A film that wants the world but gets much less
Scarface reviewed
By Matthew Singer 06/12/2008
Brian De Palma’s Scarface is one of the most celebrated spectacles in the history of cinema — an obnoxiously loud, pastel-colored fever dream, soaked in blood, cocaine and more f-bombs than a Tourette’s convention. For anyone who wasn’t alive in 1983 (or was too alive at the time to remember), the film today comes across as an ultra-violent fantasy, with an entrepreneurial sociopath as its protagonist. But as the 2006 documentary Cocaine Cowboys proves, the reality of Florida in the 1980s was, frighteningly, not far off: daily shootouts in broad daylight; assassins who’d stab their targets in the middle of a crowded airport; hitmen taking orders from a woman in Colombia nicknamed the Black Widow. Suddenly, Tony Mon-tana isn’t such a far-fetched creation. In fact, the real guys were a lot worse.
Why, then, does Scarface still seem so ridiculous?
Part of it has to do with perspective. The movie is a major touchstone for the hip-hop generation, which isn’t surprising: It’s a rag-to-riches story about an oppressed figure taking advantage of a system that wasn’t meant for him — nevermind the shit he had to do to get to the top. There is a reason Tony Montana is revered as a hero despite his narcissism and ruthlessness, and that’s because De Palma never lets us see outside Montana’s point of view. Normally, this wouldn’t be a problem — it is a character study, after all — but Scarface takes place in a broader historical context than other films about the criminal underworld. The drug trade built modern Miami and left a hell of a lot of bodies in its wake, and not all of them were in the business. All the killing and profiteering in Scarface, however, is relegated to Montana’s self-contained universe, and in his eyes it is justified because he is an immigrant who escaped from under the boot of communism to become a sort of bionic uber-capitalist. Had De Palma cast a wider net, taking into account that the cartels weren’t just offing themselves and expanding their personal fortunes, Scarface may have not have ended up as the vapid, macho shoot-‘em-up it is.
And then, of course, there’s that performance. Scarface marks the point where Al Pacino traded the quiet, internalized menace of Michael Corleone for the hammy hoo-hahing that has defined his career for the last two decades. Tony Montana is actually a more complex character than he is portrayed, but Pacino goes so far over the top it is hard to care either way about him. By the time he kills Frank Lopez and takes over his empire (in one of those corny ’80s music montages) Montana has become a cartoon, and like Daffy Duck or Peter Griffin, we are neither rooting for him nor hoping he gets his comeuppance — just waiting for the next one-liner. That ending, in which he massacres a small army by himself and survives about two dozen bullets before finally taking a header off his balcony, is the equivalent of Wile E. Coyote being crushed by an anvil: It is not heartbreaking nor particularly awesome; it’s simply inevitable. And have you ever met a Cuban with that accent, mang?
It isn’t that Montana as he is constructed isn’t believable — the scumbags in Cocaine Cowboys make him look like a slightly more irritable Bill Gates — it’s that Pacino treats him as if he is not. He turns Montana into a caricature, and as such Scarface becomes something akin to a comic book adaptation — badass and unreal — while the true-life murderers he was modeled after are much more terrifying, vile and, overall, interesting. But you don’t see Black Widow posters hanging up in many dorm rooms, do you?
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