Keep this sketch going!
1. Have you read Gone With The Wind?
2. I’m going to think about that tomorrow.
Carlito’s Way
“Here comes the pain,” says somebody to somebody toward the beginning. The line would turn up again later as a key moment in Snake Eyes. Wonder what it means to De Palma, or David Koepp (who wrote both scripts) or if it’s just another unconscious quote.
Pacino as restrained and understated here as he is enormous and overblown in Scarface. Overall I think I prefer Scarface, and who would not. But the two movies aren’t very similar, director, star and genre notwithstanding. Maybe if Tony Montana had somehow survived the shootout at the end of Scarface and had a crooked lawyer, he might end up like Carlito, older and wiser and the type to run around ducking assassins instead of blowing people away with a grenade launcher.
Sean Penn, John Leguizamo and Paul Mazursky cover themselves in glory.
The final subway train-chase, cat-and-mouse in Grand Central and escalator shootout the big De Palma setpiece we’ve been waiting for.
United 93
Taking a break from the De Palma-fest to go see a current release.
Actually, turns out there is a De Palma connection to this project. Among the many unknowns and non-professionals, Gregg Henry shows up as a guy in a military outfit talking on a phone in some room somewhere.
The movie is certainly gripping, an enormously polished piece of filmmaking by a supremely talented director, but it is also something other than entertaining. One-third of the way through, I wasn’t sure if I wanted to see this happen. Two-thirds of the way through, I wasn’t sure I wanted to see this dramatised, reduced to an action-movie anecdote. When the guy behind me shouted “Beat that fucker!” as the passengers took over the airline, I wasn’t even sure I wanted to be in the theater.
I could be wrong (the experience is quite upsetting), but dramatically, the message of the movie seems to be: the government is incompetant, the military is incompetant, the airlines are incompetant, even the airplane staff is incompetant; if you want to be saved, you have to save yourself.
Maybe that’s why the studio only advertised on right-wing blogs for opening weekend.
The “common folk” band together and take back the airplane, not to prevent it from crashing into the Capitol, but to try to land it themselves. Needless to say, they fail; the plane crashes seconds later.
A downer in every sense of the word.
Full disclosure: my wife and infant son were on United 93, not the one that crashed, but the same flight, same plane, Newark to San Francisco, a few days earlier. One of the flight attendants was rude and unhelpful to her regarding her infant car seat. My wife was so angry that she demanded the woman’s name. The same flight attendant was on the United 93 that crashed in Pennsylvania.
Femme Fatale
Utterly preposterous and totally heartfelt, excruciatingly dumb and achingly sweet, I feel like this is more like the valentine to humanity that De Palma wanted Mission to Mars to be.
The ending, I see now, is the fullest flowering of his fuzzy fantasy idea, where a dream isn’t always totally a dream. A grace note in his other movies, here it becomes the hook that drives the entire narrative.
Rebecca Romijn takes time out from the movie to strip down to her black underwear and do Melanie Griffith’s dance from Body Double. I assume De Palma’s quoting himself, but sometimes I just can’t tell he’s quoting himself of if he just forgot that he’d done that bit before. Presented with a physical prop like Romijn, I can see how one might forget.
Come to think of it, he quotes himself all over the place here; I just realized that he’s even got the “twin girls, one of whom speaks with a French accent” beat from Sisters.
Antonio Banderas, I never quite realized, is rather short. But Romijn is in heels, so.
I believe that Bill Gates might one day become United States ambassador to France, but I cannot believe that Bill Gates would fly commercial.
Body Double
When this movie came out, all anyone could talk about was the nudity, sex and outrageous violence. That, and the shameless borrowings from Vertigo and Rear Window.
Yeah, it’s got all those things. But De Palma uses the sex and violence the same way the villain does, as a distraction.
Because while this movie is only serviceable as a murder mystery, it’s brilliant as an art film, a dense, witty, unpredictable, multi-layered fugue on the themes of illusion, perception and reality.
Scenes from movies seem real at first, no matter how obviously fake they are, and scenes of “real life” are shot using obviously fake devices like rear-screen projection. Characters weave in and out of reality without warning, keeping us constantly on our guard regarding what’s “really happening,” even though we’ve seen by now that “what’s really happening” is quite low on the list of things De Palma is interested in.
In interviews, Scorsese is always talking about “Well, but is it real?” Something tells me that’s not a phrase that comes up a lot on a De Palma set, although Scorsese and De Palma have a similar discomfort with the demands of genre. Scorsese is happy to ignore the demands of genre in order to get at the core reality of his characters, and De Palma has grown so unhappy with genre that he seems to deliberately throw silly, hackneyed plot points into his movies almost as if to remind us that we’re not supposed to take any of this as literal truth. There isn’t “really” a psychiatrist who’s dressing up in women’s clothing to murder people, there isn’t “really” a demented subject of evil psychiactric experiments running around and murdering mothers. De Palma isn’t interested in suspension of disbelief, he’s interested in suspense for its own sake. And while that might seem cold, slight or elitist to some, he’s actually doing his best to invite us in to his point of view by creating movies as fiendishly entertaining as this one.
The acting in this is quite good, by the way. Craig Wasson and Guy Boyd, to pick two, are terrific in this and I’ve never seen them in anything else. Very strange.
And another great credit crawl.
Sisters
In spite of borrowing heavily from Psycho, this turns out to be one of De Palma’s most original movies.
For some reason, it’s never occurred to me before now just how important issues of perception and point-of-view are to De Palma. It’s not just the voyeuristic camera and the re-tellings of stories from different points of view (although his movies have plenty of both). In both Raising Cain and Snake Eyes, there are scenes where there are scenes dreamt or recounted by characters, which turn out to be inaccurate, colored by perception or wholly false. And the rational filmgoer says “But that’s a cheat, that’s not how it happened.” Well, how do we “know what happened?” We just saw it on film; but whose point of view was being presented on film? That is, De Palma doesn’t seem interested in how it happened, he’s interested in what a character has perceived.
There’s a scene in Snake Eyes where Gary Sinise tells Nicolas Cage What Really Happened, and we see it played out on film. And because of the use of subjective camera, we get the feeling that we’re seeing What Really Happened from Gary’s point of view. Later, this explanation turns out to be a total fabrication. Then how could we see his story on film? Well, what we’re seeing is Nicolas Cage’s perception of what he thinks Gary’s story represents. That may seem like hair-splitting, but it marks a cinematic conceptual leap that is rather extraordinary.
Similarly, in Raising Cain there’s the rather amazing sequence where Lolita Davidovich wakes up, goes to her bureau, finds that she’s given the wrong clock to her lover, goes to her lover’s hotel to switch the clocks, then wakes up to find that she’s actually in her lover’s bed already, then later wakes up to find that she’s actually still in her own bed. But later we find out that only part of the dream-within-a-dream is a dream, part of it happened in real life. So what De Palma showed us was a dream that at least in part recounted a real event. When people chide De Palma for his use of hackneyed conventions, it’s useful to remember that he also often plays with our perceptions in deep and subtle ways.
Anyway, there’s this rather incredible scene in Act III of Sisters where Jennifer Salt is told the Big Secret That Explains the Whole Movie. And instead of having the doctor sit calmly and explain it to us (like he does at the end of Psycho), he has the doctor drug Jennifer, tie her down to the bed, hypnotise her and put her through a traumatic fake operation. Why? Well I’d hate to spoil things, but let’s say that he wishes to leave her in a state of confusion.
But as a wild tale of love, loss and medical mishap is told, she undergoes a series of bizarre hallucinations, some of which seem to be almost-literal representations of truth and others which make no sense whatsoever and approach Lynchian levels of weirdness and discomfort.
And it turns out that all of this information is quite useless to Jennifer as a protagonist.
Speaking of which, another neat trick is how the doctor is introduced as The Creepy Guy who’s stalking Margot Kidder, and by the end of the movie we realize that he’s really the Only Sane Man who could have stopped a lot of death and ruined lives, had not certain horrible things happened.