If you ever suffer really bad from some lasting pain...

Rating: 10/10 (30 April 2007)

...Scarface becomes one of the very, very few films indeed for which you'll still find taste watching. (Pretty much like with Parsifal in the opera business, though for slightly different reasons, as follows.)
Dressed in the suit of a gangster film Scarface is in fact a frontal attack on society, pleasure and the human condition in general. The beginning sets the tone for the whole film, we see real TV coverage of Fidel Castro declaring that criminals are better off in the U.S. than in Cuba and then their shipping over to Miami.
The film continues to show the veracity of this in the most cynical way imaginable, namely that Tony Montana does not only rise to the top, but that the big players in the U.S.' economical and political life even profit with him. What a waste, if he'd stayed in Cuba, on which all of his qualities would have been lost.
When it comes to money laundering and the legalisation of drugs you can clearly hear the political convictions of the people behind this film. But it doesn't stop there. "Me, I want what is coming to me." - "Oh well... what is coming to you?" - "The world, Chico, and everything in it." You want more? Yet, what is satisfaction? How elusive is it? Can somebody, in whom there is no lying, be satisfied by means of possession? Tony can not, Tony is wrath, ebbing away when he gets trapped in settled circumstances. Irrationality as all of human's joy, strength, suffering and action.
The world Tony needs to be natural can never be his, yet the world like it is, is pretty much so, only in another sense, made for him, not to be owned by him. It is the world to be owned by the peaceful, in which the devil rules. Ends don't meet.
A hymn to Schopenhauer and in Tony's case Schopenhauer's eternal justice even becomes credible, he's exactly the kind of melodramatic figure that is needed for that. But in this fate and its lesson there really is rest for the tormented, pain loses its teeth if it all wasn't meant to make sense anyway.
A huge film, no doubt, one of the best.