Chilling movie

Rating: 9/10 (3 November 2006)

In 1983 I found this movie to be flawed but entertaining in a campy sort of way. Here was Al Pacino playing a Cuban gangster, along with a whole bunch of other non-Hispanic actors playing various Latin American characters. To me it added to the essential surrealist quality of the movie. Well, 23 years later, I watched the same movie and my impressions have changed. This movie is anything but surrealistic. This movie is a powerful dramatization of what happens when a psychopath grabs power. This is Al Pacino's greatest movie. Here he plays a character who is angry, alienated, dispossessed, morally depraved and marginalized. His own mother wants nothing to do with him. His own sister is utterly corrupted by his presence. Unlike Michael in The Godfather, whose own depravity is at least blunted by the veneer of middle class civility, Tony's behavior is upfront, unambiguous, without restraint and utterly lacking in finesse. Everything he does is based on cunning and brute force. Unlike the Godfather, Tony doesn't need an organization to run his operation, he IS the organization. Nor does he pretend to be anything other than what he is, a gangster. For Tony is a product of the culture of violence that pervades society, produces characters like Tony Montana and supplies Hollywood with the material with which to make these kind of chilling movies.
Further comments: the story is tragic. Tony is doomed from the start. He wants it all but doesn't have the education or temperament to channel his efforts in a way so as to avoid self-destruction. He is like a locomotive building speed and unable to stop because he doesn't have brakes. Now, Tony is not bad person; he is a product of a materialistic culture that measures success in terms of money. For Tony the equation is simple: money equals power which in turn equals self worth. Tony has the potential to do great things, but having been brutalized has warped his character, and so for him money is toxic - the more he accumulates the more paranoid he becomes. That's too bad because all that potential goes to waste, with tragic consequences.