Scarface Review
Essay Preview: Scarface Review
Report this essay
SCARFACE, Brian De Palmas update of the 1932 classic directed by Howard Hawks and written by Ben Hecht, is the most stylish and provocative – and maybe the most vicious – serious film about the American underworld since Francis Ford Coppolas Godfather. In almost every way, though, the two films are memorably different.
This Scarface, which was written by Oliver Stone, contains not an ounce of anything that could pass for sentimentality, which the film ridicules without mercy. The Godfather is a multigenerational epic, full of true sentiment. Scarface, which is actually a long film, has the impact of a single, breathless anecdote, being about one young hoods rapid rise and fall in the southern Florida cocaine industry.
Where the Coppola film worked on our emotions in unexpected ways, discovering the loves and loyalties that operated within one old Mafia dons extended family, Scarface is a relentlessly bitter, satirical tale of greed, in which all supposedly decent emotions are sent up for the possible ways in which they can be perverted.
Scarface opens today at the National and other theaters.
To someone who never felt completely at ease with Mr. De Palmas flashy, big-budget exercises in grand guignol (Carrie, The Fury), or even with his far more witty and more successful Dressed to Kill and Blow Out, which were as important as examples of film criticism as they were as films, Scarface should be a revelation. Here is a movie of boldly original design that looks like some crazy cinematic equivalent to those gaudy Miami Beach hotels, the ones with inappropriately elegant names and interior decorations that suggest that Madame du Barry might have been Louis XVs minister of culture.
Tony Camonte, the Chicago gangster in the 1932 Scarface, the role of the Italian-American mob boss that made Paul Muni a major star, is now called Tony Montana and played by Al Pacino with such mounting intensity that one half expects him to self- destruct before the films finale. Though a busy performance, its not a mannered one, meaning that its completely controlled.
The new Scarface is a small-time Cuban punk, one of supposedly hundreds among the 125,000 or so legitimate refugees that the Castro Government allowed to immigrate to Florida in the spring of 1980. Quick- witted, hollow-eyed Tony Montana hasnt one redeeming feature, but his greed and ambition are so all-consuming that they are heroic in size if not in quality.
Tony has absolutely no compunction about murdering for profit, which quickly endears him to a Batista Cuban refugee who is the chief of the Bolivia-to-Florida cocaine traffic. In almost less time than it takes to write this synopsis, Tony has succeeded his former mentor and married the now-dead mans mistress, Elvira, a silky blonde junkie played by Michelle Pfeiffer, a beautiful young actress without a bad – or even an awkward – camera angle to her entire body.
Mr. Stone follows the general outlines of the Hecht screenplay with at least one notable difference. Tonys fall comes not only because he ignores the underworld maxim to the effect that one should never underestimate the other mans greed. To his misfortune, he also ignores a second rule: Dont get high on your own supply. This is a major switch on the work of Hecht, who might have guffawed at the suggestion that Al Capone, Chicagos most powerful Prohibition gangster, might have been done in by alcoholism, though Capone did have syphilis.
Mr. De Palma never understates anything when overstatement will work better. Never is this more evident than in the last quarter of the film, in which we are treated to the spectacle of the paranoid, cocaine-addicted Tony Montana as he loses control of himself and his