Props to Eric! (I think you've already named names here, tho.)
Say ‘Brian De Palma.’ Let the Fighting Start.
By A. O. SCOTT
IF you ever want to start a fight in a room full of film critics — and honestly, who doesn’t? — you might bring up Brian De Palma’s “Mission to Mars.” Released in the spring of 2000, the film is an unusually somber space adventure starring Gary Sinise, Connie Nielsen and Tim Robbins as members of a crew of astronauts encountering danger and mystery on the surface of the red planet.
At first glance it does not seem to be the kind of picture that would incite ferocious controversy, since it contains no sexual provocation, little in the way of graphic violence and few obvious gestures toward topical relevance. A disappointment at the box office, it nonetheless stirred up unusually fierce sentiments among reviewers, or at least among its defenders, who used their regard for the movie as a cudgel against some of their colleagues.
“It can be said with certainty,” Armond White wrote in the weekly New York Press, that anyone panning “Mission to Mars” “does not understand movies, let alone like them.” Charles Taylor in the online magazine Salon, revisiting the movie on the occasion of its release on DVD later that year, sounded a similar note when he declared that “a critic who does not recognize the visual rhapsody” of the film ‘‘is about as trustworthy as a blind dance critic.”
This kind of language arises with arresting frequency in discussions of Mr. De Palma’s work. Almost from the beginning — certainly since he began to receive wide attention with the lurid, unnerving and strangely comical horror thrillers “Carrie” (1976), “The Fury” (1978) and “Dressed to Kill” (1980) — his name has been a critical fighting word. Sometimes the arguments fasten on a particular theme or issue: the sexual violence in “Casualties of War” (1989), for instance, or the general violence, extreme for its time, in “Scarface” (1983). But more often the combativeness of Mr. De Palma’s committed admirers reveals more about the nature of cinephilic ardor than it does about the filmmaker himself. Rock stars have fans; opera singers have worshipers; but movie directors have partisans. Liking a given director’s movies can feel like a matter of principle, not of taste; failing to appreciate them is therefore evidence of cretinism or, at best, a serious moral and intellectual deficiency.
Last month, in anticipation of the release of Mr. De Palma’s new movie, “The Black Dahlia” (which opened on Friday and which stars Josh Hartnett, Scarlett Johansson, Aaron Eckhart and Hilary Swank), the online magazine Slant, a repository of passionate and often prickly pop-cultural analysis, began publishing a series of essays on this director’s oeuvre. Many of those articles — new ones continue to appear at slantmagazine.com/film/features/briandepalma.asp — are packed with insights and ideas. They are also noisy with the din of gauntlets clattering to the ground.
Introducing the De Palma package — called “Auteur Fatale,” a play on the title of his 2002 film, “Femme Fatale” — the critic Eric Henderson tosses down a bucketful, construing Mr. De Palma’s career as a series of face-offs with his uncomprehending and uptight detractors.
“Perpetually a crucible to critics who liked only the most tasteful dash of sensualism mixed in with their rigid formalism,” Mr. Henderson writes, without naming names, “the release of each new De Palma film would inevitably bring forth offended defenses of sacrosanct cinematic aridity, and that was only if he got off easy.” More than that, it seems that his movies have served as a direct riposte to such critical bluestockings: “De Palma’s oeuvre owes at least some part of its brash vitality to the destructivism his critics sparked in the director’s bruised ego,” Mr. Henderson writes.
Whether or not this is true — and I’m not sure it does Mr. De Palma much of a favor to suppose that his creative potency springs from a vendetta against journalists — Mr. Henderson is hardly alone in taking a defiant, oppositional stance in the director’s defense. The tepid early reviews of “The Black Dahlia,” a tangled period noir based on James Ellroy’s novel about a famous 1947 murder case, may be an incitement to further polemics.
But who (or what, since the “critics” who are always imagined to be ganging up on Mr. De Palma are rarely specified or quoted) is being opposed? And in the name of what?
It depends on whom — and when — you ask. Like a number of other American directors, including Robert Altman, Martin Scorsese and Jonathan Demme, who came into their own in the 1970’s and early 80’s, Mr. De Palma, who turned 66 last week, found an important champion in Pauline Kael. Her long, enthusiastic New Yorker reviews of “Carrie,” “The Fury” and “Dressed to Kill” were not only appreciations of his technical skill and sadistic sense of mischief, but also important installments in her long-running polemic against what she took to be a stuffy, condescending way of looking at — or refusing to look at — movies. In many ways Mr. De Palma’s supremely artful approach to horror movies and slasher films was ideally suited to Ms. Kael’s aesthetic commitment to finding exaltation in entertainments too easily dismissed as trash.
In the “Carrie” review, the words trashiness, tawdriness, candy and schlock appear in the space of a few sentences, and none of them are used disapprovingly. They signal how much fun the movie is, and also that the fun is not mindless but knowing. In Ms. Kael’s account, which remains one of her most persuasive reviews, “Carrie” is at once terrifying and funny, satirical and heartfelt, exploitative and implicitly critical of the machinery of exploitation. It draws promiscuously on the movies of the past — in addition to Hitchcock, Ms. Kael invokes Buñuel, “Splendor in the Grass,” “The Bride of Frankenstein” and “The Wizard of Oz” — to arrive at something lively and new.
To put it another way, the movies that secured Mr. De Palma his critical following (which has not, it should be noted, been limited to Ms. Kael’s followers) exhibited many of the attributes of what people would eventually call postmodernism: a cool, ironic affect; the overt pastiche of work from the past; the insouciant mixture of high and low styles. They were also — sometimes playfully, sometimes vertiginously — self-conscious, making you aware of the psychological manipulations inherent in cinema even as they manipulated your own responses with sadistic glee.
Voyeurism, surveillance, the deceitful nature of appearances and the unstable nature of reality: these have been preoccupations of Mr. De Palma’s from the start, so much so that he has sometimes seemed to parody himself. Peeping Toms, mysterious doubles, evil twins, mirrors, video cameras, film clips, tape recordings — all are predictable elements of a De Palma movie.
When too many of them are missing, admirers can find themselves disappointed. Ms. Kael’s review of “Scarface,” for example, was published in The New Yorker under the heading “A De Palma Movie for People Who Don’t Like De Palma Movies.” That the advertisements for “The Black Dahlia” promise a new film “from the director of ‘Scarface’ and ‘The Untouchables’ ” is likely to frustrate true believers, since those two movies, maybe his best known, are also in many ways his least characteristic.
Over all, though, he has remained remarkably consistent. The teasing shock of “Sisters” (1973), with its murderous twins, resurfaces in the underappreciated “Raising Cain” (1992), just as the uncanniness of “Obsession” finds an echo in “Femme Fatale.” (“The Black Dahlia,” though a rare period piece, is nonetheless loaded with the director’s usual themes and visual hallmarks, from the mysterious doubles to the films-within-the-film to the vulnerable and monstrous femmes fatales.) But if he has not changed, his partisans — or at least the terms of their partisanship — have.
Ms. Kael’s celebration of trash has given way to the defense of art. Mr. De Palma, customarily associated with Hitchcock, Dario Argento and other masters of the movie Gothic, is now frequently placed in the company of cinema philosophes like Jean-Luc Godard and Chris Marker. No longer the playful postmodernist, he is now, in the eyes of his admirers, something of a classicist, his critical enemies not high-minded squares but soulless philistines.
In his brief for “Mission to Mars,” Mr. Taylor of Salon claimed that “more than any filmmaker now working, De Palma communicates his meanings almost entirely in visual terms.” The hyperbole in this statement — more than any filmmaker? Steven Spielberg? Wong Kar-wai? — indicates that he sees something at stake beyond the merits of a particular film or filmmaker, namely the continued appreciation of film as a visual medium.
In other words, if you find yourself attending, as professional critics and everyday moviegoers often will, to things like the psychology of characters, the coherence of plot or the plausibility of dialogue, you are missing not only the point, but also the art. And if critics, the presumed protectors of the art, are dismissive of its purest expression, then there is reason to worry, and maybe also to fight.
Even though Mr. De Palma’s detractors are accused of formalism, what elicits rapture from his admirers is in the end nothing other than his formal command. Even in his weakest movies there are moments of intense visual pleasure, in which he moves the camera with the elegant, arrogant virtuosity of a pianist tackling a treacherous passage of Liszt. “The Bonfire of the Vanities,” for instance, can be a chore to sit through — as it was, notoriously, a nightmare to make — but the opening shot, which follows a drunken Bruce Willis on his meandering course from an underground garage, up stairs and elevators, through one change of clothes and several female companions, and into a faceful of poached salmon — well, it will take your breath away, as describing it just did mine.
And Mr. De Palma specializes in choreographing extended set pieces that are variously breathless, breathtaking, heart-stopping and nerve-racking. Even a De Palma dilettante will single out favorites, while the more scholarly will arrange them in motifs. He has, for example, an evident affinity for elevators and stairwells, and for traveling shots in which his camera moves vertically and laterally as if borne aloft by birds or balloons.
He had the nerve to recreate the baby carriage-on-the-stairs sequence from Eisenstein’s “Battleship Potemkin,” in “The Untouchables” (1987). But that scene, in Mr. De Palma’s oeuvre, is just one variation on a theme, part of an anthology that includes the long, intricate chase and shootout in Grand Central Terminal at the climax of “Carlito’s Way” and, most recently, a suite of killings on a marble staircase that forms the centerpiece of “The Black Dahlia.”
Anyone familiar with Mr. De Palma’s work can compile a catalog of marvels, and there seems to be at least one in every picture. (Even “Mission to Mars” skeptics will smile at the image of Mr. Robbins and Ms. Nielsen dancing in zero gravity to Van Halen). But are such moments enough? That, it seems to me, is a case-by-case question of taste, and thus not really a matter for sweeping, all-or-nothing arguments.
In other words, you can like movies just fine and still not like “Mission to Mars.” But behind such combative assertions is a very real worry: that the possibility of recognizing and relishing such moments, and of appreciating the unique visual power of film, is at risk in a culture saturated with cheap, flashy, corrupting images, few of them worthy of a second look. Which is something Mr. De Palma’s films always demand and frequently reward.
Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company
― Dr Morbius (Dr Morbius), Monday, 18 September 2006 13:03 (seventeen years ago) link