My First Time: ‘Scarface’

I grew up in the 1980s, so there are few ’80s movies, good or bad, that I haven’t seen. Amazingly, until last night, that list included Scarface. I know a few quotes and a couple of iconic moments from Oscar clip jobs, but the experience of actually sitting down and watching Scarface end-to-end had eluded me, mostly because over the years it’s tended to appear on networks like TBS, where a showing takes four hours and often bleeps out the best lines. Now, it’s on Netflix, where, with a wide screen and some surround speakers, you can home-simulate going to see it in the theater in 1983. Bring an extra box of Junior Mints. It’s long.

Scarface came in the middle of director Brian De Palma’s creative heyday, a great crime-movie directing run that started with 1980’s Dressed To Kill and 1981’s Blow-Up, two nifty star-studded noir thrillers, and ended with 1987’s The Untouchables, one of the most entertaining movies ever made. Those movies, I’ve seen, and I’ve seen The Untouchables more than 200 times, since I worked in a movie theater the summer it came out. I assumed that Scarface would be the apex of that group of movies, De Palma’s ethnic gangster epic to match the first two Godfather movies and Scorcese’s Goodfellas and Casino. But that’s not exactly what I got.

The Godfather movies have so much historical scope, they’re almost like an American Bible. Casino and Goodfellas are a little more constrained, time-wise, but the “present day” sections are short codas that mostly showcase bad sweat suits. Scarface, on the other hand, is an accidental living document of its neon era, 1983’s most 1983 movie, with all the horrible fashion and palm-tree wallpaper that implies. It’s impossible to tell how much of the baroque Patrick Nagel-esque set design, from the leopard clocks to the weird gilded telephone stands, was deliberate, and how much of it depends on what was available.

On the one hand, this gives the movie an urgent, unpreplanned quality. The screenplay, expertly written by Oliver Stone, of all people, starts with the Mariel Boatlift, an event that was huge in 1980 but now seems as historically distant as Vito Corleone’s arrival at Ellis Island. The rest of the story plays out like an Esquire article by a first-rate investigative reporter, with several chilling scenes involving a suave Bolivian coke-lord, including one that implies the CIA was involved with the cartels in assassinating Drug War critics. And then there are the incidentally great ’80s things, like the weird cars everyone is driving, to Michelle Pfeiffer’s V-cut bathing suits and Blondie wigs. On the negative side of the ledger, you have Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio’s hideous Afro, weak-ass Pointer Sisters manqué disco songs, and a terrible “hero rising” montage, in the middle of the movie, to the song “Push It To The Limit,” that would have been a shameful plot skip in The Karate Kid 2. That montage, in the middle of a De Palma-Oliver Stone movie starring Al Pacino, is one of the strangest and most surprising misfires in cinematic history.

Scarface also suffers from a Gods Of Egypt-style casting problem. Al Pacino as Tony Montana, you can accept. Pacino chews the scenery with such weird bluster that it’s hard to imagine anyone else in the part. But Robert Loggia, Steven Bauer, and F. Murray Abraham, even though they’re all pretty good, don’t really qualify as legitimate Cuban heavies, and Mastrantonio, who plays a key role, looks like she wandered over from the set of Crossing Delancey. These casting choices are even harder to justify because many of the supporting characters, from the Bolivian drug lord to Tony Montana’s mother, not to mention countless mustachioed henchmen, are played, and well, by actual Latino actors. This gives Scarface some verisimilitude, particularly in the Miami street scenes, but it’s hard not to be distracted by the layer of white frosting, and I don’t just mean the piles of cocaine.

That said, if you haven’t seen Pacino’s performance, then you haven’t seen film acting at its most committed and baroque. There’s lots of yelling and bloodlust, but Pacino also has a lot of mumbly, quiet moments. You never know what he’s going to say or do, particularly when he starts in on the nose candy. The drugs don’t make him crazy and jittery, they turn him into a careless tub-soaking automaton who occasionally busts out the Uzi. It’s one of the most committed performances of all-time.

Most of all, though, this is a Brian De Palma movie, with all the set pieces and flourishes that he brought at his best. There are moments when De Palma gets it stunningly wrong, which might be why he won the Razzie for “Worst Director” for this movie. His kitchen-sink drama scenes with Pacino and his mother seemed phoned-in from a telenovela. But there are other moments, like Abraham dangling by his neck from a helicopter, to the gruesome but brilliant “chainsaw sequence” that challenge De Palma’s “Odessa Steps” sequence or horse-chase scene from The Untouchables. He’s eons away from being the worst director; in fact, he’s one of the most influential directors in American history.

Nothing tops the amazing ending, a massive gun battle on Tony Montana’s estate, which plays out like Miami Vice on steroids and has influenced every gangster movie and Grand Theft Auto game to come since. It’s so high-level gory that it makes Quentin Tarantino, who cites De Palma as a major influence, seem almost subtle. Then Scarface ends with a final shot that lingers in the mind, both for its beautiful composition and its deeply ironic bite. It almost wipes away the memory of the montage. Almost.

[Watch Scarface on Netflix]

Neal Pollack (@nealpollack) is the author of ten bestselling books of fiction and nonfiction. His latest novel is the sci-fi satire Keep Mars Weird. He lives in Austin, Texas.