The Responsive Eye:
A Brian De Palma Retrospective
CARLITO'S WAY
Screened May 27, 2001
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Notes
CARLITO'S WAY
Universal,
1993, 141 mins.
"A Revelation: Carlito's Way", compiled by Fiona A. Villella, from
the on-line film journal Senses of Cinema (Issue #6, May 2000)
(www.sensesofcinema.com):
CARLITO'S WAY combines classic
American storytelling with a strong dose of soul. It is a film about the
act of running toward a dream with a speeding bullet right behind you
and the excruciating moment when the dream is lost forever. Never has
a film illustrated these themes with such qualities of energy, intensity
and grace in every aspect of its mise en scène. In order to arrive at
a real appreciation and understanding of the film, a call was recently
put out for "impressionistic" paragraphs on specific key moments or broad,
poetic themes relating to CARLITO'S WAY. The following lexicon is a collage
of diverse perspectives that illuminate particular aspects of this wonderful
and beautiful film.
There
is much much in CARLITO'S WAY that tells us it is a Brian De
Palma film. The mirrors in which Carlito sees Gail's nakedness or an approaching
killer (reflected in a pair of glasses), like the elevator mirror in which
Nancy Allen sees the marauding madwoman in DRESSED TO KILL (1978). The
overwhelming extreme close-ups of faces, so integral to De Palma's style.
The vigorous 'multi-ethnic' comedy of bad manners and vulgar kitsch. The
casting 'typage': all those wonderfully heavy-set tough guys and trashy
dames. The remarkable long-take camera movements, explored earlier in
DRESSED TO KILL and BODY DOUBLE (1984) and technically enhanced
later (via Steadicam) in SNAKE EYES (1998) and MISSION TO MARS (2000):
shots that follow the protagonist laterally, in front or behind, sometimes
moving to show what he sees, at other moments leaving him altogether to
go somewhere else and circle back. On many levels, CARLITO'S WAY is a
companion piece to SCARFACE (1983), sharing Pacino, a criminal milieu,
disco music. And yet CARLITO'S WAY is also a special film in De Palma's
career. While it has many intricate games with sight, knowledge and power,
it boasts few overtly 'Hitchcockian' touches. Despite the red, white and
blue colour-scheme and several props reminding us of the national flag,
CARLITO'S WAY is less grandly 'about' America than SCARFACE (or Coppola's
GODFATHER series). It is De Palma's most 'human' and intimate, his tenderest
and most affecting film: its hero, Carlito, is the noblest, most decent,
least lascivious or amoral of all his protagonists; and its heroine, Gail,
is neither a sex-doll (like Carla Gugino in SNAKE EYES) nor a wily, dry
street-dame with a heart of gold (Nancy Allen's speciality). De Palma
has long been acclaimed (by Pauline Kael, especially) as an exuberantly
'pop' artist, but Carlito's Way invests its clichés, its generic and pulp
elements (ex-crim dragged in for one last job, crooked lawyer, pregnant
girlfriend) with a rare sense of gravity and poetry. A melancholic note
reminiscent of Leone's ONCE UPON A TIME IN AMERICA (1984) dominates, especially
in the many scenes of Carlito gazing from a distance at his beloved. And
it is the only De Palma film in which a central plot intrigue is boldly
forfeited: we know from the first moment that Carlito will die, that he
will never 'touch his dream', that a lifetime of violence will finally
catch up with him, no matter how fast or magnificent his flight. (Adrian
Martin, film critic for The Age [Melbourne], and author of the BFI publication
Once Upon a Time in America).
With
this lyrical film, De Palma achieves a kind of immortality
through the creation of Film as Art. Never really as cold and calculating
as his detractors would have you believe, De Palma builds on the humanist
line he introduced into his work with BLOW OUT, in 1981. Once again he
calls on cinematic technique to serve the higher purpose of illuminating
his characters and their fleeting passage through life, but here adds
a translucent, tremulous note of poignancy and doomed longing that haunts
his already haunted protagonist. Pacino's ex-crim hell-bent on going straight
could be Tony Montana from SCARFACE (1983), older and wiser. He's seen
the light now, but the light hasn't quite seen him, or if it has so has
too much darkness. Death looms from the outset and comes full circle to
claim its own. He's on a road for which there is but one exit. In essence,
Carlito is trying to outrun the cold hard metal lodged in his being. All
of his life flashes before his eyes in a last bid to hold onto that elusive,
one and only truth: the love of a beautiful woman and the paradise it
promises. The film it inspired: the elegiac Turkish film, ESKIYA (THE
BANDIT ), directed by Yavuz Turgul in 1996. (Dmetri Kakmi, critic
and essayist. He currently works as an editor for Penguin Books Australia.)
The Ghost is a major prototype in contemporary
cinema. The cinema, of course, didn't invent this specter. But nowadays
it is populated by ghosts that aren't the shadow of anything else, like
someone dead or divine, or from some mysterious elsewhere. They are ghosts
in themselves and to themselves. The appearance of such creatures defies
the distinction between life and death. They perpetually shed their skin
as they move through the world, allowing the most extraordinary narrative
extravagances: Cosmo Vitelli in THE KILLING OF A CHINESE BOOKIE (John
Cassavetes, 1978), the crowd of rollerskaters in HEAVEN'S GATE (Michael
Cimino, 1980), Clint Eastwood as the PALE RIDER (1985) or William Munny
in UNFORGIVEN (1992), the protagonist of DEAD MAN (Jim Jarmusch,
1996), even Ace Rothstein in CASINO (Martin Scorsese, 1996), driven by
lack of love... They come like troubled souls, unable to achieve either
existence or disappearance, pursued by a profane destiny which they resist
with all their weightlessness. The cinema today produces such figures
en masse, but they are not all negative or defective; quite the contrary.
Some of them are the strongest figures of assertion the cinema hass ever
produced, because they reverse "the striving from this world to the other
into a striving from another world to this one" (1). These ghosts would
really like to be their body, their here and now, they want to become
it. The first sequence after the prologue in CARLITO'S WAY gives the most
euphoric demonstration to date of this: Carlito Brigante in court describes
his reformation, his personal development, his resolutions, thanking each
assistant and 'playing up' to the crowd like an actor receiving an Oscar.
We assume that he is mocking this world and yet-and this is a significant
event in the cinema of De Palma-we end up understanding, deeply, that
he told the truth, that he was truly a lover of life. Thus the cinema
snatches (arracher) a 'creature' from the realm of artifice, and attaches
(attacher) it to itself. (1) Friedrich Hölderlin, "Remarks on Antigone",
in Friedrich Hölderlin: Essays and Letters on Theory, trans. & ed. Thomas
Pfau, Albany: State University of New York Press, 1988, p. 112 (Nicole
Brenez, author of Shadows [Nathan, 1995] and programmer of experimental
cinema for the Cinémathèque Française. )
In
the club Paraiso, by refusing the champagne bottle sent over
to him by Benny Blanco, Carlito 'sends back' the image of his bad double.
On the station platform, it isn't the bullets which kill Carlito but that
offer from the young gangster-an offer which, in a state of exhaustion,
Carlito ends up accepting. The gun barrel, with its protruding scarf of
white silk, is identical to the towel which covers the bottle in the night
club; the muffled gun explodes like the opening of a bottle; and the bullets
emerge like a champagne cork. In his white clothing, Benny-whose name
evokes the whiteness of a shroud-is the reappearance of the white Carlito
(as seen in the brief Laline flashback), he is the phantom which Carlito-in-black
attempts to flee in his second chance at a future. The bottle opens: one
figure is reincarnated, the other must disappear. It is now Benny Blanco's
turn to 'send back' Carlito. (Nicolas Viallard, a contributor to Admiranda
and a member of the Zone Frontière collective.)
The story of Dave Kleinfeld, lawyer—Sean
Penn in one of his most memorable and least recognisable roles—represents
the revolt of the servile, bureaucratic middle-classes. In the opening
seconds of his dialogue with Tony T in jail, he is made to take menial
orders ("write this down"). He is threatened, bullied, scared incessantly.
Dave suffers a complex kind of class envy: he cannot stand taking such
orders ("in my office") from these underworld 'scum' who in fact enable
him to become rich; the higher he climbs up the ladder of upward mobility,
the more he surrenders to his petty fantasy of revenge. Dave is an anxious,
unconscious fag (witness his Latino style disco moves, the soft and pampered
body almost visible through the tailored three-piece suits, the nearly
effeminate swish of his hips canceling out the wannabe tough-guy swagger
and, most fantastically, that curly red hair so at odds with the milieu
he aspires to), and he does not take to a life of excess terribly well:
cocaine 'liberates' him for a quickie in the toilet with Benny Blanco's
girl, but, soon enough, renders him impotent and paranoid. Even his new-found,
street-style recklessness—pulling a gun on Benny-is fatally misplaced.
The greatest glee of his short life is to reverse the taunts he has suffered,
condemning Tony T, for instance, to the same grim, underwater fate that
he wielded as a threat. The avenging Italian gangsters, however, know
how to give Dave a poetically just reward: as he receives a knife in the
chest at the office elevator, he is given a message from Tony T that echoes
the very first menial command: "Hold that for him". And Carlito completes
the cycle of retribution by ensuring that, when destiny arrives, Dave
will only be shooting blanks. (Adrian Martin)
In his films, Brian De Palma ingeniously
constructs entire scenes that resemble each other as in a mirror, but
with all the crucial elements somehow shifted, switched, transformed.
This creates an unfolding dramatic structure which is full, satisfying
and surprising, and also completely cinematic. Two special scenes in CARLITO'S
WAY play out a complex 'mirror' relationship. The early scene of Carlito
and his young cousin doing business in a large, back room sets up Carlito
as the master of vision, a canny split-second strategist, and the controller
of territory—a classic position for a screen gangster for, as he
solemnly states at a key moment of the film, "when you can't see the angles
no more, you in trouble". Carlito glimpses and intuits everything that
is going on in the pool room, mentally 'maps' the whole space, while his
giggling, naive cousin sees nothing. Then he springs into action, surreptitiously
'setting the scene' for his 'trick shot' at the pool table, moving a guy
into position so that he can see reflected in his glasses the killer emerging
from the bathroom. The later boat scene in which Dave kills Tony T and
his son Frankie (Adrian Pasdar) uncannily recalls the pool scene in several
details. Carlito is once again the 'tag along' guy, and again the question
"who's he?" is asked in irritation. The stick that Carlito holds out to
Tony ironically resembles the pool cue he wielded so dexterously before.
The shocking sight of blood appearing from Tony's head recalls the uniformly
blood-red walls of the pool room (and the redness-as-shock spectacle chimes
in with the boat's name, 'Jezebel', recalling the 1938 film of that title
in which Bette Davis enters a ballroom scandalously wearing a red dress).
But now, precisely because Carlito is no longer on land, no longer in
command of a 'turf' he knows or recognizes, one in which he can bluff
his way through even when his gun is empty, he is literally 'at sea' (not
a member of the 'boating class' like Dave, he dresses inappropriately
for the ride and does not even know the meaning of the command to 'cast
off'). Carlito finds his position in this new scene totally reversed.
This open-air space is completely clogged by fog; Carlito keeps complaining
that he 'can't see'. He is no longer 'in position' to glimpse or figure
out anything; his back is turned when Dave brutally attacks Tony T, and
he has no clue that, on the top deck, Dave has already killed Frankie.
In fact it is Dave who is now the 'director' of the action, shuffling
people into position, controlling the movements of the boat, and ordering
Frankie to 'keep his eye' on the light, just as Carlito earlier ordered
the pool player to keep his eye on the ball. Only when Carlito is back
in his club-an earthbound space designed to look like a boat-can he regain
control by 'knowing the angles', using his office as an overlooking surveillance
post, weaving his labyrinthine way through crowds along corridors and
stairways, and eventually using a bar to render him momentarily invisible
while he ducks down a trap door. Even more importantly, Carlito here re-learns
the need to act upon and trust his keen instincts, as he so spectacularly
failed to do on board Dave's boat, suspecting catastrophe but going ahead
anyway (as he muses in voice-over, a "bad move"). (Helen Bandis, Melbourne-based
screenwriter.)
Dancing
pervades CARLITO'S WAY, as indeed it has pervaded the gangster
genre since the '30s. But more than that, this film is a dance. And it's
not just Gail's occupation and dream, or the recurrence of a motif. Despite
his protestations, Carlito is the dancer of this film. And De Palma knows
this, just as he knows Pacino is the perfect dancer. There's nothing quite
so cinematic as Pacino following or leading a Steadicam: his every movement
through the club, to the disco of the 1970'ss, a part of this dance. He
is someone who can still sway to the rhythms of the camera under the weight
of a life that has taken its toll. We see him lift his feet, give his
hips an extra shake, but like an athlete summoning that little extra to
get across the line, it is only the mustering of a remembered vitality.
Because Carlito is old now. And older than his years. He no longer pursues
the original gangster's perversion of the American Dream. Once, but that
lead to prison. His is the dream of retirement, selling Ford Pintos in
Florida. He is no wallflower, he never was. The streets and clubs were
his dance floor and he moved with the best of them. But now he would be
happy to just sit it out, just as he chooses to watch Gail from the side
of the dance floor. But for Carlito the dance can only end one way. (Michael
Cohen, Master of Arts candidate, in Cinema Studies at Latrobe University,
Melbourne)
A silent, avant garde film of the 1970's,
John Dunkley-Smith's TRAIN FIXATION, plonked a camera at a good spot to
observe the cross-movement of multiple trains in a humble patch of suburbia:
glimpses of the landscape through a play of windows evoked both a camera's
framing and a projector's shutter mechanism. At a completely different
level of production, using narrative conventions that allow unprecedented
virtuosity, but with a similarly childlike (and self-reflexive) sense
of wonder and enquiry, De Palma stages a long tour de force of trains
and stations at the climax of CARLITO'S WAY. The movement of train carriages
from every kind of angle-laterally tracked while the train stands still,
hurling past a static set-up, seen from within as a POV shot barrels down
the aisle-produces flicker, blackouts, momentary obscurings and dazzling
'reveals'. The choreography of the action (thanks to a fat gangster who
can't keep up with the pack) allows dynamic cutting between two lines
that will eventually meet in collision. The architecture of the station
itself (zones, levels, pillars, escalators, a cluster of balloons), like
the lay-out of the platform and the internal design of a train, creates
a hide-and-seek game of bodies: Carlito ducks behind a wall, under the
train window and finally lays out flat on the escalator (unseen from across
the adjacent escalator, but finally spotted from above by the fat man).
From DRESSED TO KILL and BLOW OUT (1981) to THE UNTOUCHABLES (1987) and
MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE, De Palma has cultivated a true cineaste's love for
trains and stations-not only for the fireworks of their cinematic possibilities,
but also because they function as (to quote Eustache's La Maman et la
putain, 1973) a "locus of transitions", a site where multiple lives, stories
and destinies pass each other, intersect or not, and-as in this case-sometimes
cancel each other out. (Adrian Martin)
A
woman leaves a city building. It is raining and she carries
an umbrella. Where is she going as she hurries down the street? Next we
see a man standing in a doorway, struggling in vain to stay dry, he pulls
up his collar. Intent on following the woman, he runs after her. What
a strange scene De Palma sets up for us. Let's call it a dream space because
it is full of familiar things rendered unfamiliar. There is the sound
of rain falling steadily, hypnotically. The plaintive soundtrack echoes
the voice-over which precedes the scene: Carlito's reverie on his and
Gail's love. The street is dark and there are none of the usual signs
of city life, only the facades of buildings recalling a movie set. THE
UMBRELLAS OF CHERBOURG (1964) or SINGIN' IN THE RAIN (1952) are gently
evoked. We are going to follow this man and woman. They cross a road,
the cars lined up at the traffic lights. The cars take off in an ordered
progression, their colors (white, blue, yellow, red) as stylized as their
movement. The physical world has lost any sense of threat and been ordered
into a benign and orchestrated surround for the emotions. The woman enters
the building. The man looks around him at the opposite building for a
vantage point (is he afraid she will see him?). Effortlessly, magically,
the camera scales the building to reveal a ballet class in progress. The
man enters through a door onto the roof opposite. Carlito is on the roof.
He scans the space, grabs a trash can lid and holds it above his head,
protecting himself from the rain. What does he see? Ballerinas dance in
front of a mirror like a jewel box where a child's treasures are kept.
As the camera slowly moves closer one dancer is singled out and, never
breaking the spell, the camera lovingly and slowly unites them. Image
mirrors image in an illusion of a single shot drawing their bodies closer.
No rhythm is broken: the trajectory of the camera unites the shots, classical
music silences the falling rain. A close up on Carlito. Now that the lid
is framed out of the shot, Carlito's hand mirrors perfectly Gail's final
gesture in the dance. Here is a De Palma mirroring at its most poetic
and moving. This is more than a simple opposition of the gutter and the
stars. Gail's dream for herself, of a place where harmony and beauty are
possible, is never in doubt for Carlito. For him she is harmony and beauty,
"the face that still knows ya", in that place where love can take us.
(Grant McDonald, cinema studies student, Melbourne University.)
Oye,
Carlito, things have changed. They fuck at summer homes and
wear purple ties. Mustaches have tightened and plays run unseen. Can you
reconcile two names? The rhythms of business? Try to catch up with a past,
and in the speed of betrayal, you're doomed to fulfill a flashback. A
dream is a destiny if you run fast enough, and when the salsa gives out
there's a moment: a gun from a cloth under fluorescents. (Michael Price,
graduate student in Boston University's Film Studies program.)
De
Palma's art is the art of appearance and disappearance. It
is a magical form of prestidigitation, practised by both the filmmaker
and his characters: from SISTERS (1973) through to MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE
(1996) and SNAKE EYES, via sleight-of-hand, something is made to suddenly
disappear or, inversely, what was there all along, unnoticed by the spectator,
is suddenly, dazzlingly revealed, brought to light. CARLITO'S WAY is shaped,
from end to end, by its system of apparitions and erasures, its decisions
as to what to move off screen and bring on screen. Some we don't notice
because the plot is flying and the scene's center is intensifying: like
the dancing girls in the pool room (gone just like the diegetic music
they were dancing to), or Benny Blanco's sudden absence from the train
platform once he has shot Pachanga. Some sleights-of-hand are part of
the plot and its intrigue: Dave's hidden crowbar on board his boat; Carlito
emptying Dave's gun in the hospital as he keeps on rapping. Some are craft-based,
superb touches of narrative economy and condensation: the pan up the building
where Gail practices her ballet covering the time and energy it takes
Carlito to get up to the top of the building opposite. Some are only available
for our astonishment on a second viewing: the incredible shot of Benny
Blanco entering frame and running ahead of Carlito on the train station
before we know he's there. Appearance and disappearance are inextricably
and indelibly linked by De Palma to narrative point-of-view and its vicissitudes:
who sees and knows what. Primarily at stake is Carlito's control of his
'own' story, claimed by him in first-person voice-over, but often escaping
him-in details (neither we nor Carlito see Dave's murder of Tony T's son)
and in chunks (several scenes involving Dave and the DA; glimpses of the
soon-to-be-renegade Pachanga). The voice-over itself appears and disappears
(this is a game of sound as much as image), carving out for Carlito his
interiority, his perspective and his love story (the presence of Gail
in his life goes unremarked during the film's first half hour, until he
is moved to do so in voice-over), but also subtly setting the limits to
his power and his dreams. Most strikingly, the text of his voice-over
changes radically as it plays over identical shots (the first in black
and white, the second in color) at the start and end of the film. At the
start, suspended between life and death, between heaven and earth, Carlito
tells us that his heart isn't about to give out; at the end, he tells
us he is tired, draining away, and at last his eyes close. Carlito is
a true cinematic apparition: he only lasts as long as he has a story to
tell, a world and a life to conjure. (Adrian Martin)
The
voice-over spoken by Al Pacino as the dying Carlito, gunned
down by "Benny Blanco from the Bronx" on a railway platform, is undoubtedly
one of the finest voice-overs written for the postwar American screen.
The opening blue credit letters superimposed on the film's black and white
photography provide a stark lyrical quality to the doomed Carlito as he
sees the world upside down from his stretcher while being rushed to hospital.
We encounter an inverted neo-noirish black and white world of overhead
strip lighting and inquisitive faces in choker close-ups worthy of Robert
Frank's camera. Pacino's smoky gin-Hispanic-nuanced voice is apt for the
moving Faulknerian undertones of his lyrically laconic and tragic voice-over
of someone trying to escape the urban inferno of his past. The city and
its menacing ambitious night creatures, just like the ambitious punk Benny
Blanco (John Leguizamo) who acts as Carlito's once younger doppelganger,
encircle Carlito who seeks redemption faraway from the larva evil of the
streets (brilliantly rendered in an extraordinary serpentine sequence
of crisscrossing Hispanics as Carlito hits the streets with his innocent
young relative) on a Carribean island running a car rent business. Carlito
dreams, but the city knows better. Pacino paces his voice-over with the
consummate ease of a poet capturing the everyday rhythms, silences and
tensions of city life as Auden's "great wrong place." His words are measured,
clipped and sculptured with the generic hard-boiled familiarity of classic
crime fiction (Hammett/Chandler) and film noir. It is a noble, poignant
doomed voice-over, almost Proustian in its elliptical temporality and
subtlety, that speaks of Carlito's sheer will to exist with a modicum
of self-dignity, somewhere far from the reach of human evil. But (as expected)
his endurance to survive ebbs out like a nocturnal tide revealing Carlito's
past catching up with him. Each time I see and hear Carlito's Way I marvel
at the strong, finely-chiseled performances (Pacino, Penn, Leguizamo)
that will burn you in your seat, but to hear Pacino's words snake their
charm around you is to encounter a multifaceted verbal poetry seldom heard
these days in the American cinema. It is a voice-over that will set the
benchmark for future aspiring filmmakers. To hear it, just once, you will
come back to it—again and again. It is a voice-over that, if I may
say so, Abraham Polonsky would find arresting in its moral resonance and
musicality as American urban speech. (John Conomos, media artist, critic
and writer who lectures in film and media studies at the Sydney College
of the Arts, University of Sydney.)
I
first saw CARLITO'S WAY (1993) shortly after reading two impressive
books-Richard Dyer's Stars (BFI, 1979) and Andrew Britton's Katharine
Hepburn: The Thirties And After (Tyneside Press, 1984). The discovery
that star images were not only worthy of critical investigation, but could
reveal new areas of complexity in works with which I considered myself
thoroughly familiar helped me appreciate aspects of Brian De Palma's film
I would otherwise have missed altogether. Writing about Al Pacino in The
International Dictionary Of Films And Filmmakers (1990 edition), Robin
Wood suggested that Pacino's roles could be divided into two types. On
the one hand, immature characters marked by "nervous energy, vulnerability,
craziness and childishness" (Sidney Lumet's DOG DAY AFTERNOON [1975] and
the two films for Jerry Schatzberg—THE PANIC IN NEEDLE PARK [1971]
and SCARECROW [1973]-provide the best examples, though, to judge from
the clips I have seen, Pacino's own THE LOCAL STIGMATIC—shot piecemeal
throughout the 1980's-also belongs in this category). On the other, mature,
repressed characters, "restrained and understated, the energy held back
by an act of will" (Francis Ford Coppola's THE GODFATHER [1972] and its
1974 sequel, William Friedkin's CRUISING [1980]). Implicit in this opposition
is the assumption that if energy is linked with immaturity, the onset
of maturity must involve a loss of vitality, and De Palma's response to
the implications of Pacino's persona-the way in which the first set of
characters inevitably becomes the second-was already evident in SCARFACE
(1983), wherein Tony Montana (Pacino), initially defined in terms of extreme
(though already corrupted) energy, becomes increasingly immobilized-in
a chair, in a car, in a bath, and face-first in a mountain of cocaine.
The interest of Pacino's recent work, following his brief retirement in
the mid-'80s, resides in the attempt to reconcile energy with maturity:
the central concern of SEA OF LOVE (Harold Becker, 1989), FRANKIE AND
JOHNNY (Garry Marshall, 1991), HEAT (Michael Mann, 1995) and LOOKING FOR
RICHARD (Pacino, 1996). It is even vaguely discernible in the otherwise
execrable SCENT OF A WOMAN (Martin Brest, 1993) and THE DEVIL'S ADVOCATE
(Taylor Hackford, 1997). The failure of this attempt becomes the explicit
subject of this period's two masterpieces—Coppola's THE GODFATHER
PART III (1990) and De Palma's CARLITO'S WAY—and it is significant
that both films use the same strategy, projecting the negative aspects
of Pacino's persona onto subsidiary characters: Vincent Mancini (Andy
Garcia), Joey Zasa (Joe Mantegna) and Don Altobello (Eli Wallach) in the
Coppola; Dave Kleinfeld (Seann Penn), Vinnie Taglialucci (Joseph Siravo)
and Benny Blanco (John Leguizamo) in the De Palma. In each case, the structure
is rendered explicit: Coppola stresses Don Altobello's function as a representative
of what Michael Corleone (Pacino) might become by having him boast (in
a scene cut from the theatrical release but restored to the video) that
he has "lost all the venom, all the juice of youth. I lost the lust for
women. And now my mind is clear. My duty to God is clear."; at the other
extreme, the psychotically violent Benny Blanco-who, although he possesses
that energy associated with Pacino in Scarecrow and Scarface, has not
a single redeeming feature-is described to Carlito Brigante (Pacino) as
"you twenty years ago". Michael Corleone and Carlito Brigante are respected
figures in criminal underworlds from which they now wish to retire. In
both cases, their plans are frustrated not by character flaws, but by
the inexorable logic of the societies they inhabit. Whereas corruption
in, say, Capra could be purged by the villain's change of heart, the personal
changes undergone by Michael and Carlito inadvertently cause them to set
in motion a series of events, defined as beyond individual control, which
lead to their defeats. This theme is complicated in CARLITO'S WAY by De
Palma's characteristically caustic view of heterosexuality, which he sees
as essentially neurotic. Expanding on the hints of homosexuality that
often accrue to Pacino's characters (DOG DAY AFTERNOON, CRUISING), De
Palma suggests that while Carlito's most intimate relationship is with
Dave Kleinfeld ("If you was a broad I'd marry you"), his affair with Gail
(Penelope Ann Miller) is entirely illusory. For Carlito, Gail remains
an image which, by its very nature, must remain tantalisingly out of reach,
and he is consistently separated from her by windows, door chains, narrative
events and the sheer length of the widescreen frame: to film their single
moment of sexual passion, De Palma selects that complex camera movement-borrowed
from VERTIGO (Alfred Hitchcock, 1958)-he habitually uses to imply surrender
to romantic illusion. But for us, Gail is presented as a fully rounded
individual with an autonomous existence that is the antithesis of Carlito's:
she is practical enough to understand that her dreams of becoming a dancer
can best be achieved by performing in a strip club. The relationship's
attraction for Carlito lies precisely in its artificiality: he can enjoy
making plans which, at some level of consciousness, he knows circumstances
will prevent him from realizing and that, when the time comes, he can
easily abandon (the key moment is Carlito's smashing of the mirror in
which he and Gail had been reflected). Clearly then, this relationship
forms the private component of Carlito's public scheme to sell cars on
a tropical island, and the impracticality of both projects is stressed
by the gesture which connects them: the romance with Gail is summed up
by the "Escape to Paradise" sign (the equivalent of SCARFACE's "The World
is Yours"), while the nightclub Carlito uses to finance his dreams is
called 'El Paraiso'. (Brad Stevens, a UK-based writer on film.)
People
like humanism humanism in the cinema because they are sexually
repressed. To see a human on the screen-brimful of life, vim, vigour-is
to want to fuck it in some way. This is actually good. It's a form of
modern parafilia which has not yet been adequately defined or catalogued
(1). People should consensually fuck anything in anyway whenever they
want. If it comes down to watching arthouse movies with an occasional
young thing in some semi-sensual situation-fine. I like to do my fucking
outside of the cinema. I leave the cult of humanism for those addicted
to emotional pornography. For me, the cinema is only attractive when death
is on the screen. Pathetically yet undeniably, when someone is dying on
the screen, I feel most alive. Not because "there but for the grace of
god go I", but because I know that when I die every death scene in the
cinema will flash by-simultaneously, deafeningly, overwhelmingly. I have
no problem with this whatsoever. Films that start with someone dying are
the best films. Those films state openly and defiantly that their story
is well and truly over. They leave you nowhere to go except to trace the
events which will fatefully and fatally return you to the film's beginning.
Like a morbid virtual-loop from BRAIN STORM (Douglas Trumbull, 1983),
you watch the film to die and die again. When Al Pacino is dying at the
beginning of CARLITO'S WAY, I feel giddy, exhilarated, impassioned. For
it is Al Pacino dying again-not Carlito. Al Pacino is the gracefully impassive
face of death. His visage haunts the cinema as a morbid mask doomed to
die again and again. His breath is the whisper of ghost. His skin has
the tactility to engross a mortician. His hair is like the world's most
perfect wig. He is sexy, heaving, funky, dark-like a doll of dreadful
desire from Necropolis. He ain't no Latin lover, baby. He's El Morte.
CARLITO'S WAY is one of Pacino's best chapters in the cinematic road movie
that is his eternal death. Upside down, in slow motion, color-drained,
across Central Station, fixated on a garish, tacky Caribbean billboard.
He looks into it and sees the same fantasy world which drew him to the
USA from Cuba in Scarface over a decade ago. In Scarface he went out in
a blaze of operatic death-a spectacular demise in neon, disco and velvet.
In CARLITO'S WAY he goes out in fluorescent, strings and vinyl. Pacino
is best when he is drained, is draining, is being drained. His is the
living corpse of exhaustion, and the cinema loves him for this. Everytime
his leather jacket squeaks in Donnie Brasco it is the sound of his bones
calcifying. Everytime he sniffs in SCENT OF A WOMAN it is the sound of
a sheet being pulled across his face. Even in HEAT, he withers as he stalks
Robert De Niro, giving himself heart palpitations as he chases what might
be his own shadow, his own mirror image, his own echo across LA. And in
Looking for Richard, he passionately revives moldy old Shakespeare-not
because the bard is alive and well, but because Pacino knows the grave
repository of psychoses that lines Shakespeare's tomb with figures of
maddened men. To prove his effectiveness as death, Pacino also gives us
the most vital signs of life. His body is a motion machine: it dances,
sways, dives, surges with delicate denouement and dynamic drive. In CARLITO'S
WAY, he defines the art of sitting at a marble club table; waiting in
well-upholstered V-8 cars; walking across busy downtown traffic. He merges
and blends effortlessly in the land of the living. De Niro is a face-a
granite block so compacted that when it is in close-up you can hear the
atoms humming. Pacino is a complete body that can be performed on and
fragmented in so many ways. There are few actors who you can smell on
the screen. Pacino is one of them. CARLITO'S WAY is sublime because of
its rendering of Pacino. It captures him in a palpable holographic frieze
and allows him to breathe, spit, curse, dance, drive, shoot and run. And
best of all, it allows him to die. That is what Al Pacino does best. That
is what the cinema does best. (1)Parafilia-blanket psychological term
for all groupings of pathological and sociopathic forms of aberrant and
'non-normative' sex. Literally means 'beyond love' due to its focus on
de-human, non-human, inhuman and post-human fetishization. In my view,
most forms of acceptable heterosexual sex are extreme repressions of the
wider terrain that fetishists have broken through by engaging with non-human
and non-normative sexual triggers. (Philip Brophy, lectures at RMIT, is
a filmmaker, and also a noted cultural commentator of many years standing.)
Poetry
and irony irony fill the last scene of CARLITO'S WAY. Carlito
departs the platform not in a train, on a one-track route toward a dream,
but on a stretcher, with a piece of metal in his side and a vision quickly
fading. In the final moment before dying, Carlito's life (the part that
leads him directly to where he is now, at least) "flashes" before his
eyes. All he wanted was to go clean and live a modest life. But the inexorable
forces of gangster law and street-bound codes of honour-merciless and
destructive-deny this dream. Like Hitchcock, the filmmaker De Palma was
so heavily influenced by, De Palma constructs CARLITO'S WAY with the viewer
very much in mind. He has crafted a plot based on the principle of ephemerality,
of transience, of allowing a dream to exist only to have it withdrawn.
The profundity and melancholy of CARLITO'S WAY lies in the gesture De
Palma makes that, like the cinema and life itself, Carlito by striving
desperately to make his dream a reality is constantly haunted by death.
In the images of the last scene, we share Carlito's final view of the
world: as it slips from a normal perspective and turns uncontrollably
until settling on the over-head fluorescent lights that pass one by one;
as people in a rushed and panic state huddle round the stretcher fussing
over this "Puerto Rican ass"; as we catch the final glimpse of Carlito's
beloved, Gail who we are painfully pulled away from. She stands alone
on the platform-crying-ready to board that train. That empty space beside
her is where Carlito should be, and together they should board that train
and begin their life together. Carlito/Pacino is an angel, unable to materialize
his dreams, to live his life "his way". Like the viewer who becomes inextricably
immersed in the hopes, the dreams, the "life" of cinema, Carlito will
always be cut off from being able to fully grasp his simple dream and
hopes. There is no other fate for him but death. (Fiona A. Villella, co-editor
of Senses of Cinema.)
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