Reverse Shot
Everything about Carlito’s Way (1993) is improbable, starting with the fact that it’s a masterpiece. On paper, it sounds like a glossy Nineties Hollywood version of a cheapo B-picture that, 50 years earlier, would have been labeled “a programmer,” and for that reason, its initial reviews tended to be negative or somewhat dismissively positive (variations on “You’ve seen it all before, but it’s still fun”). My own Dallas Observer review—written by a young man who had a lot more living to do—hewed to this superficial reading; thirteen years and many viewings later, it’s high on the list of verdicts I wish I could take back. (The older you get, the wiser, it seems.) Sure enough, though—as invariably happens with Brian De Palma’s movies—audiences grew to admire and ultimately adore Carlito’s Way. They looked past the film’s surfaces and got lost in its depths; within seven years of its release, Cahiers du Cinema named it the best film of the Nineties.
There’s no denying that the story is primordially familiar: Carlito Brigante (Al Pacino), a notorious heroin dealer sprung from prison on a technicality, re-enters society determined to build a new, law-abiding identity with his girlfriend but gets pulled back into street life and pays the ultimate price. Yet Carlito’s Way is complex, resilient, and uncannily moving. Its power originates not just in director De Palma’s command of technique—a given, even in his films that don’t work—but in his determination to take his hero at his word and demand that audiences do the same. It treats cliches not as storytelling shortcuts, but as metaphors for personal struggle.
The film’s intent announces itself in its bracketing scenes, which shows his ruthless young rival, Benny Blanco (John Leguizamo), assassinating him on a train platform— mere seconds, we later learn, before he can escape to the tropics with his pregnant girlfriend, Gail (Penelope Ann Miller). By showing us exactly how and when Carlito died, and giving us a lingering three-quarters view of Benny’s face so we know who killed him, then segueing into the hero’s ruminative, at times bemused, deathbed narration, which will continue for two-plus hours, De Palma clarifies the film’s intent: its primary action is internal, psychological. The opening tells us, definitively, that this movie is not about what happens to Carlito, but what happens within Carlito.
This description makes the film sound like a tragedy (De Palma’s specialty). But it doesn’t play that way. For a director who specializes in operatic portraits of impotence, violation, and dashed dreams, Carlito’s Way is radically optimistic—as foursquare and impassioned as its closing song, Joe Cocker’s “You Are So Beautiful.” With the possible exception of Mission to Mars (De Palma’s own E.T.), no other De Palma film is so unapologetically bullish on free will—on peoples’ capacity to alter, or at least redirect, their supposed destiny and even remake their personalities from the ground up. As adapted by screenwriter David Koepp (Jurassic Park) from two novels by Edwin Torres, Carlito’s Way is—no kidding—a story of spiritual rebirth: a mythic western in Seventies crime thriller drag about a man who realizes, deep into his forties, that the thug life he’d killed to create is in fact an imitation of life—not just immoral and shallow, but silly and boring.
To Read the Rest of the Essay
No comments:
Post a Comment