De Palma

The documentary De Palma (Baumbach & Paltrow 2016) isn't particularly illuminating.  The director, Brian De Palma, sits in front of gaping and cold-looking hearth talking to the camera.  As he speaks, the film shows an anthology of De Palma's greatest hits:  the power-driller murder from Body Double, Angie Dickinson slashed to death in a mirrored elevator in Dressed to Kill, various rape scenes from Casualties of  War and Redacted, the bucket of pig blood scene from Carrie, and the gory explosion of John Cassavetes in The Fury.  De Palma seems guarded and conceals his personal life from the camera -- at one point, he makes the remark that the cinema is his "wife", perhaps, as an explanation of his various marital failures.  Of course, the notion that cinema is a demanding mistress is a cliché and De Palma, for most of his career, has trafficked in various forms of cliché -- in some instances, brilliantly, but, often, in a very derivative way:  he imitates Hitchcock, for instance, to the point of plagiarism, but, generally, without Hitchcock's wit, glamor, and his moral underpinning.  For better or worse, Hitchcock is a moralist -- his films are fables about sin and punishment; by contrast, De Palma is coldly post-modernist -- his films are, generally, transgressive but in the remote style of Pop Art.  De Palma has some good back-stage stories, but he's not naturally eloquent and, in fact, has some curious verbal tics -- he uses the ejaculation "Holy Mackeral!" about seven times in the first half of the film without the listener really understanding what he means by expression:  is he saying that he was surprised or that we should be surprised or that we should be offended?  Of course, his films are famously bloody, but, he defends the gore in his pictures (usually the result of the mutilation of a young woman) as being artificial and unrealistic. (Godard used this defense long ago in interviews about his film Weekend -- "there's no blood in my pictures; what you see is just my use of the color red.")  De Palma notes that his father was an orthopedic surgeon and that he often went to the hospital to see his father operate (which seems questionable to me)-- he says that there was blood everywhere during surgery, a dull substance that dried to a dismal brown color.  By contrast, blood in his films is more colorful, enduring, and decorative.  (This suggests that, perhaps, all the gore in his films is supposed to cancel out the real blood that he saw as a boy in the Philadelphia operating theaters where his father worked -- but the idea is not explored.)  In comparison with Orson Welles, Fellini, or Werner Herzog, De Palma is not a good interview -- he's arrogant and self-serving although he is willing to recognize his failures.  The film is valuable in an archival sense in that it presents a chronology of De Palma's early movies -- counter-cultural and heavily influenced by Godard, these pictures (which have more in common with Rowan and Martin's Laugh-In than Ingmar Bergman) are hard to see and difficult to access.  De Palma made about six snarky political comedies before directing his breakthrough picture Sisters with a very young and translucently beautiful Margot Kidder.  The documentary doggedly goes through De Palma's catalogue, showing memorable scenes from each of his films.  The director doesn't talk much about his curious professional relationship with Pauline Kael -- she was a huge supporter of many of his films and brought them respectability that, perhaps, they didn't deserve. And De Palma doesn't much discuss feminist critiques of the creepy, nightmare voyeurism in his films -- and he steers away from any detailed commentary on the viciously misogynistic violence in his most famous and effective films.  In some ways, De Palma seems to me bizarrely obtuse -- for instance, he argues that he wanted to apply Orson Welles film technique in The Magnificent Ambersons to filming Tom Wolfe's Bonfire of the Vanities -- a manifestly bad idea.  In fact, this notion seems so startlingly off-base as to be surreal. Curiously, De Palma seems most proud of the big-budget films that he made with expensive stars:  he talks at length about the silly and meretricious Mission Impossible film he made with Tom Cruise and, also, asserts that The Untouchables was, perhaps, his best and most fully realized film.  He deplores Scarface a little -- this is odd, but makes sense when we recognize the movie didn't make money when it was first released and only became famous later when it was adopted, as it were, by the hip-hop and rapper crowd.  He's sadly realistic about the fact that filmmaking is a physical job that requires immense stamina and focus -- he admits, it seems, that he's now too old for the game.  In my view, De Palma made three masterpieces Body Double, certainly the most audacious film ever made for a mainstream Hollywood audience:  it's completely disorienting and a great unexpected masterpiece; Blow Out, and the brilliant Phantom of the Paradise (a movie that, for most of my life, has been almost impossible to see -- De Palma explains that this indy film was produced without Errors and Omissions insurance coverage and, almost, immediately got itself tangled up in litigation over copyrights.)  To the extent that the film reminds the viewer of the risks that De Palma took, at least, during the first half of his career -- and the fact that those risks paid off, at least, a third of the time, the documentary is salutary.