De Palma’s Way

Brian De Palma is in hot water. Again. For a director who often seems more interested in form than content and who has devoted the bulk of his career to making mainstream entertainment for the Hollywood studios, it's surprising how regularly he upsets people. Even his fans have a love-hate relationship with this prodigiously gifted but perverse and erratic talent.

Feminists picketed Dressed to Kill and Cuban refugees weren't flattered by Scarface either. But that's nothing on the US reaction to his new film, Redacted, which has been labeled treasonable in some quarters, and which worked Fox News commentator Bill O'Reilly into such a lather he practically had soap suds blowing out of his ears (admittedly this is par for the course with Mr O'Reilly).

It's been ten years since he had a hit (the relatively anonymous blockbuster Mission: Impossible), which is one reason why De Palma made Redacted on High Definition for just $5 million using a cast of newcomers. In a way it's a throwback to the experimental low budget films he made in his youth - stuff like Greetings and Hi Mom! - during the height of the Vietnam War.

De Palma returned to that conflict two decades later, in the brutal Casualties of War. And Redacted (which he also wrote) inevitably recalls that film; both are based on real life accounts of US troops raping and murdering a civilian in the midst of a war zone.

Violence is another controversial hallmark in De Palma's movies, not least because he treats it as an aesthetic element: "I find violence very cinematic," he says. "It's motion. It's visual. It's dramatic. Crescendo!"

Think of that next time someone dumps a vat of pig's blood over your head (Carrie) or takes a chainsaw to your limbs (Scarface).

Not only that, but he has a nasty habit of implicating us in the spectacle: many of his (anti-) heroes are voyeurs, like Craig Wasson in Body Double; silent witnesses, like Michael J Fox in Casualties of War; or eavesdroppers, like John Travolta in Blow Out. Drawn into life and death situations by chance or conscience, they may try to make a difference, but it's 50-50 whether things will turn out for the best or not. These are not heroes it's always easy or satisfying to identify with.

The son of a surgeon, De Palma has talked about watching his father's operations as a young man, which may account for his lack of squeamishness, and admitted photographing evidence of his dad's extra-marital affairs, which probably explains his fascination with peeping toms, spies and illicit sex.

Few filmmakers gorge on the expressive qualities of motion pictures quite as floridly as De Palma. He has no truck with the idea that the camera is an invisible witness, or that the director shouldn't get in the way of the audience.

Like his most important influence Alfred Hitchcock, he delights in the role of showman - so much so that he's never been shy about measuring himself against "the master of suspense" himself. Sisters riffs on Psycho. Obsession is a remake of Vertigo. And Body Double throws Rear Window into the porn age. Such blatant recycling infuriates his critics, while apologists say he's playing a more sophisticated game, engaging in a kind of artistic conversation with late great Sir Alf.

What's odd is that many of these Hitchcock-and-bull stories he wrote himself (they also include Femme Fatale and Raising Cain), and even in their excess they look like his most personal movies. He's no forger, and if he does indulge in pastiche it would be a mistake to miss his sly wit and transgressive streak (even if his out-and-out comedies have been pretty wretched: The Bonfire of the Vanities; Wise Guys).

Of course he could use a hit. He's had several in his lengthy career - Carrie, Scarface, The Untouchables, and the 1996 blockbuster Mission: Impossible - but his last four pictures have sputtered at the box office. Not that anyone would have expected big returns from Redacted, but De Palma's hopes of confronting the American public with a reality the news media shies away from has fizzled. There's no appetite for this particular truth.

No doubt that's why, at 67, De Palma hopes to return to the scene of an earlier crime. His next film may be a prequel to The Untouchables: "Capone Rising".

Good or bad (maybe we should say: "Great or terrible") a De Palma movie is a baroque carnival of beautiful girls, exotic animals, clowns and freaks, a hall of mirrors in which we may or may not recognise ourselves, and De Palma himself is the ringmaster, cracking his whip, trumpeting his artistry and wowing the crowd.

Tom Charity
tom.charity@lovefilm.com

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