Drug dealing is for schizophrenics

Rating: 10/10 (28 September 2009)

Don't let yourself be lured by the picture of the poor Cubans under the dictatorship of Fidel Castro who is kicking them out of the island. It is hinted these exiled people are far from being clean. They are the dregs of society and coming directly out of prison. Scarface is no exception. He is scum and scum he will remain till the end. The Americans are not lured at all, at least the police, but they are under strong pressure to provide these poor refugees with "libertad". As soon as Scarface gets that freedom he starts his business, from scratch and from the bottom, but he knows how to climb fast and how to get rid of obstacles and his road is punctuated with bodies or parts of bodies. In no time at all he is the boss and he is able to realize his ambition: millions from the opening Colombian route (cocaine of course) whereas those he eliminated to get in their place were only making a few grands. But the story of this man is the story of a paranoid and schizophrenic sociopath. He climbs to power and cannot see he has to share that power with newcomers. He defends his territory like a lion or a grizzly bear and his power becomes a war, a constant war in which everything and everyone is destroyed. That makes a perfect action film full of violence as if it were loaded with cocaine, but with a more human dimension in the character of Scarface himself who is impersonated marvelously by Al Pacino. The acting is so good that it transcends the pure bloody violence of the images and the plot. We can admire how Brian de Palma paints and composes his character to make him so true to what we can believe. He becomes a masterpiece in that psychological line in spite of the total absence of any other depth, social, cultural, political or whatever.
Dr Jacques COULARDEAU, University Paris 1 Pantheon Sorbonne, University Paris 12 Créteil, CEGID