Don't get high on your own supply

Rating: 7/10 (7 January 2002)

Ostensibly a reworking of Howard Hawks' 1932 gangster classic, director Brian DePalma's 1983 crime epic SCARFACE remains one of the most hotly debated movies of modern times. Although I myself cannot quite call this a masterpiece along the lines of, say, the GODFATHER films, I do think it captures the life of a criminal as well as any film has ever done.
Oliver Stone wrote the screenplay to SCARFACE, so it not surprisingly also has a political slant to it. The film opens with the 1980 Mariel boat lift, in which Castro allowed as many as 125,000 Cubans to join their families in the United States, free from his totalitarian regime. The complication is that twenty percent of those who fled to America were known criminals. One of the latter is Tony Montana (Al Pacino), a Cuban punk who gets in on the ground floor of an increasingly lucrative trade in Miami's Cuban community; the buying and distribution of cocaine. He works his way up the ladder of the American dream because of the advice given to him by his mentor (Robert Loggia): never underestimate the other guy's greed, and don't get high on your own supply.
But even as he makes connections with the Colombian drug kingpins who supply him with what he needs, Pacino also becomes increasingly power-crazy, addicted to his own supply (against Loggia's advice), and paranoid. He alienates himself from virtually everyone around him, including his wife (Michelle Pfeiffer) and sister (Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio). In the end, he steps onto the toes of the wrong drug lord (Paul Shenar), who sends assassins to Pacino's Miami villa, resulting in a ferocious and hugely violent, blood-drenched showdown.
To this day, SCARFACE remains a touchstone movie for a lot of very good reasons. It is a withering critique not only on the excesses of greed, money, crime, and corruption, but also on our own anti-Communist paranoia which gave Castro carte-blanche to export his worst scum to our shores and thus accelerate the amount crime and death associated with the drug problem. The way the South Florida drug underworld lifestyle is depicted by both DePalma and Stone is very true to the essentials. And although I personally found Pacino's Cuban accent to be overdone at times, his performance (four-letter words and all) was and still IS the center of this film.
But SCARFACE is not necessarily the easiest film to like. At two hours and fifty minutes, even with an interesting political undercurrent, it does seem longer than is really necessary. The amount of times the "F" word is used (or variations of it) is perhaps a bit grossly overdone (I lost count of the number at around two hundred), although this too is perhaps close to the truth of its story. Finally, SCARFACE is still one of the most violent films ever to have come out of Hollywood. The chainsaw scene in the Miami apartment, the hanging from the chopper, and the ultra-gory shootout rank among the most violent sequences ever filmed. I can recall of only four films that have this kind of nerve-shattering violence: THE WILD BUNCH, SOLDIER BLUE, TAXI DRIVER, and SAVING PRIVATE RYAN.
Still, Pacino's performance and a fairly good, albeit slightly cheesy, music score by Giorgio Moroder are worth giving SCARFACE a '7' rating. But this is definitely NOT a film for young kids; it is rated 'R' for some very good reasons.