Brian De Palma: The Untouchables

No one in The Untouchables, either cop or criminal, seems to have anything in the way of a moral code. Their lives are far more existential: the criminal steals because he is a thief, and the cop upholds the law because it is his job to do so. When a reporter asks Bureau of Prohibition agent Eliot Ness (Kevin Costner), dedicated defender of Prohibition, what he would do if the government repealed the 18th Amendment, he replies without hesitation" I think I'll have a drink." Until that day, however, "It is the law of the land."

As for everyone caught in-between, life under a system of legislated morality has seemingly divorced individuals from a sense of right and wrong. Ness' efforts to conduct raids on bootleggers fail because of corrupt cops tipping off Al Capone's men in order to get a few drops of the material they're helping to hide. The title refers to the team of uncorrupted policemen Ness and Irish beat cop Jim Malone (Sean Connery) recruit straight out of police academy to ensure their unblemished records, but it just as well describes Al Capone and his empire, which has such control over the desires of the common American that the boss can openly chat with reporters about bootlegging.

In comparison to the hedonism of Scarface, The Untouchables does not show anyone particularly enjoying the thrill of illegal consumption. Flapper-filled speakeasies seem to be in some other dimension entirely from the world Ness and co. traverse to take down Capone. Those smoky, alcohol-serving dens are in the underworld, but the point here is that the cops need not descend into it to find law-breakers; the most flagrantly criminal people live topsoil. Not only that, they leave in lavish mansions fit for holding the aristocracy at court for the winter.

In such matters, De Palma's attention to detail and suggestion has never been better: period costumes and set design are immaculate, and the director clearly shoots for an accurate representation of the social turmoil caused by Prohibition, not simply in the resulting crime spree but in a skewing of values that led to romanticizing that crime. For example, he immediately juxtaposes the scene of Capone chumming with sympathetic reporters as he assures them he just runs a business and does not use violence with the bombing of a bar that refused to sell Capone's wares, killing everyone inside (including a young girl).

However, De Palma's capacity to let wooden performances go uncorrected has rarely been so apparent. Divorced from his Brechtian satire, De Palma crafts a remarkably straightforward Hollywood picture with The Untouchables, but that only means that the actors have nowhere to hide when one examines their work. Costner, who would go on to convey something resembling human emotion as a crusader in JFK, here barely modulates his voice, speaking in a flat tone even when yelling. Connery, playing an Irish cop, appears to have decided the best approach to the accent would be to speak in his normal voice but occasionally make it a bit more nasal. Thankfully, he only tries to keep up this charade for about five minutes, at which point he simply speaks like Sean Connery, full stop. Only Robert De Niro, who plays Capone like a more unassailable and confident version of the fat Jake LaMotta in Raging Bull, puts any effort into this.

De Palma, too, uses little of the prowess so freely on display in his usual style. The film has its share of Steadicam and crane shots, including a first-person roam outside Jimmy's apartment that has all the trappings of the director's voyeuristic, playful élan. But so much of the movie feels stiff, too mannered, as if the starch in everyone's suits bled into them and into the film itself.

This is all the more perplexing given that it was written by David Mamet. Though certainly not as madcap as Oliver Stone, Mamet nevertheless works best as a vulgarian wordsmith with an ear for detail, and only a few isolated moments of wit ever surface. The rest of the time, we get treated to farcical sub-slapstick—"Where's your warrant?" "He's my warrant!" comes the response with a sucker punch that makes the criminal's eyes bug out cartoonishly—that clashes with the somber tone of the rest of the film.

In fairness, the shootouts are fun, even if the famous rip-off of Potemkin's Odessa steps sequence feels like just that, lacking the creativity De Palma usually puts into his quotations. The lead-up to the fight is masterful De Palman suspense, and the actual gunfight in slo-mo is also entertaining, but where Obsession, Dressed to Kill and Body Double warped, inverted and experimented with his love of Hitchcock (to say nothing of minor variations on influences sprinkled throughout his work), this just feels like plagiarism.

I honestly don't know what the point of this movie is. People call Carlito's Way an "apology" for Scarface, but I would point to The Untouchables as the likelier candidate for a direct response to that film. If Scarface dove headfirst into the underworld (and potentially cracked its skull on the bottom), The Untouchables never really ventures anywhere outside the respectable world, but the point De Palma was making carries no weight without seeing how the respectable members of above-ground society are precisely the ones to sink into dens each night to get plastered and dance. The open wealth Capone enjoys is the only hint at the transparent garishness of the wealthy during the Great Depression, a financial catastrophe caused in part both by massive income inequality and the effective second economy created by Prohibition that made men like Capone so wealthy that, when the law cracked down on bootlegging, it collapsed the legitimate economy in addition to the illegal one.

But this is all projection. The Untouchables lives up to its name in that even the director seems reluctant to grab a hold of these people and really throw them into the muck. It runs in the opposite direction of Scarface, presenting a sterile view of crimefighting not even fully alleviated by the presence of blood. De Palma and Mamet do suggest that the characters want to be in a more violent movie, however: when one of the team, Wallace, starts tracking the accounts of every business tied to Capone and suggests getting the mobster on tax evasion, Ness waves him off, unwilling to take down a murderer with a prosaic approach.

After under-performing or flopping with most of his '80s features, The Untouchables proved a much-needed hit for De Palma, though I can't help but lump it with the likes of Wise Guys instead of legitimately good mainstream fare like the director's next film. By the end of the film, Ness has eroded his law-abiding façade, killing an unarmed man and lying to a judge to ensure the outcome he wants in Capone's trial. Had the rest of the film put more effort and care into crafting a moral viewpoint, this downfall would only enhance the irony of Ness' final statement, the aforementioned quip about post-Prohibition what-ifs. As it is, these end-game occurrences are merely the first signs of life after two hours of watching De Palma fuss over everything but what's important. At least it secured him a few large budgets for his next couple of features. When not even an Ennio Morricone can liven your film, you've got problems.

Taxi Driver

To commemorate the release of Taxi Driver on a downright essential Blu-Ray, I've reviewed the film at Cinelogue. Almost assuredly my favorite movie of the 1970s, Taxi Driver hasn't aged a day regardless of the vastly different condition of modern New York City. This is a film for the lonely, the hurt and the angry, which makes it as good a fit for millennials as it did the post-hippie burnouts.

I only briefly touched upon the extras included in the Blu-Ray, but everything you need to know about the movie can be found in its commentary track or the bevy of retrospective material. The A/V restoration makes the film come alive more than it already does, yet this gorgeous transfer does not take away from the dingy feel of the movie. It is already my to-beat disc for 2011.

You can read my review now at Cinelogue.

Machete

When first announced, Machete, the full-length adaptation of the fake trailer Robert Rodriguez placed before his Grindhouse entry, it seemed but the latest in a slew of projects the director proposed whilst wearing his Bad Idea Jeans. Everyone wanted him to finally get down to Sin City 2, the sequel to what is to date Rodriguez's sole work to be completely successful from start to finish, and instead he seemingly went out of his way to bore his fanbase with projects no one cared about.

Now don't we all look foolish?

Somehow, Machete is by far the best film Rodriguez has made since Sin City, and even a sizable improvement over the Grindhouse contribution that helped spark this movie. Where Planet Terror contented itself to slop red corn syrup by the bucket, Machete takes advantage of the hilariously stilted politics of old exploitation movies to get across a pointed attack at current fearmongering regarding illegal immigration without having to bother with anything so inconvenient as subtlety. Rodriguez wants us to know that the true enemies are within, and they have access to a lot more capital and resources than a day laborer just looking to make a new life for himself. Naturally, the director proves this point with a machete-wielding ex-Federale who destroys half of Texas to enlighten it.

Danny Trejo always makes an impression, with his pockmarked face opening up crevasses for untold pain to pool and insinuate itself onto an audience. He's a fearsome looking man, yet one feels instant sympathy for him, a sympathy that he can then subvert and pervert until he projects an intimidating aura that overpowers even his striking appearance. When we first meet him, he's still a cop in Mexico fighting the drug cartels (led by Torrez, inexplicably played by Steven Seagal, who is so hammy that he seems to have put on weight from his own overacting). Despite being a lawman, he's already a legend and nothing short of ruthless when confronted by criminals, but when a rescue goes awry, Machete watches Torrez kill his wife and say that he did the same to the Federale's daughter before leaving the heartbroken man to die in a burning building.

Of course, the elements of nature are no match for Trejo's leather hide, and he makes his way to America, where he works quietly as a day laborer until being picked up by a shady businessman (Jeff Fahey) and receiving a large sum of money to assassinate State Sen. John McLaughlin, who is tragically not a jazz guitarist but an open racist who promotes a zero tolerance policy on illegals. Machete doesn't seem too thrilled, but he knows that, despite the payment, he has no choice in the matter, and he also does not seem all that surprised when he learns that the assignment is a setup that frames Machete in order to sway public support for harsh immigration law.

Plot twists continue to pile up, but Rodriguez clearly intends this 15-minute chunk of setup to represent everything you really need to know about the story. All that comes later is just icing on the expository cake, designed mainly to show off a packed cast of mainly Latino actors, as well as a few surprise heavy-hitters. Michelle Rodriguez plays Shé, a revolutionary who has organized a network of immigrants and those sympathetic to the cause in preparation for the inevitable race war. By day, she runs a taco truck, constantly visited by an immigration control officer, played by Jessica Alba, who suspects "Luz" of being Shé. Jeff Fahey reprises his role from the trailer as the businessman and election manager who orchestrates the failed assassination to ensure the senator's reelection and the building of a border fence, and Robert De Niro, of all people, plays the senator. Even crazier, it's probably the most committed he's been to a role in years, taking to the affected twang of the rich Ivy Leaguer posing as a good ol' boy (sound familiar?) with a relish for character acting that's been so absent from his contemporary work. Most interesting among the casting choices is the deliberately unmarketed appearance by Lindsay Lohan. She plays a young woman with a spiraling drug problem and a penchant for exposing herself on the Internet, thus proving that Lindsay Lohan is more dedicated a method actor than Daniel Day-Lewis.

Everyone knows exactly what this movie is, and they're decent enough to still pretend to take it seriously without lazily winking at the audience. Only a gag involving guards letting Machete past them because he claims to be a gardener comes off as an openly acknowledged moment of metafiction. The rest is just glorious madness, with such audacious bits as a cleverly hid cell phone on a nude woman to a seemingly pointless bit of dialogue about the length of the human intestine shortly before Machete improvises a rope to rappel down a hospital building. The violence is broken up by stilted speeches about tolerance and political strife, delivered almost to the camera in tried and true exploitation fashion. Still, the old exploitation movies were so open about their politics because they came out in times of uncertainty, and with the Tea Party twisting the Republican party even more into an entity that worships the rich and stokes the fires of xenophobia and racism, maybe the sight of a senator shooting illegals and burning DVDs of it for his biggest corporate donors does not seem so absurd after all.

But let's get real. The draw of Machete is the action, cartoony yet well choreographed, from gritty close combat to blood-splattering machine gun assaults. How can you hold back raucous laughter when Machete leads a convoy of low-riders, all of which bounce, to battle against a Minutemen-like group of ultra-racists who patrol the border shooting anyone who so much as has a nice tan? And who doesn't admire the goofy wit of a director who would stage a death involving impalement with a meat thermometer followed by an explosion that leaves the poor man charred as the mercury in the thermometer rockets upward?

Rodriguez has always aimed for the middle ground between intelligence and lowbrow, but he usually hits the lower mark. Machete, like Sin City and Once Upon a Time in Mexico, finds just the right balance, paced well and endearingly quirky while still amounting to little more than a series of explosions, hacked-off limbs and popping squibs. Rodriguez will never approach the level of his friend Tarantino as a silly-serious filmmaker, but films like Machete remind me why I still look forward to his new movies every now and then. It does not break the fourth wall as often as the last neo-exploitation movie, Black Dynamite, and because of that it works better as an actual film, even if it's just as absurd as Michael Jai White's vehicle. The silliness only makes the gore go down more smoothly, and Machete surely ranks as one of the bigger surprises of the weak mainstream offerings of the year.