Things Go Better With Coke

Rating: 7/10 (12 January 2008)

The visual imagery is strikingly different from Howard Hawks' early 1930s version, but the plot is fundamentally the same, transposed from Al Capone in Chicago in the 1920s, through Tony Camonte and prohibition in the 1930s, to Tony Montana (Al Pacino) and cocaine in Miami in the 1980s. The protagonist begins as an ethnic nobody and rises to the top before being undone by his own reach. There's a sub-plot. A Latin kid falls for a trophy blond before returning to the girl who reflects his own roots, though she may be his sister.
I'm not sure about that incest business, which showed up first in a shadowy way in Hawks' film. There it was arguable. Here, with Maria Mastrantonio as Pacino's sister Gina, it's made explicit in Gina's speech before she attempt to shoot Pacino. But, I don't know. Latin culture tends to be pretty protective of its women, who are either Madonnas or whores. (And not just Latins, but other cultures as well, including Samoans.) It's the business of the brother to protect his sister's reputation. True enough, Pacino seems obsessed with Gina, and the director, Brian DePalma, emphasizes this by giving us a close-up of Pacino's glare every time he spots her with a boy friend. But then, after all, Tony kills his best friend for being with his sister, only BEFORE he discovers they're married. Sure, it's ambiguous. It's just hard to believe that what amounts to fratricide would have taken place simply because of incestuous longings.
Anyway, enough incest. In Hawks' film, Tony drove an armor-plated car and lived in an armor-plated room. We only knew he was rich because everybody said so. Here, we actually SEE the opulence and, man, is it disgusting. It's ritzy in the same sense that a Las Vegas casino is ritzy, which is to say pretty vulgar. No class, you know? The production designer, glimpsing the plan, just have entered the phase of ejaculatory inevitability.
And in Hawks' film there is the usual final shoot out in which the sister is accidentally shot and Tony gets his. It's dramatic but it doesn't last long. In this film it looks a little like World War III. It's not a blood bath. It's literally a swimming pool of blood. (Two of them, in fact.) "Say hell to my LITTLE FRIEND!", Pacino screams before triggering his grenade-launching assault rifle -- but a bullet is just a bullet after all.
Pacino, playing a rogue Cuban, is kind of funny. I wonder if he played it for laughs. His accent is a kind of all-purpose Romance language dialect, edging crabwise at times into some kind of Slavic. And coke has a peculiar effect on him. Where most people get a rush of exhilaration and euphoria from doing a line or two, Pacino can shove his face into a mountain of the stuff, take a big deep breath, and emerge more sluggish and dispirited than before. Michelle Pfeiffer is the trophy blond wife. (Yummy.) If you rubbed her belly with a hundred dollar bill she'd go into tonic immobility like a chicken. I was most impressed by the performance of Arnaldo Santana as Pacino's adversary Ernie, the henchman of Robert Loggia. Pacino has just killed two of his enemies, leaving only the remaining gangster Santana standing next to Loggia's body. (Why does Loggia wear a chai?) As Pacino and his friends are walking out with their guns still asmoke, Steven Bauer glances over and asks, "What about Ernie?" The expressions that flit across Santana's features at that moment are priceless. He's not exactly terrified. He's just monumentally UNEASY.
DePalma stages a few memorable scenes. One is an argument between him and Pfeiffer in a fancy restaurant. My ex wife was a specialist in initiating such public scenes. Another is an attempted assassination of Pacino in his own night club, in which a fat Fellini-esquire clown with a plastic head gets caught in the crossfire while prancing around to "Strangers in the Night." The third has Pacino in a marble tub surrounded by sycophants, booze, and bubble bath. The shoot out, with Pacino taking bullet after bullet while waving his arms and screaming vile curses, is hard to take because of its excess. (Let the guy DIE, for crying out loud!)