De Palma

De Palma (2015)

**** (out of 4)

Directors Noah Baumbach and Jake Paltrow got Brian De Palma to sit down and talk about all of the movies that he has made. This documentary has De Palma basically giving a history lesson about all of his movies. He talks about his influences, their failures or things that he wish he had done differently.

If you're a fan of De Palma's work then you probably already know that he has contributed to countless interviews and special features for his movies. There's a lot of stuff out there where the director talks about his career but this documentary works because you can pretty much get everything in one sitting. I really liked the flow of the picture because it really does come across as being shot in real time and it's just like you're sitting down at a table with the director and listening to him talk about his career.

DE PALMA is certainly a must-see for film buffs because the director is quite honest with his talk. At this point in his career he certainly doesn't have to worry about offending anyone and this leads to some very good stories about issue he had on films with actors including Robert DeNiro on THE UNTOUCHABLES. Each film is given a good amount of discussion and it's fascinating getting to hear the director pat himself on the back when he thought he did a great job or pointing out things that went wrong.

None of them films are given great, full details but as I said there are countless bonus features out there that dive into each film in more detail. This film works remarkably well because of how simple it is. The camera is set up close to De Palma and he simply talks and tells stories.

Brian De Palma is one of those directors whose films are very polarizing (with a few exceptions, of course). Being that he no longer works within the Hollywood establishment and his output has been drastically reduced, I guess a documentary will have to do. And boy, what a documentary! Still, the word 'documentary' doesn't really describe this film that well, since it's more like a one-on-one conversation. De Palma is very candid about his past and doesn't shy away from emphatically stating his opinions on people he's worked with and his own work. One thing that did surprise me was how little Hitchcock, his clearest influence, was brought up. Not a criticism, just an observation. Clips from VERTIGO, NORTH BY NORTHWEST, and REAR WINDOW are shown, though, in the context of techniques or stylistic features that De Palma learned from them. If anything, the range of artistic influences was much wider than I had ever realized before. Even if he never made another film, De Palma has left behind an incredible body of work that deserves serious study and consideration, and this documentary fills a void for everyone. It provides a nice retrospective for those already familiar and, for those not, a great place to start.

You know, I went into this experience thinking I what was a big fan of De Palma, but was really cool is, I knew nothing, but learned a lot.

I was expecting this movie to be all about Carrie, the Untouchables, Mission Impossible, but for those of us who De Palma became a big name for because your of the generation that group up with Hip hop artist who loved Scarface, that movie and many of his mainstream hits play an important part in this sit down interview, but a small one, as De Palma talks with great personal depth a careering touching 50 years.

He's tells the story from his perspective and it's told with an honest feel, and it gives you perfect insight on his film style. He's a guy who loves indie films for the freedom it allows but needed to prove to himself that he can make a mainstream hit. He defends his disturbing images, by revealing to us how he did not realize it was disturbed.

Though focus on his movies, De Palma does give you personal insight on his upbringing and the state of mind he was in when he made those movies (like during the early 80s when he constantly cast his then wife, Nancy Allen, which he knew as damaging to their relationship).

A few times in the film, his treatment of women in his films came up and once again this is where his honesty of what he was trying to do came up. The interview is intertwine with clips from his movies and other movies that inspire him, and I think every nude scene De Palma has ever filmed was used here. Another contemporary subject was War in which he was able to give his two cents on what's going on now by talking about the two war movies he did do.

It's a great sit down for not just De Palma fans but for film fans everywhere. The man was enjoyable to listen to for almost two hours and he told great stories about the development for his long list of film credits.

Now I have to go out and find the movies I never seen.

Yes, he made some good movies, but he made some very average and awful movies. Most of the time I felt I was watching movies that were too clinical, no emotions to them. Which is odd, considering the subject matter and violence to them. DePalma seemed to be more interested in creating something that was a lesson in cinematography, rather than tapping into your connection to the story or the characters. This documentary shows that. I felt he was giving a class in movie making, which most of his movies seem to be like. I never had the emotional pull like I have with The Godfather, American Graffiti, Saving Private Ryan, Taxi Driver, or Bonnie and Clyde. I cared about the characters; I cared about the stories; when I got to the end of the movie, I didn't want it to end. ThT is missing in 90% of DePalma movies. He fails to make the emotional connection with his audience and he doesn't seem to realize that audiences what an emotional connection.

This documentary is by and large an excellent film school in 108 minutes, which is just slightly ironic as at one point in a moment of candor (among several if not often points for this man), he says how film schools produce many people who just won't ever really get into the film business (he gives a percentage of people who just won't make it, and it's high). Sometimes things do simply come out to good luck, good timing, and maybe for certain studio heads and people frankly go to see the blasted things (Carrie, as we can see here, was from all four of those things coming together at once).

The whole thing is De Palma only, talking to the camera, with a tiny bit at the end of him walking down the street for... some reason I'm not sure of, maybe .98% of him doing something other than talking and gesticulating was necessary - and this is juxtaposed with some photos and newspaper clippings and footage from ALL the De Palma movies (including little side pieces like "Wonton's Wake", a student film, and he even gives an anecdote about being the one with the idea to bring Courtney Cox on stage for his charming music video for "Dancin' in the Dark"). It's a full retrospective of the violent, the satiric, the operatic, and the messy.

I'm glad Paltrow and Baumbach took this approach; if it had been the requisite usual documentary where other talking heads chimed in about who this guy was and his films perhaps other opinions could pipe in, but if the movie is called DE PALMA, give us a full course of the man! And this does as far as it being a full life story, with the semi-framing of Vertigo, Hitchcock's masterwork of surrealism and voyeuristic nightmares realizes, being the lynchpin for many of his works (Obsession, Dressed to Kill, Body Double, basically any movie that has a long take of a character following another or doubles being used, not to mention Bernard Herrmann). There's also, something I'm glad about, not too much in the way of trying to deep-focus-psychoanalyze the man as far as his films; the questions, though we don't hear them, seem to lead to straightforward answers (whether you like what he has to say about women - in his plain language, he says, "I like following women, I think they make good subjects on film" in so many words, that depends on how you see it in his films).

Because it's all on him for those interviews, camera planted down as De Palma talks, the scenes from his many films, from The Wedding Party to Passion (50 years!), it doesn't feel bogged down at any time - from one movie it leads to another and another, and I liked that I came away understanding there was no real grand plan for De Palma as a filmmaker (he didn't know he wanted to even be one until college, again with good timing the Nouvelle Vague changed everything as well as American experimental cinema), and this is a documentary that is charting a real commercial artist of the 2nd half of the 20th century.

By this I mean he is conscious of the money - one of the anecdotes about Carrie reveals how he knew down to 200 grand what a movie *would* cost with a certainty - and yet even with this consciousness he could go too far; look at what happened between 1987 and 1993, where he goes from one of his biggest successes (Untouchables) to a personal triumph but financial flop (Casualties of War), a general fiasco (Bonfire, though he says he still enjoys the movie, "Don't read the book", he says half jokingly), and then another personal film but this time as one of *his* thrillers (Raising Cain) and finally what he thought of as "I can't make something better than this (Carlito's Way, one of my personal favorites) - it all shows a man working in the system (perhaps sometimes against his better judgment, though it's not to say he didn't want his films to be seen and appreciated, he clearly did and still does), but he was always finding his way through the films, falling on his face at times, but still coming away with how he wants to do it, if only by the skin of his teeth.

If there is a complaint to have it's not even that it's too short, per-say, but near the end the section of De Palma's life and career in this century feels short-changed; perhaps this may be intentional by way of the director's point near the end where he brings it back to Hitchcock, that, according to him, post-Psycho his films didn't connect because a filmmaker's best work is in their 30's-40's-50's (spoken like a true Tarantino eh?), however I still wanted to know more about this latter-day films, that have interesting elements even as they go back to his roots (Femme Fatale, Redacted, Passion being good films, the middle one showing some innovation even in his latter years). This said, for at least 100 minutes this is film-geek ecstasy, with stories that sometimes feel like their from the front-lines, and you can't help but laugh at some/several of them. His candor brings you in, but it's also that he can simply be fully engaging with an audience as a speaker (albeit it's clear occasionally he's talking to two filmmakers behind the camera), and so for regular audiences who may have only seen Scarface or Carrie or the first M:I movie and want to more more it can be compelling as well.

To put it another way, if I showed this to my film school students, I'd almost feel like I wouldn't need to hold too many other classes - except, maybe, probably, to just make a damn movie as a collective ala Home Movies!