is, but the look of unendurable pain on Sinise's face, an agony that simmers below his sunken eyes even—especially—when he's smiling ensures that even this trudging moment passes quickly.

But soon the action takes off, De Palma cutting to the first ship's arrival on Mars and their study of the terrain for possible colonization. Orange tinting turns the rocky landscape into a convincing duplicate of Mars, and De Palma uses his widescreen to communicate a sense of loneliness and building unease in these scenes. He also sets up the first of many tricks of perspective, pulling back from the shot of an automated rover on the surface to see its larger, human-carrying counterpart drive past and readjust the scale. Later, in space, a camera swirls outward from four astronauts floating above a flattened atmosphere to likewise reveal the true vastness of the scenario.

Yet these dwarfing visual corrections of perspective belie the intimate nature of the film itself, especially after a mysterious event destroys most of the first crew sent to Mars and prompts the other cluster of characters to fly to Luke Graham's (Cheadle) rescue. De Palma slyly cuts away from Mars just as it starts to resemble a De Palma film, with man's arrogant quest to conquer cut brutally short by a mysterious, unexplained force. By realigning with the second crew, who insist that Jim flies them despite washing out of the program, De Palma moves away from suspense and potential commentary to focus on the struggles and hopes of the team that wants to save Graham but also has six months of travel to kill.

To fill the time, De Palma stages the most joyous, effervescent shots of his career. His camera floats gracefully through space, exuberantly capturing feelings of zero gravity and also communicating an ebullient whimsy wholly absent of the director's usual sense of irony. Giddy to the point of shamelessness, these scenes recast the clinical tone of Kubrick's movement through advanced space stations as pure ecstasy. For Kubrick, the scientifically plausible technology he posited signified man's complete surrender to technology, placing man in an environment where he would literally die without his inventions helping him. But for the Romantic side of De Palma, the ability to explore space gives us the infinity to explore and the ability to leave behind troubles, or at least some of them.

In the film's finest scene, Woody (Robbins), who earlier protested the idea of dance lessons with Terri (Nielsen), puts on Van Halen's "Dance the Night Away" and twirls in zero-gravity with his wife. It's such a happy moment that everyone on-board forgets the mission and watches the two go. De Palma revels in the romance, but he also adds a tinge of sadness when Jim arrives. Sinise plays his part beautifully here, looking on with a smile that does not fade but slowly cools as he thinks of his own wife and how it so easily could have been he and Maggie dancing. It's a quiet, heartbreaking cutaway that displays De Palma's pained humanism stripped of the usual sarcasm or at least doom. That the Mars mission pairs husband and wife in the first place is itself revealing of the director's emotional approach here: in this idealized future, even scientists recognize the need for human comfort and warmth in space and want their mission leaders to be emotionally level. They just recognize that humans are emotionally level when they are happy, not clinically neutral.

All of this is not to say that Mission to Mars contains none of De Palma's darker impulses. But even they are timed to be affecting, not sinister. Consider the scene of Graham's team exploring the aberration in a Martian mountain intercut with the broadcast he and the crew recorded earlier to send back to the space station over Earth. That transmission reaches and plays for the astronauts there just as Graham and co. reach the site, and the cheeriness of the transmission (in which the crew on Mars joke and sing "Happy Birthday" to Jim) conflicts with the mounting suspense of the electronic warbling and gathering wind on Mars. The crosscutting only exacerbates the tension by making the thought of anything happening to these characters (who are all so thinly defined you know few, if any, will survive) unpleasant instead of just expected.

There's also the devastating sequence of the four members of the second mission crew forced to abandon their craft after micrometeorites lead to an engine explosion. As Woody aims for a refueling module, he secures a tether but carries too much momentum to stop, flying outside the range of his friends. Unwilling to watch her husband die, Terri cuts her own tether in a doomed attempt to rescue him, leading Woody to take drastic measures to prevent her from killing herself. His act of self-sacrifice is poignant and poetic, using tense setups—Woody propelling himself too fast, the line on the tether gun reaching its end just before it can reach him—to reach a sorrowful conclusion.

On Mars, the remaining crew reunites with a half-mad Graham, and as they wonder what it is about Mars' atmosphere that might have caused this, Jim points out that he watched his friends die and spent six months as the only man on a planet. Or is he? The storm that destroyed Graham's mission was clearly controlled, and one can only expect aliens to show up at some point. What makes Mission to Mars remarkable is how it (literally) relates those aliens to us. An earlier scene establishes a joke by having Phil (Jerry O'Connell) arrange M&Ms in zero gravity to form a DNA double-helix of what he calls his "ideal woman." Jim reaches out and nabs a few candies, asking Phil what the strand is now. "A frog?" Phil guesses after briefly studying the altered base pairs.

Amusing at that scene is, it also establishes the key theme of De Palma's film, that all life is linked to the same fundamental building blocks, with only the tiniest variations separating vastly different species. The Martians only take this idea to its endpoint, providing an explanation for life on Earth that not only connects all creatures through the huge chunks of DNA they share but does the same for life in the great beyond. For a Disney film that works primarily as an optimistic space adventure, Mission to Mars strikingly reminded me of Terrence Malick's recent The Tree of Life, another film that used a universal canvas and the scientific conclusions of evolution to posit a spiritual connection linking all life.

This is a far cry from De Palma's usual view of humanity, where even his most loving portrayals show characters who are isolated and cut off from the world. The closest he comes to acknowledging his usual forays into underworlds and monsters is a jokey retort from Phil when Terri waxes rhapsodic on the three percent of DNA that makes humanity its own species, the three percent that gave the world Einstein and Mozart. "And Jack the Ripper," chimes Phil. Nevertheless, in Mission to Mars, we are all one, and when Jim decides to leave his empty life behind to seek meaning even deeper into the cosmos, De Palma promises to make him see just how vast the universal web of life is. It may not be De Palma's best film, but Mission to Mars is the most rapturous and hopeful of his stylistic exercises, and one of the finest displays of the love he has under all his cynicism.

Brian De Palma: Snake Eyes

Snake Eyes is, in a bizarre way, the logical continuation of Brian De Palma's previous film, Mission Impossible. Mixing political thriller with questionable plays for De Palma's capacity to capture Romantic grief, Snake Eyes likewise feels like a safe bet for the director, but one he that allows him to push his luck. If it's one of the emptiest films of De Palma's corpus—a collection of work that houses more than a few technical exercises—at least the director gives us a story so ridiculous you almost don't mind when it collapses in the third act.

In a long career of intricate, arresting openings, the start of De Palma's Snake Eyes may be his finest. A 13-minute tracking shot that moves through the grimy politics behind a heavyweight championship fight, the opening moves from camera monitors through police corruption and finally ends with an assassination. I would couch that in a spoiler warning, but I want to avoid repetition and thus see no need to mention that this is a Brian De Palma movie a second time. It's the start of a shallow but merry and hysterically over-intricate journey into late-Clinton America, a time of economic success and almost-grating peace, of a country so well off it's now darkly quaint to think how badly everyone wanted something interesting to happen.

That opening shot serves not only to introduce principal players—chiefly crooked cop Rick Santoro (Nicolas Cage) and his best friend, Commander Kevin Dunne (Gary Sinise)—but to serve as a smorgasbord of De Palma's pet themes and tricks. The initial focus on pre-newscast prep and pullback to a row of monitors starts the film with surveillance, while Rick's tour through the arena's underbelly, placing bets for the fight and chasing down hoods (Luis Guzman) who hang out with the defending champ, shows off corruption and the way some cops fit into the criminal underworld a little too well. De Palma's Steadicam careens around corners, tilts with anticipation, and when the action moves to the floor of the arena for the big match, De Palma uses the frenzy of the crowd (and a ludicrously oversized and ironic American flag) to instantly plunge into sensory overload. You're left waiting for something terrible to happen, a feeling made worse by De Palma strictly tethering the movement to Rick, always pivoting to look at suspicious people around him and Kevin sitting by the visiting Defense Secretary before returning to an oblivious and ostentatious Rick. At the height of the match, shots ring out, and Rick turns to see the Defense Secretary dying, the only clues amidst the pandemonium the previously established glimpses at surrounding characters. As is so often the case with De Palma, the style slowly reveals the substance.

It's a shame the rest of the film doesn't live up to this bravura opening, a perfectly timed escalation of comic overacting, art-for-art's-sake stylistic flourishes and gripping tension that introduces multiple stories and red herrings from the start. Once Rick, with his gaudy leather-brown jacket and leopard-color Hawaiian shirt, starts digging into a case that runs far deeper than he could ever comprehend, it soon becomes evident that he's too indifferent to justice and too invested in some of the suspects to pursue the truth with the conviction he displays.

Not that it isn't fun to watch Cage strut around yelling his head off at all those who cross him. In many ways, he's the ideal Hollywood star for a De Palma film, capable of powerhouse performances when matched with the right material but incapable of subtlety at all times. Cage is a bundle of wild eyes, a manic grin, and a base volume so high one would be forgiven for assuming Cage imagined himself in some strange variant of Speed where he couldn't drop beneath 55 decibels. The only time he looks in his element is when stands up in his front-row seat and declares himself king as the crowd roars. That is the single moment of the film Cage is sufficiently in his element; the rest of the time, the action takes place on Earth, a place Cage infrequently dwells.

Made to chase down various leads, Rick slowly uncovers a vast conspiracy that does not border on comical so much as merrily squeak a clown nose as it rides over the line on a unicycle. De Palma announces the twist early on, even framing it in blatant visual terms: red light bathes the double-crosser as the camera goes Dutch, and ominous music sets in because you can never have too many clues in a De Palma film. Taking a page from their work on Mission: Impossible, De Palma and writer David Koepp set their sights on a wounded military-industrial complex reacting to the end of the Cold War gravy train with pent-up masculine capitalist aggression. This curious, amusing mash-up of jingoistic greed and psychosexual feelings of impotence in the military machine when it cannot flex its muscles to impress people is grounds for merciless De Palma satire, but the director never truly explored the idea in either of these films.

But if Snake Eyes sacrifices potential depth of comedy (to say nothing of humanity), it at least proves a fun diversion that lets De Palma dance around coquettishly. He and Cage understand each other to the point that the two nearly ring tragedy out of the absurdity of the double-cross and Rick's steadfast refusal to accept it (to those always on-guard for De Palma's purported misogyny, the fact that he blames a woman to her face for the transgressions of a man edges uncomfortably into an abstract, allegorical form of slut-shaming, with money swapped out for sex). Sinise plays Dunne like Lieutenant Dan with more self-control but all of the frothing hatred roiling underneath; to hold back that tension, Sinise clenches his jaw, and it's entirely conceivable he turned in this performance after having his mouth wired shut from some kind of accident. His hissed lines make a jolly counterpoint to Cage's toothy yells. Carla Gugino steals the show as the mysterious woman whose role remains ambiguous for a chunk of the film as she alternates between the femme fatale, the brilliant professional and the damsel. Gugino handles these shifts so fluidly she emerges perhaps too talented a chameleon for the sort of person her character really is, but it's a delight watching her melt through various female types while not letting herself be defined by any of them.

But not even Gugino is as interesting as De Palma's camerawork. Though the film lacks the aesthetic or political bite to place it among the director's finer works, Snake Eyes boasts a few setpieces that display the best (and most gloriously tacky) of De Palma. Besides the stupendous short-film career-summary of the opening shot, De Palma outdoes himself with a drift over hotel rooms as evil forces close in on Cage and Gugino. With a camera pointed straight down, De Palma moves over gauche tableaux of Atlantic City oblivion, scanning over garishly colored rooms filled with reveling frat boys, lonely gamblers, gratified johns, even a businessman or two who clearly imagined themselves enjoying the kind of night we see in the other neon-smeared suites clinging to the '80s by the fake fingernails. As with the first shot, it's silly, tasteless, and oh so brilliant.

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.