Forbidden Mirrors

Rating: 8/10 (17 July 2006)

What strikes the viewer is the notable lack of theft of ideas from movie predecessors. I spotted the "Foreign Correspondent" borrowing when the Columbian gets it between the eyes from Pacino. And the Babylon mirrors resemble those from "Enter the Dragon". But that's about it -- the rest is devoted to piling on its own style.
Stone assiduously avoided rewriting this just like Hawks' original, saying in interviews that, in its old form, it offered very little. So he wrote this as part exploration of the cocaine-fueled underworld, part catharsis to end his own dependence. Montana's death is heavy on the layered symbolism.
The structure of the story is also 'mirrored' in the club mirrors -- each plot segment overlaps with the next one in some way; before the narrative completely moves out of one idea, the next one is reflected in.
What makes this fly though is DePalma. We have almost relentless use of long, panning crane shots here. The perspectives are impossible for a human, so the camera does the acting -- typified in the aversion to the chainsaw scene. The effect is that of a painting, much like the sunset murals put up by the set designers all over 'Miami' (mostly L.A.). Lots and lots of bright, excessive colors and personalities.
Pacino plays this as a mixture of Bogart/Cagney/Muni plus his own Godfather II-derived Michael Corleone...in other words, as a tyrant. He would mine this for much of his later work (including Godfather III). In fact, when he tries to avoid tapping the Montana character, he comes across as lethargic ("Sea of Love", "Insomnia").
Also remarkable for the time was how the south Florida community reacted to the knowledge that the film production was underway, and forced the relocation of this to the west coast, because of the implied negative depiction of Cuban ex-pats. Probably, the only other movie that had this much unfavorable advance press is "Basic Instinct".