The Layers of the Scarf

Rating: Null/10 (26 February 2002)

Spoilers herein.
With Kubrick and de Palma, the image comes first. The script is an excuse, and the actors are either collaborators or unwitting victims. Fox is a victim here. He was chosen precisely because he is clueless.
With de Palma it is the eye, always the eye. But here he lets the story frame the eye more than in the past. He had just come off the Mamet-authored `Untouchables' to acclaim (lines like `stinks like a whorehouse at low tide') and was to disasterously rely more heavily on the text in `Vanities.' This is between the two, also by a celebrated playwrite. Framed by the bus, with inner framing of the tunnel scene and the bridge scene.

These two scenes are the backbone of the vision. de Palma likes the notion of worlds under and over worlds. The tunnel world gives no contribution to the story per se, it is the filmmaker's statement of the cherry's entry into unknown levels. Later, the levels are the bridge and river, where his real story ends. In between the camera is constantly moving up and down, often beginning or ending completely out of frame. If you love visual narrative, you gotta love that.
Also the four-house deal: how the camera lives in these four spaces: the hooch of the abduction, the hooch of the rape and later the assistance, the destroyed temple of the interview with the Captain and the `courtroom.' The camera knows these spaces -- they have character, which are defined first and then only reflecting on the persons within. This is a Welles trick, one which de Palma does more subtly and effectively I think.
de Palma has chosen to make an anti-war film. And he is intelligent enough to know this means making an anti war-film. War-films are by their nature reductionist. You need to not only undercut war (a trivial job for an artist) but the simplicity implied in the genre. Malick was to do this better, but by recourse to a philosophy probably not reachable by most (additive abstraction). de Palma's solution is less intellectual, and as with Malick relies on collaboration with Penn.
This is Penn's first truly multidimensional role, where he plays several characters at once. Here he plays the Sgt., as John Wayne would. But he also plays the playwrite/filmmaker and the actor playing the filmmaker. It is his birth as an artist, and one not missed by screenwriter Rabe. He would rewrite his `HurlyBurly' as a more multileveled project and similarly collaborate.