Review: De Palma

Score: A-

Directors: Noah Baumbach, Jake Paltrow

Cast: Brian De Palma

Running Time: 107 Minutes

Rated: R

For much of his career, Brian De Palma has been a provocateur. His incredible run from the late ’70s to the early ’80s pushed the envelope for sex and violence onscreen, but often in service of the story he was trying to tell. But his output since 2000 hasn’t been very good, and as such he’s fallen out of favor and the recognition he deserves.

De Palma, from directors Noah Baumbach (Frances Ha) and Jake Paltrow (Young Ones), aims to change that. Part appreciation, part retrospective, part off-the-cuff film school, this is a consistently engaging documentary about one of America’s great directors – although one with far more speed bumps than his friends Martin Scorsese and Steven Spielberg.

Originally a self-described “science nerd,” De Palma fell in love with film in college and never looked back. His early films often featured Robert De Niro, then an up-and-coming actor. (In one of the more interesting anecdotes, De Palma contrasts how young and hungry “Bobby” was in the ’60s, compared to the highly paid actor in The Untouchables who would rarely learn his lines.) De Palma pushed buttons with the dark comedy Hi, Mom!, which features a scene shown here that’s disturbing even in 2016. I can’t imagine how audiences in 1970 would have reacted.

After several cheap thrillers, De Palma hit the big time with his adaptation of Stephen King’s Carrie in 1976, the remakes of which he relentlessly mocks. It almost didn’t happen because the studio haggled with him over a $200,000 budget increase. My, how times have changed.

The film moves on chronologically, as De Palma and De Palma alone recounts the ups and downs of his career. It’s a format that the late film critic Richard Schickel employed for his documentaries on Scorsese and Spielberg. But this film has a lot more style than those serviceable features. This is clearly the work of two admirers with a knack for editing and context. But, as De Palma points out, directors don’t set out to make a career arc. They just take the work as it comes. It’s not a straight line. He spent years developing Prince of the City, only for Sidney Lumet to swoop in and take it. De Palma returned the favor by taking over on Scarface.

De Palma – both the film and the director – are wildly entertaining. But it stings a little, hearing tales of him battling with the MPAA and studios over the extreme content of his films. There’s no director working within the confines of the studio system that’s fighting those fights anymore. De Palma may be nearing the end of his career – and he’s had his share of career-ending films before – but this doc proves why he shouldn’t be forgotten.

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About Kip Mooney

Kip Mooney
Like many film critics born during and after the 1980s, my hero is Roger Ebert. The man was already the best critic in the nation when he won the Pulitzer in 1975, but his indomitable spirit during and after his recent battle with cancer keeps me coming back to read not only his reviews but his insightful commentary on the everyday. But enough about a guy you know a lot about. I knew I was going to be a film critic—some would say a snob—in middle school, when I had to voraciously defend my position that The Royal Tenenbaums was only a million times better than Adam Sandler’s remake of Mr. Deeds. From then on, I would seek out Wes Anderson’s films and avoid Sandler’s like the plague. Still, I like to think of myself as a populist, and I’ll be just as likely to see the next superhero movie as the next Sundance sensation. The thing I most deplore in a movie is laziness. I’d much rather see movies with big ambitions try and fail than movies with no ambitions succeed at simply existing. I’m also a big advocate of fun-bad movies like The Room and most of Nicolas Cage’s work. In the past, I’ve written for The Dallas Morning News and the North Texas Daily, which I edited for a semester. I also contributed to Dallas-based Pegasus News, which in the circle of life, is now part of The Dallas Morning News, where I got my big break in 2007. Eventually, I’d love to write and talk about film full-time, but until that’s a viable career option, I work as an auditor for Wells Fargo. I hope to one day meet my hero, go to the Toronto International Film Festival, and compete on Jeopardy. Until then, I’m excited to share my love of film with you.

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