Wow, my love letter to Brian De Palma seems to have attracted a few interesting comments that I feel elicit some response. Where to begin …
First of all, Ed said that I shouldn’t judge De Palma on a moment. Just to be clear, my little story about him snubbing me has no impact on the type of movie I think he’ll make. My experience with De Palma did not make me like his earlier films any less nor his more recent films any more. But how can I judge a man treating a fan in a moment? Quite simply. I’m not saying he’s generally a bad person, but he’s obviously not a generous person, at least to his fans. The easiest thing in the world in that kind of situation is not to make a fan feel like an ass, don’t you think? Still, my whole purpose for telling the story was more for simple literary effect. I don’t actually believe that this moment had any impact on Mr. De Palma or that he has a vendetta against me. And I actually find it hard to believe that anyone might read my little blog post in such a serious way.
Then Phyrephox suggested I was underrating Femme Fatale and I should read some of the films positive reviews. I know the film got a lot of good reviews (and I read many of them at the time), but I base my opinions on my own judgments, and as someone who is a huge fan of “good” De Palma, I don’t think I’m underrating Femme Fatale at all. In fact, I think that most people who praised Femme Fatale as some enormous comeback for De Palma simply wanted it to be that and overlooked major holes in the movie. It looks good, sure, but the twist was visible from pretty early on. Plus, as good as Rebecca Romijn looks, she’s just not a strong enough actress to carry a film on her shoulders as she had to do here. There were sequences which were vintage De Palma (such as the opening scene at Cannes), but ultimately, he just took some Body Double and a bit of Antonioni’s Blow Up (which of course he basically remade by crossing it with The Conversation in Blow Out) and then added a dash of Mulholland Drive-like identity swapping (although I realize the last probably wasn’t an influence). It had great elements, but it didn’t add up to a whole, and ultimately it just felt like De Palma trying to recapture his old self but simply going through the motions. And by the way, the idea of the double worked much better in his own earlier films, including Sisters and The Fury.
Finally, CJK also thought Femme Fatale was “excellent” and talked about enjoying elements of Mission: Impossible. I actually liked Mission: Impossible a lot too, but I’ve always found myself to be in the minority. Even a lot of people who liked it seem to think the story was very confusing. I thought he did a good job with it, but it still didn’t feel like a De Palma picture, even if he did manage to include some familiar elements. I take issue with your praise of it as having “some wonderful set pieces” not because I disagree but because to me that’s not enough. And I feel that’s the same thinking that makes people praise Femme Fatale. Are our expectations for De Palma so diminished now that he doesn’t have to make a great movie? He just has to stick some great parts into an otherwise messy film?
I think CJK also gave too little credit to Kevin Costner by intimating that De Palma had some role in pulling an extraordinary performance out of him in The Untouchables. Costner, in the right role, is actually a great actor, and Elliott Ness was a perfect role for him. Costner (in my opinion) is an awful, overbearing director, but as an actor in Silverado, Bull Durham and The Untouchables, he was perfect. Hartnett, on the other hand, has absolutely no personality or talent and is just plain awful. Thankfully, the Paul Walker talk, I believe, is still just a rumor because he’s even worse than Hartnett.
Just one final note on De Palma: I was having a conversation with a friend of mine who calls De Palma his favorite director, and I was further explaining my theory about the decline in his work. Yes, just like I have a theory about Martin Scorsese being more enthusiastic about his documentary work than his narrative films, I have a theory about why De Palma seems to be directing by numbers.
I believe De Palma hit his peak with The Untouchables and Casualties of War. (You want to talk about an underrated film? Please don’t mention Femme Fatale. Talk about Casualties of War!) His next film was Bonfire of the Vanities, and I think he took a big risk with it. Here was a major best seller, loved by just about everyone who read it and given this major budget. It was his first truly big Hollywood film, expected to be a blockbuster. He decided to put his own unique spin on the story; trying to instill his own personality into the story and the film. But somehow, he lost control of the picture, and what resulted wasn’t simply a movie few people liked but instead a huge story of Hollywood excess and colossal failure. In fact, the story of the failure of Bonfire of the Vanities became famous due to the successful book The Devil’s Candy in which writer Julie Salamon detailed the problems of the production.
I think Bonfire took a lot out of De Palma. His films had never made him a mainstream Hollywood success. For the longest time, he was just that guy who made Hitchcock films even scarier. Carrie was successful, but that just made him a horror director. The Untouchables was the first film to make people look at him differently. It allowed him to make Casualties of War, but unfortunately that film came out after a glut of Vietnam movies had already flooded the marketplace, and it was a commercial failure. It also was a movie that had people criticizing the casting of Michael J. Fox (who was great, by the way) without even having seen the film. Bonfire was the first film he had with an A-List cast. The Untouchables is the film that gave Connery box office clout again; Costner hadn’t been the lead in anything of note yet; and De Niro, while well-respected, wasn’t really a huge box office draw. But with Bonfire, he had Tom Hanks, Bruce Willis and Melanie Griffith at the heights of their star power. Willis was hot off the first two Die Hard films, Griffith was still basking in the glow of Working Girl, and Hanks had just broken through with Big.
But it failed. And it lost money. And if anyone got blamed, it was De Palma. I wonder if he’s never really gotten over the relative disaster that was Bonfire. The next film he made, Raising Cain was entertaining, but he’d also made much of it before in Dressed to Kill — just substitute John Lithgow for Michael Caine. Carlito’s Way was just another story in the same mode as Scarface, this time even using the same lead actor, Al Pacino. He was making films he had really already made because he knew he could make those well-enough. And he’d get paid. Then came Mission: Impossible, Snake Eyes and Mission to Mars. The last of those is quite simply one of the absolutely worst movies of the last few years. It’s painful, agonizingly so, to watch.
Femme Fatale was an attempt to get back to what he once was, but he was still copying himself. With The Black Dahlia, I see him still trying to do the same thing; I just doubt that he’ll find what was once there. Maybe I’m wrong. But placing the weight of this movie on Josh Hartnett indicates that I’m right.
Out of Focus 