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.
On the level of craft and cinematic construction, Scarface is an all-out masterpiece. John A. Alonzo’s cinematography is a stupendous assemblage of color and texture, the production design is consistently evocative and attention-grabbing, Giorgio Moroder’s foreboding synth score is a real landmark, and De Palma builds outstanding sequence after outstanding sequence, some of them deeply entertaining, some incredibly tense, some deadening and soul crushing – but it’s always working on the viewer, in some form or another. The fact that virtually every scene in this three-hour long movie has left some kind of indelible footprint on pop culture is a mind-boggling achievement in its own right.
The film is also brutally racist, of course, a story of criminal Cuban immigrants invading Miami and bringing untold violence and depravity with them, with all the Hispanic roles filled by white American (mostly Italian-American) actors. Here, though, we come to the problem of whether it would be worse or better if De Palma had actually used a Cuban cast, and the thorny, unanswerable question of whether all representation is necessarily good representation. Because as nice as it would have been to give Cuban actors work filling all these parts, and the exposure that might lead to future stardom and increased Hispanic visibility in Hollywood, we also have to confront the fact that Scarface is such a ludicrous cartoon version of immigrant crime and criminality that making the casting authentic might result in a film that feels more offensive than it already is. When it’s Al Pacino giving the most spectacularly over the top Al Pacino performance in the history of Al Pacino, the viewer never actually thinks for a single second that this is a realistic representation of the authentic Cuban immigrant experience; it is so obviously artificial, so prima facie ludicrous, that it plays as the fantasy it very much is. If the film instead had Tony Montana and the rest of the ensemble played by Cuban actors giving more naturalistic performances, in some ways that might feel more insidious, more propagandistic in its anti-immigrant overtones.
I don’t know the answer, to be clear, and as a white critic, I know I am definitely not the person to provide that answer one way or another. But I think it’s a question worth posing, in no small part because the film is, I think, aware of this dissonance. The best scene in the movie, and the one that really ties the entire film together into something approaching a thematically coherent whole, is the big sequence in the fancy restaurant between Tony, Manny, and Elvira before Tony goes to New York, where a strung-out Tony starts going off about how empty and purposeless his entire life of untold excess has become, and Elvira finally gets up and leaves him for good, and Tony then lashes out at all the rich white people in the surrounding booths by declaring himself the villain they need to make sense of the world. On every level, from writing to staging to performance, it is a brilliant sequence, the one that makes it clear this isn’t a story about a guy who will be laid low by external forces, but one who will purposefully self-destruct, who spends the rest of the movie consciously making every possible mistake he can. It lets Michelle Pfeiffer’s Elvira walk out of the movie entirely on her own terms, in a way that makes her general silence and aloofness through the first two hours land harder (it reminds me a bit of what Martin Scorsese does with Anna Paquin’s character in The Irishman, a woman who purposefully removes herself from the narrative of the violent men around her, denying both them and us her subjectivity).
And then in Tony’s final outburst, it reveals the subtext of the film’s overall artificiality: that Tony is the villain white Americans (including, statistically, most of the people watching) have imagined for themselves to feel more comfortable in their own lives and judgments. And there is a certain logic to having that beat delivered by someone who is quite literally a fantasy, a prominent Italian-American star pretending to be Cuban, and not in any way an accurate portrait of anyone who has ever existed. There is a potency to the way the sheer cartoonish scale of Pacino’s balls-to-the-wall performance pays off here. I thought of Sacha Baron Cohen and his Borat character several times throughout the film, and as weird as that sounds, Cohen’s performance art is sort of the same idea: Borat is not an attack on Kazakhstani people (at least not in intention – that does not mean it has not or cannot cause real world offense, or that anyone is wrong to feel offended), but on ignorant white Americans who think this hawk-worshipping antisemitic goofball is what ‘foreigners’ are actually like. I worried at the outset of Scarface, which begins with a description of the Mariel boatlift that reads like the teleprompter at a Donald Trump rally, that De Palma’s film was presenting a Fox News fever dream of immigrant invasion, of another country emptying its jails and dumping its worst people on our shores. By the end, I felt like the movie was more self-aware than that, more interested in engaging with the idea of gangsters and of immigrant crime stories, and making us question our own relation to them.
That’s where you have to bring back the 1930s gangster pictures Scarface is inspired by back into the conversation. Those films weren’t at all accurate portrayals of organized crime, and they also grew out of fears of migrants coming to America and turning to criminality. The Public Enemy is technically a ‘pre-Code’ film, and got away with scenes and images that would have been impossible in just a few years once Joseph Breen started enforcing a rigid Catholic vision of morality on all Hollywood cinema, but it has its straightforwardly moralizing opening and closing text – and brutal shock ending with the reveal of Cagney’s dead body – for a reason: there was a belief that you could not let audiences walk out of the theater romanticizing or wishing to imitate this lifestyle. If the criminal protagonist was going to run free on screen for 90 minutes, he had to be dead or in jail by the end to make sure audiences got the message. Scarface operates on the same logic, to a degree, but expands it out in every direction. The film and each of its component parts has all the subtlety of a sledgehammer; it isn’t 90 minutes long like the original Scarface or The Public Enemy, but three full hours. Where those films had moments considered shocking and scandalous in their day (like the aforementioned scene of Cagney abusing Mae Clarke with a grapefruit), Scarface makes sure to include at least one moment of equal or greater impact in each and every scene. It is a nuclear accelerationist version of the gangster film, going big and brash and offensive in every direction, making Tony Montana the biggest piece of shit to ever grace the silver screen, but also – like every gangster movie – framing him in just enough of an iconographic way to make him worm his way into the collective unconscious, to the point that we both despise him and want to be him, are deadened and disturbed by the film’s violent, destructive grind, but also wholly enraptured by it.
The other moment that most clearly tells me De Palma, screenwriter Oliver Stone, and all involved knew what they were doing in their critique of this genre is when Gina, Tony’s sister, confronts him before the final shootout, daring him to sexualize her before shooting him in the leg. The violent, possessive jealousy Tony exhibits towards Gina throughout the film is of course a standard of the genre, and a trope of masculinity in Hollywood present in all kinds of films for the last century; but here, De Palma makes the subtext text and, again, rubs our nose in it. If this guy doesn’t literally want to fuck his sister – and he probably does, given the way their every interaction is staged – he at the very least doesn’t want anyone else to fuck her, wants to claim her sexuality entirely for himself, and be the one who chooses whether or not that sexuality is ever acted upon. And of course, it is all irrevocably tied up in violence. There is something really startling about letting Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio play that moment, to ultimately give her the power not just to stand up to her monstrous brother, but to hold up a mirror and force him to look at what he is and what he has done. And that mirror is, by extension, held up to the audience, too. Scarface is a film absolutely self-aware of how overwhelmingly ugly it is, even as it knows all the buttons to press to entertain, titillate, and fascinate us. It is a cornucopia of the worst parts of ourselves laid bare in an all-you-can-eat buffet prepared to taste delicious and to then make us violently ill. If one did somehow come away from this movie with an easy, simple reaction, that person would be watching it wrong. The film exists to challenge.
It’s no surprise to me that Martin Scorsese became a champion for Scarface when its early critical reaction was so mixed and controversial, because as much as it is indebted to Scorsese’s own revival of the crime drama in the 1970s, the film is also an obvious inspiration on Goodfellas and The Wolf of Wall Street, two movies that are similarly built on the contradictory impulses of making an amoral lifestyle look appealing while damning the viewer for letting themselves be appealed to. Scorsese does a cleaner job of it, a more coherent and respectable job, but I’d be prepared to guess he himself would admit there’s something even more honest in just how uninhibited Scarface is, how messy and ugly and over-the-top is component parts are, and how the whole is irreducible to any one-line takeaways.
Whatever else you might say about it, Scarface is undeniably potent. It is a cinematic Molotov cocktail, concocted to explode on impact and leave flaming wreckage in its wake. I don’t know what, exactly, to do with it, but I am fascinated and compelled by its existence, by its role in the last 40 years of pop culture, by the adeptness with which it both indicts and entertains. It is the cinematic equivalent of the mountain of cocaine covering Tony’s desk at the end of the movie: inhaling it will make you experience new sensations and indulge in carnal pleasures your everyday inhibitions would otherwise prevent, but you are going to feel incredibly sick afterwards, and the more time you spend snorting, the worse it’s going to feel.
NEXT WEEK: Anticipating the release of Tim Burton’s Beetlejuice Beetlejuice in theaters, we look back at the original Beetlejuice from 1988, and try not to say his name three times. Here’s a look at the full line-up for September!
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