Carlito's Way

If Martin Scorsese's The Irishman offers a corrective of sorts to audience misreadings of Goodfellas and Casino, Brian De Palma's Carlito's Way serves a similar function in relation to Scarface. The earlier film, with its decadent surfaces and fever pitch, was embraced or derided (depending on who you talk to) for endorsing the very excesses it was meant to indict. I happen to love that movie and think that it would be pretty useless satirically if it didn't go all the way in that respect. But here comes De Palma, reuniting with an older, wiser Al Pacino, clearing the air and assuring us that no, crime actually does not pay (a lesson which should have been clear to anyone who paid attention to the other movie's ending.) Pacino plays Carlito Brigante, a former drug dealer with a formidable reputation who vows to go straight after being released from prison five years into a thirty-year sentence. You see, he's got a plan to go to the Bahamas and manage a car rental business for a friend he met in prison. Problem is, nobody around him can believe it.

Had Scarface ended a little differently, you could argue this would have been Tony Montana a few years down the line. Tony burned too brightly and flamed out before he became capable of reflecting on his ways. Carlito is haunted by the spectre of past violence, suggesting that he was at one time was capable of similar savagery, and the movie offers John Leguizamo's upstart gangster ("Benny Blanco from the Bronx") as an avatar of his worst qualities. Yet when Tony managed to look himself in the mirror, he found that he was a lowlife to the core with nary any principles to speak of. Carlito in contrast seems a bit more grounded and human, which makes his inevitable downfall all the more tragic. Here's a man who can see all the mistakes he's making, and makes them anyway. Carlito's Way is a portrait of men trapped by a culture of machismo, forced into bad decisions and cycles of violence because they can't comprehend any other way. (A scene where Carlito spares Benny after being disrespected in his club leaves his henchmen baffled.)

Carlito stands by his lawyer friend David Kleinfeld, played by Sean Penn, even when Kleinfeld's visibly coke-addled decision making and penchant for treachery actively undoes him, and the movie highlights how a seemingly noble trait can become downright stupid under these circumstances. I've found Penn's reliance on tics distracting elsewhere, but saddled with makeup this unflattering, he's forced to actually get into character and provides the movie with one of its most memorable lowlifes. (Interestingly, at one point Marlon Brando was considered for the Penn role, which would have been, uh, interesting, considering Brando's career and stature at this time. Viewers of a certain generation will also recognize the character as the inspiration for the hero's sleazy, incompetent lawyer in Grand Theft Auto: Vice City.) The other central relationship is between Carlito and Gail, his dancer girlfriend played by Penelope Ann Miller. Like the Michelle Pfeiffer character in Scarface, she's white, conspicuously WASP-coded, and the movie is astute about how she represents a certain respectability to the ethnic hero. It's also aware of how loyalties and conflicts will form almost arbitrarily along racial lines, and the exceptions of Carlito's relationships with Kleinfeld and Gail and his past dealings with Italian gangsters stand out as a result.

The production design here isn't much less meticulous than in Scarface, but the flashy period fashions and glamorous coke-fueled parties aren't quite as intoxicating here, as Carlito no longer feels their allure. (He's also seen frequently in dark colours, looking austere, almost monk-like, in contrast to the colourful suits worn by his cohorts.) Perhaps due to the period setting, the appeal of these things lacks the present tense urgency of the symbols of wealth in Scarface, and with Carlito's relative wisdom they rarely feel divorced from the realities of the street, whereas the earlier film got more and more insular as its protagonist ascended the criminal ladder. Where De Palma does dial up the flash is with the set pieces, with his fluid camera moves, dancerly sense of movement, acute spatial awareness and hair-trigger timing evident in a pool hall ambush, an ill-advised prison escape scheme and the climactic pursuit through a train station. The sequence is less bloody but just as suspenseful as I'd remembered from my initial viewing years ago (funny how your memory fills in the gaps). Compared to Scarface's gun battle climax, this scene feels like the other half of De Palma's take on a John Woo shootout. Scarface brings the body count and firepower, Carlito's Way has the balletic motion. (John Woo's classics, released between the two films, are similarly concerned with the gangster lifestyle but exist in different, if no less compelling, emotional landscapes.)

Now, with all the Scarface talk, it's worth pondering which is the better film, and I think it really comes down to personal preference. This is a slower, more contemplative film, closer to superficial notions of quality and respectability. Yet, perhaps by design, it can't match the brute force impact and lightning-in-a-bottle quality of the other film. But really, these are movies in completely different registers and it's nice that they're as good as they are in their own way.