Psychokinesis in extremis.

Rating: 6/10 (31 October 2009)

Now, it's been said that many of Brian De Palma's movies are sloppy and half-witted imitations of Alfred Hitchcock's. It's a bloody lie. De Palma's movies are very precise and fully witted imitations of Alfred Hitchcock's.
Whatever Hitchcock did, Brian De Palma does more of it and does it more expansively.
Carrie (Spacek) is a high school senior who is an ugly duckling, kept ignorant by her mother (Laurie) who is a religious fanatic, and ridiculed by her classmates, especially the vicious and vengeful Chris Hargenson (Allen), a juicy and sluttish blond. Kids can be so cruel, you know? Spacek is too freaky to have friends in school but Amy Irving comes closest, and the gym teacher, Miss Collins (Buckley) isn't far behind. Amy Irving goes so far as to persuade her hunky jock/poet inamorato William Katt to take Spacek the Doomed to the all-important senior prom. It's meant as a kindly gesture.
There, a terrible trick has been planned for Spacek by Allen and her boyfriend (Travolta). They've take a bucket full of pig's blood, perched it on a beam above the stage mark for the prom queen, arrange it so that Spacek wins, then dump the blood all over her in front of a gym full of classmates and teachers. Katt is knocked out by the falling pail. Everyone begins laughing at Carrie, who is standing wide-eyed with humiliation and fear on the stage, splattered all over with blood.
That laughter is a big mistake. Spacek has hidden psychic powers. She distracts everyone from her discredited state by having fire hoses squirt water all over everybody, then electrocuting them and having falling structural beams crush them like cockroaches, and then burning the whole joint down.
It's a very carefully done movie, paying at least as much attention to detail as Hitchcock would have, and usually more. Pino Donaggio has contributed a fulsomely orchestrated operatic score. He lifts the screaming violins bodily from "Psycho." The cinematography is by Mario Tosi and is equally well done. The performances are fully blown, as is appropriate to an Italian opera. Eyeballs bulge, voices shriek, knives fly through the air, gestures are florid enough to be seen from the balcony.
Well, actually, it's not entirely true that this is a precise imitation of Hitchcock. Hitchcock would never have used so many looming close ups. And, like Beethoven, Hitchcock might have adumbrated a big theme into which he was about to launch with a couple of teasers, but he would never have drawn out the tension before a climactic act the way De Palma does.
The bucket-of-pig-blood gag seems to go on forever -- and mostly in slow motion, which Hitchcock never used. Have you ever seen a movie in which people clap their hands in slow motion? It's a little like watching a machine gun being fired in slow motion, the twirling cartridges being ejected, the bolt languidly sliding back and forth. It's all very informative but dramatically the impact is more silly than tense.
It's different from Hitchcock in other ways too. Hitchcock always made movies about the world he was familiar with. His early movies were about the British working class from which he was sprung. Later we got to see much more of fancy restaurants and Cary Grant in tailored suits. When Hitchcock moved too far from those chummy settings, he tended to stumble, as in "Under Capricorn" (Australia in an early period). In the end, his social world had narrowed to such an extent that he lost touch with taxi cabs. In his last movie, Bruce Dern is a taxi driver who wears a military-style yellow-cab cap with a bill.
I don't mean to go on about Hitchcock this much but any reasonable assessment of "Carrie" compels me. Hitchcock wouldn't have DREAMED of making a movie about teen-age jealousies and the senior prom. He wouldn't have had sex and nudity in anything he did. He might have allowed the kind of discontinuity in character so blatantly on display here, though.
Take Miss Collins, the gym teacher. She's been protective -- even nurturing -- towards the marginalized Carrie. She's punished those who've played tricks on Carrie. She's encouraged her to accept the invitation to the prom, prompted her on her wardrobe and grooming. Miss Collins' eyes glisten with tears when Carrie steps onto the stage to accept the award as prom queen. But a few minutes later, when Carrie is bug-eyed with humiliation, Miss Collins bursts out laughing along with the rest. Why? I guess so she can be selected for the special kind of destruction she gets. It violates the logic of the plot but it makes for startling imagery. And, really, who can believe that Amy Irving would be willing to talk her handsome boy friend into taking another girl to the prom, while Irving stayed home with Mom and Dad?
I'd better quit this before I run out of space. I'll have to start editing this nonsense and slashing away at it, "killing all my darlings," as Proust would have put it. I wish Brian De Palma could be as ruthless with his work.