Through a Glass Darkly

Casualties of War (1989): As is typical of De Palma, it begins with Hitchcock, specifically Vertigo (1958): a Vietnam vet nodding off on the San Francisco streetcar sees the lookalike of a peasant girl he saw murdered during the war. He (Michael J. Fox) falls back asleep and has a "bad dream" recapitulating this sorry episode in American history, when young soldiers stole away a Vietnamese girl in the night for sick pleasure and shot her after she had served a purpose. The protagonist is the one character in his company who protests against this, but by a kind of Faustian tie to his nation (he detests his comrades' actions, but is afraid to lose his privilege as an American by rebelling against military hierarchy) he proves impotent in stopping it. 

If the mark of De Palma's best films is his self-contained visual sequences, often wordless, of stylistic bravura that imbue each shot or camera flourish with an eternity of tension, this film has to be considered disappointing. Its lasting impression for me is mostly declamatory arguments about ethics between sweaty actors standing around in jungle brush. I didn't know De Palma could be so self-serious. The film's constant need for audience identification in the form of Michael J. Fox's guilty, head-shaking liberal moral-compass is a surprising blunder for a veteran filmmaker – perhaps driven by fear of a negative reception from the American public. It didn't work either way: the movie was not a hit.

Score: 2.5/5

Before the Devil Knows You're Dead (2007): A seething, Karamazovian melodrama by octogenarian Sydney Lumet about two unhappy white-collar brothers whose scheme to rob their parents’ jewelry store goes horribly wrong. The father relentlessly investigates the crime in the aftermath, unaware that he is looking for his own children. As some Letterboxd reviews note, the script seems indebted to the Coen Brothers’ post-modern crime stories of flawed, unremarkable people from generic American milieus interconnected in violent webs of monetary greed. The ugly, “gooey” quality of the image, thanks to its 2000s digital intermediate process, also helps its resemblance to the Coens’ contemporaneous films, No Country for Old Men (2007) and Burn After Reading (2008). What I prefer about Lumet’s film is that these flawed characters are still treated with an air of tragedy as opposed to disdain, as humans with some subtlety, some moral centre, some emotional and behavioural modulation, as opposed to the alienating caricatures that pervade much of the Coens’ work (No Country is an exception), whose clumsiness and stupidity is something to be sneered at. Compare William H. Macy’s character in Fargo to Ethan Hawke’s in this, for example. I like humanist art.

What makes the film great is not just the acting, which one would expect with this director and these performers, but wise old Lumet’s Polanski-like ability to contain abysmal, demonic suffering and evil in benign forms — an interrogative fist balled on a table or stones poured on a glass coffee table. Unlike Polanski, however, Lumet has a greater emotional range, balancing the abyss with the touching: the sad image of Hawke and Hoffman in the latter’s office, laughing in daylight over their doomed plans as Hoffman sits perched on his desk like Mephistopheles, will not be forgotten by this viewer.

Where the film is less successful is its structure: the film is told non-linearly, alternating between the perspectives of multiple characters before, during and after the robbery. While I understand the vision of this — the robbery happens early on and the rest of the film is essentially a dirge for these characters — the film loses some of its tension through this discursiveness and is not as riveting as it could have been. The editing transitions between perspectives also are unaccountably chintzy. These are fitting flaws for Lumet, a talented director but not one free of failure throughout his career.

Score: 3.5/5