Carlito’s Way (1993)

Rewatched 5/23/24 (Blu-ray)

As I have aged, so too, in my estimation, has the fine-wine collection of films directed by Brian De Palma. What was originally seen by my younger self as a distracting, pretty awkward overabundance of style now plays as a fascinatingly-egotistical, time-period-unique, stunningly-edited resume. The big question is: Did De Palma purposefully populate his scripts with such obviousness and hyperbole in an effort to un-immerse the viewer and force the focus on his direction? Was he that self-centered?

So often does modern cinema seek to transport the viewer into another world. Did De Palma simply seek to transport them into the world of his camerawork?

Is that why Carlito sounds off in such cheeseball fourth wall breaks? Is that why Ethan Hunt employs such a vocal, sweaty thought process? Is that why every bullet or knife that enters a body is answered by such a bright scarlet rainbow of blood? Is that why Brian “DP” employed first-person POV and extended tracking shots with such aggression? Because it makes you realize this is not a story but a mechanism. A pieced-together marriage of sight and sound known as a film.

It’s an overtly energetic filmmaking style that is also the most blatantly cinematic of any of De Palma’s peers. You don’t feel the world the characters are living in; you feel the movie they’re living in. Even Spielberg and Scorsese, with all their fancy tricks, don’t employ them in nearly as raw of an overkilled fashion as De Palma. Perhaps that oh-so-over-the-top dialogue is the cherry on top to make you notice how painstakingly creative the direction is.

If the films were any less committed to the bit, I’d be harsher on them. But no… De Palma is so head-over-heels in tune with his bizarro, psychosexually-charged characters and the testosterone-fueled showmanship of his shot selection that when it all comes together in the editing bay, it is clearly the work of a generational, if regressive, talent, and one that has not suffered a comparable imitator in recent memory.

De Palma was (maybe still is?) the brilliantly shameless ripoff and evolution of Hitchcock. DP’s run was magically, somehow educationally retrograde and thus was a thesis for young people to study the role of director at its most unfiltered, fully post-code. At the risk of hyperbolizing just as De Palma would, his is a filmography that unabashedly shaves realism in exchange for stagey, fanatic-level formal dedication and explicit taboo. When everyone else in his class was evolving with the times to make these very commercial blockbusters, De Palma was building upon the oldest possible influences while playing with their ultra-noticeable dialogue and implementing an avant-garde luridness. A risky, ultimately rewarding venture, it takes some people a while to see it for what it is—me included—but there is a savage, dedicated, ambitious love of movie history at play in De Palma’s noisy, anachronistic, voyeuristic auteurism. It’s goddamn fun, is what it is.

8.75/10