Review: Making Sense of Brian De Palma's "Scarface"

Movie of the Week #6 and a controversial classic

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I am both in awe of and repulsed by Brian De Palma’s Scarface, and I think that’s pretty much exactly as intended. This is De Palma doing a 1930s gangster movie – not just the 1932 Howard Hawks film it is remaking for a 1980s context, but also James Cagney pictures of the same period, like 1931’s The Public Enemy – and dialing up every single element way past eleven, to make one of the most flagrantly excessive movies of all time. It feels like a bold experiment in seeing if you can romanticize and deromanticize something at the same time – if you can make a gangster movie so stupendously iconic it penetrates popular culture to an almost unfathomable degree, but that in the actual context of watching feels increasingly deadening and suffocating. In the tradition of James Cagney smashing a grapefruit into Mae Clarke’s face, De Palma’s Scarface is all about rubbing our noses in the awfulness of this empty, decadent, bitterly angry criminal lifestyle, with that lifestyle being portrayed as an impossibly heightened, cartoon version of what we collectively imagine organized crime to be; the difference is that in Scarface, the thing the film is rubbing our noses in is an absurdly large mountain of cocaine.