This is a continuation of last week’s article exploring the earlier works of Brian De Palma.

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Mission to Mars (2000)

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Now if one were to look at the arc of Brian De Palma’s career, I am of the opinion that a fair amount of people would not imagine this auteur figure of voyeurism, violence, sexuality and suspense helming a 2000 special effects showcase based off a Disneyland attraction. Now when one starts watching the film and notes the character dynamics and typical one-shot brilliance of setting up as many plot and character dynamics as he can, you might think that in actuality this may be a little secret gem, one of those ‘is his worst movie even pretty good?’. That all quickly fades however over the course of the next hour and thirty minutes and we end up with one of the few real absolute duds in De Palma’s career, and unfortunately this is one of a few. Now De Palma has managed such big budget major studio projects before, but these films have had success in my eyes due to the fact that he was able to bring his qualities as an auteur to them and that the projects although more Hollywood in nature do actually serve him as a visionary very well. Mission Impossible of course being the best example, a film that in actuality is not unlike the twisting thrillers he had made before, just with a bigger budget, a slight sanitisation and some intellectual property as it’s foundation. But here none of De Palma’s strengths are able to be tapped. This is De Palma’s last major studio film to date and despite being bizarrely chosen by the Cahiers Du Cinema (one of the most prestigious critical bodies in the film world), in a list featuring Man on the Moon ahead of it, but In the Mood for Love incredibly behind it in the rankings, Mission to Mars was an immense critical and commercial failure. Despite the great sets, some of the largest and most expensive built at the time, the film is just laden with god awful CGI that I’m sure was incredible at the time, but just looks so terrible. Now the cast are all great and actually do great work with what they are given to work with, but what they are given to work with just doesn’t work at all. It’s this lame and shoddy mangled combination of realism and intense meta-physical science fiction not unlike 2001: A Space Odyssey by the end of the film, in nature of themes and concepts. Or at least an attempt to be in the style of. I’m sure that’s what the attempt was, let’s make something as visual expansive and thrilling as 2001 with a bit more realism, some more relatable characters and an emotional centre. The film it probably shares the most D.N.A with is actually probably A.I, however whereas the budget led to some great visuals for Spielberg, here for all the budget and all the Disney clout, the film’s effects still end up looking like clip art. But at the end of the day the film is just pretty boring, there’s no grit and the ultimate narrative of the story is one that just doesn’t serve at all the film’s weirdly abrupt ending. If there was ever a film to miss for De Palma completionists, it would be this one, and Lord knows it will never be a film I re-watch, unless I am doing a full retrospective again. But these are actually the sorts of films that make those sorts of endeavours more of a chore than a pleasure.  That’s why sometimes a greatest hits tour is a far more enjoyable endeavour, such is the curse of the completionist.

Femme Fatale (2002)

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In 2002 De Palma wrote and directed of course his return to the world of the erotic thriller, this time aping a whole new sub-genre of Hitchcock, that of the international espionage thriller, whilst also returning to the world of seductive crime dramas, whilst also returning to the world of voyeurism and photography, whilst also still returning to the world of dreams and de-ja-vu and all those sorts of Vertigo-esque (Vertigo-identical) tropes he played with so often in his early career. He did all this with Femme Fatale, a truly singular beast in the De Palma cannon, whilst also of course not doing anything that he hasn’t done before. Fatale almost irreverently and joyously smashes all these themes and genres together to make an enjoyable  farce almost of criminal occasions and sub-plots, with a film as similarly dense and shallow as this, it’s hard to know where to start. I guess we should start with the name-sake, from the off we are in a world familiar to those of De Palma and those knowing of De Palma’s influences – we see the bare back of a beautiful blonde reflected in a TV showing Barbara Stanwyck’s last tragic moments in Double Indemnity, a performance many describe as if not the best, the original mould for the classic noir femme fatale. This back belongs to our lead Rebecca Romijn (then Rebecca Romijn-Stamos – John makes a cameo as a cheesy agent over the phone in the film). Romijn’s big hope with the film was for it to be her Sharon Stone Basic Instinct turn that would sky-rocket her to stardom and solidify here as a great actress. All the elements are there; a role penned by De Palma to be the perfect femme fatale, sexy, cunning, funny, dry, different accents, different personalities, all blended into one electric undeniably hot powerhouse. But it just didn’t work out that way, the film bombed, however Romijn more than lives up to the challenge. She is all of those things and more and makes this film worth the watch just for her turn, if anything is missing in unfair comparison to Stone, it’s some of the playfulness. But Romijn has a genre-bending and at times incoherent narrative to deal with, unlike Stone who can just coast through a film helping her at every turn to thrive. Romijn is brilliant in this film and more than raises to the incredible challenges De Palma puts in front of her, in writing, in performance and in directing.

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De Palma has made close to seven different films here and of course the joy of the film is that they are all enjoyable and very watchable, but do they string together and does the final 20 minute shift into a world of dream logic with a focus on fate work? That’s up to each viewer, for me the twist came fortunately farther away from the very end enough to have it not to be a final stinger and so for me ruin the film. But the whole time De Palma is just joyously and irreverently shifting every twenty minutes or so, it makes for an un-focussed and at times deeply illogical film, but one no less incredibly enjoyable to watch and even to chuckle at the extremities of it. Of course by the time we release the nature of the narrative, everything can somewhat be passed away as intentionally over the top, however that doesn’t explain the nature of the extreme opening, nor the nature of the cosmic fate-aligning climax. But as always the sequences in themselves are just undeniable, flawless and still even in 2002 some of the best and most perfectly crafted action and tension sequences put to the screen. But they don’t only work on that level either, much like the opening of Blow Out that works so beautifully as a horror sequence in its own right whilst also being a comment on De Palma’s career thus far, the opening here is a beautifully structured and completely extremely titillating comment upon his place in the modern film landscape and in a way his time in the film industry for the past forty years. The opening sets up a diamond heist led by Romijn at the Cannes film festival, this heist includes a pivotal seduction of one of the most beautiful women you will ever see. In the end we end up cutting between some brilliant action, some insanely hot lesbian sex and then happy, smiling crowds at Cannes waiting to watch presumably some boring artsy fartsy drama. We all know what we’d rather be watching and De Palma puts us right there to get bored every time we cut away, teasing us, taunting us, playing with us. Overall it reeks of horniness and it reeks of playfulness and frankly for anybody who doesn’t wish to dismiss it as the normal pitfalls of typical ‘femme fatale-lesbian-action-thriller-sex goddess’ character trope worship/misogyny/exploitation, I think a lot of playfulness can be found in its depiction.  I mean sure the film has plenty of problematic stuff to go around, whether it be perhaps the most uses of the word ‘bitch’ I’ve ever heard in a single movie, or for that matter Antonia Bandaras (who’s also great here, but there’s so much else to talk about) masquerading as a camp and fey reporter to get to Romijn – but even then there is a playfulness. I mean Bandaras camping it up and talking about his computer saying “I put it on my lap, because it’s a lap-top” is hilarious and most of those ‘bitches’ come from our lead villain who is also so outrageously over the top it can’t not be funny. Maybe I’m naive, maybe I’m an auteur worshipper, maybe I’m a privileged straight white male and these films are made just for me – but I do believe it’s all intentional. But I may be wrong, good God, I could be wrong.

The Black Dahlia (2006)

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Where does one begin with The Black Dahlia? Originally cut as a three and half hour epic that the author of the original novel, James Elroy could only repeatedly heap praise upon, even penning an essay extolling the film’s virtues, the film as we have it now is a two hour race to the finish of some of the most complex and intense noir plotting De Palma has ever dealt with. But again, not unlike a few of these later lesser films, it starts and your first though it is; “oh wow, the critics got it wrong, I can’t believe this film isn’t talked about... Oh wait”. It continues and plots fall upon each other culminating in a monotonous heap of entanglements with no way out for the viewer or for that matter the writer, director or editor. If one were to describe the film in-fact, ‘a three and a half hour movie cut down to just under two hours’ may very well be one of the better descriptions you could give it. I mean it lets you know from the off that the plotting, character arcs and overall rhythm of the film is going to feel awfully rushed, but also nothing can prepare you for how the revelations and resolutions of this mass of narratives and characters is so speedily and shoddily torn through by the time we come to the final twenty minutes or so. The cast itself is more than solid, with an ensemble that steal the show in every scene, with Mike Starr and Kevin Dunne working for De Palma again, along with even a musical performance by K.D Lang that feels terribly out of place. Fiona Shaw appears as an absolutely unhinged millionaires wife and steals every scene she is in, but this is not for her quality of performance, but rather just to see to what level she will jump to next. The actual key quartet at the heart of the film is that of Josh Hartnett and Aaron Eckhart as detectives in this brilliantly depicted world of another time, character wise these two are of course given the most to do and do well with what they are given, Eckhart however is the most strung up by his arc coming off as slight and incredibly fast due to the simple fact that it was clearly truncated. Hillary Swank and Scarlett Johansson both do the perfect noir girl angle and pull it off very well, but overall they too are hampered by an abundance of plot that all just goes nowhere. When the film is at it’s best it is in a few scenes here and there where we see perverted screen tests of our murdered dahlia, not only is our chief actress incredibly brilliant in these scenes, but De Palma appears in voice only recreating in ways earlier scenes from one of his first filmic efforts Murder A’La Mode. Now again we come to this point – this is all very interesting for De Palma fans, but as a film, no, I would never recommend The Black Dahlia. Hell, as a De Palma fan I don’t know when I’ll ever return to it. I hate how negative this article is turning, but such is the trajectory of De Palma’s career.

Redacted (2007)

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Every beloved by the Cahiers Du Cinema, this was chosen as the best film of 2008, however not unlike in the case of Mission to Mars, I unfortunately feel differently. I infact don’t have too much at all too say in regards to this film other than the fact it highlights De Palma’s constant experimentation with the form and emphasises with less impact the modernised unfortunate resonance of his earlier and superior film Casualties of War. Experimentation here comes in the form of a collection of found footage elements across different types of surveillance. These elements are often unfortunately presented with a lack of realism that makes all of it seem a little removed, nothing is too believable beyond the POV dark-vision footage which offers a few intriguing set pieces, however the overall affair is just a little lacking. Especially when you compare it as this film does by itself by design with De Palma’s sensationally good Casualties of War, both films that share the same horrifying plot and true to life element with different war settings, Casualties against the Vietnam war backdrop and Redacted set in 2006 Iraq. The cast all do good work, but overall the conceit of the CCTV element, along with the rest of the found footage for me puts everything at a remove rather than involving us closer to the devastating action on screen, which is most certainly De Palma’s clear intention. This is however also De Palma’s last effort it seems when it comes to complete investment. Whereas his next two films seem to be projects given to him for being De Palma-esque, only for him to give sub-par final products.

Passion (2012)

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Adapted from a French film from two years prior by De Palma himself in the script department, it’s fair to say that by all accounts, Passion was an attempt on the end of De Palma to return to the slick psycho-sexual thrillers that made his name, marked his auteurist vision and remain my favourite films of his oeuvre. However to aim for something is not to achieve it and to discuss Passion in anywhere near the same realm as films such as Body Double or Dressed to Kill is an entirely bizarre endeavour. Sure, both films have twisting narratives and an undercurrent of sexual experimentation and ‘perversion’, but where excels visually in every regard and fills it’s screenplay with concepts, characters and plots that thrill and evoke shock and sensuality from a viewer, Passion does no such thing. Passion is a lame clawing attempt to modernise and make fresh the formula that De Palma himself perfected, it leaves one baffled at times and for the most part leaves one terribly bored. Strands go nowhere, characters are sketched too thin to enjoy in any way and quality performances are there but sparse (Rachel Mcaddams and Paul Anderson for one do very fun work, but are severely underutilised). Passion just overall feels like grabbing the great elements of other works and re-creating them lamely, it’s the sort of film where you begin to understand critics of De Palma films you love. I understand how annoying the Hitchcock homaging must be now if you hate the film, I understand how the women can seem shallow and purely sex-driven – because here these things are all true. Perhaps the most saddening aspect of it all is that for the most part the camera-work isn’t there either, large stretches of the film go by in dull two-shots, the same sort of shooting that the auteur has damned in interviews for decades. There are elements where one can see what De Palma is going for of course, mainly the whole angling of looking at the modern world of voyeurism; through web-cams and sex-tapes and even an intriguing advertising campaign based around perversion and objectification that goes nowhere and serves no greater theme. The film too is scored by Pino Donaggio, again in an attempt to return to the glory days, however here when Donaggio’s score is not cookie cutter and as dull as everything else, it’s quite literally painfully identical to Jon Brion’s incredible score for Magnolia. Maybe I just love that Magnolia score so much that i couldn’t help but notice, but I did. There are multiple dream sequence twists and reveals that all lead to groans from the viewer and all culminate, along with the other varied aimless strands, in a shockingly awful closing five minutes that does nothing but drive the nail into the coffin of a film that less so harkens back to the good old days of De Palma, but unfortunately instead rather bastardises them, this is a cheap De Palma knock-off written and directed by De Palma himself. A sad, sad film.

Domino (2019)

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From a script by Peter Skavlan, one can easily grow a little weary with De Palma’s most recent film to date, Domino. True there are elements of De Palma’s strengths on display here, but as always with these most recent films, they are so unfortunately few and far between. In particular there is a singular closing sequence which features POV elements along with espionage along with a public setting, but one can’t cling to one solid sequence to lift this very, very average trashy cop film up to a level of underrated gem or anything of that nature. The De Palma quote on the making of the film also is something that leads one to just kind of dismiss it as a part of his oeuvre; “I had a lot of problems in financing. I never experienced such a horrible movie set. A large part of our teams has not been paid yet by the Danish producers. The film is finished and ready to go out, but I have no idea what future it will hold”. A very, very small future it seems Brian. The only reason, with regret, that one can’t wholly remove Domino from the mental time-line is because it’s of current his ‘last’ film and if we do remove it then what is left as his final film is a failed effort at what he used to be great at. So where do we go? My De Palma oeuvre ends with Femme Fatale with regret. One doesn’t enjoy multiple films from one of your all-time favourite directors, but such is sometimes the curse of prolificness.

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And that is that... An unfortunate down-beat closing article, despite one shining star, but such is the regrettable arc of some many of our great auteurs.

-       -   Thomas Carruthers