Hey, everyone. "Moriarty" here with some Rumblings From The Lab.
Oh, boy...
You ever fall in love with a filmmaker's work early on in your life, then find yourself at a certain point in time frustrated by that filmmaker's output? Especially after you've sat through five or six really bad films in a row? Have you ever found yourself in a conversation about that filmmaker desperately dodging any mention of his new work, intentionally swinging the talk back around to old work, classic work, the stuff you love in the first place?
Brian De Palma is that filmmaker for me. I am an unabashed fan of some of his movies, and I think there are times when his work as a visual stylist has been as strong as anyone's. BLOW OUT is an exceptional thriller with my second favorite bleak thriller ending (the first being TO LIVE OR DIE IN LA), and it features the absolute best John Travolta performance in any film. Including PULP FICTION. PHANTOM OF THE PARADISE is wonderful, a great cartoon rock opera riff on Gaston Leroux's classic tale, and it delighted me to no end to be able to present fellow PARADISE-freak Guillermo Del Toro with a copy of the original PARADISE script at the first Butt-Numb-A-Thon, where we watched his print of the movie. Hell, Harry Lime just brought me a CD with the soundtrack burned off of Napster, and I've been playing it nonstop for the last few days. SCARFACE is... well, SCARFACE is SCARFACE. How can you not love Al Pacino's two-fisted performance as Tony Montoya, the baddest of all movie bad boys? His classic narration ("Miami is like a great big pussy, just waiting to get fucked") and his remarkable dead-eyed performance are worth the price of admission, but that's ignoring Michelle Pfeiffer as the ice queen or Robert Loggia begging for his life or that amazing final shoot-out or any of a dozen other goodies De Palma lobs at you in his filming of Oliver Stone's coke-soaked gangster epic. DRESSED TO KILL and BODY DOUBLE are both knowing, clever, classy Hitchcock riffs that play off of our familiarity with PSYCHO and REAR WINDOW and VERTIGO, roughhousing with our expectations, goofing on us even as they actually thrill and scare us. THE UNTOUCHABLES found the visual poetry in David Mamet's mythic reinterpretation of the classic TV series, and flourishes like his much-commented-on "Odessa Steps" sequence just reinforce for me how much fun De Palma has making movies.
For my taste, De Palma peaked with 1989's CASUALTIES OF WAR, an unjustly-maligned piece that featured a strong bit of work by Michael J. Fox and a blistering, savage performance by Sean Penn that stands among his very best. As Tony Meserve, he's the Ugly American wrapped up with a big bow, an id unleashed and armed by the US Government. Ennio Morricone's score for this film is wrenching, and the photography by Stephen Burum is a career-best. All of this serves one of De Palma's finest acting ensembles, with faces like Don Harvey, John C. Reilly, John Leguizamo, Ving Rhames, and Sam Robards all doing admirable, impressive work early in their film careers. It's rough stuff, but De Palma isn't playing this for the same slick, somewhat empty thrills he normally seems satisfied with. No, he meant it with CASUALTIES, and I hoped it was him turning a corner as a filmmaker, taking that next step up.
Then came BONFIRE OF THE VANITIES. Oh, Brian... poor Brian. Not only did he make a really, really bad film, but he also had one of the most vicious behind-the-scenes books ever written published about the making of his really, really bad film. It was a double whammy that derailed him for a while. RAISING CAIN didn't really help him with his whole "comeback" thing, either. Although the film makes me laugh hysterically, I am willing to admit that there's a good chance it wasn't meant as a joke. Oooooops.
Things seemed to be looking up with the one-two punch of CARLITO'S WAY, a good but not great film that reunited him with Pacino (and that features one of the earliest film appearances of the GENIUS Luis Guzman that I remember), and MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE, which I still find superior in every way to the horrible, terrible, no good, very bad sequel released last summer. De Palma's nothing if not resiliant, and I was rooting for him to get some great personal projects off the ground while he had some heat going.
Instead, we got the limp-and-obviously-heavily-reshot SNAKE EYES and the painful MISSION TO MARS instead. And that's the baggage audiences are carrying around now. I can't mention De Palma without hearing a complaint about one or the other of his most recent misfires. I try to talk about BLOW OUT or even earlier fare like SISTERS with someone, and all they know is how much they hated MISSION TO MARS. Makes me wanna holler sometimes. I persevere, though, because that's what a fan does. You wait through the not-so-good or even terrible movies and you hope that each one is going to be the one to get the filmmaker back on the track, the one that's going to suddenly crystallize these ideas and themes that they seem to go back to time and again. You hope that this is going to be the film that justifies all these years of faith, the film that sends the message loud and clear: Brian De Palma still matters.
Too bad FEMME FATALE won't be that film.
I wanted to like it. I wanted to LOVE it, as a matter of fact. I got a copy of the script dropped off at my door by The Single Tallest Man Who Ever Lived, one of my close friends. That's not just a name, either. This guy is actually 11 feet, 3 inches tall. It's startling. He slipped me the script and told me that the last he'd heard, the $35 million film had started shooting about a month ago in France, and that it was set to star Rebecca Romijn-Stamos, Jean Reno, Antonio Banderas, and Gregg Henry, one of De Palma's favorite guys from way back. I know De Palma originally chased Uma Thurman to play the lead, but she passed in favor of Tarantino's similarly themed KILL BILL. I don't have to read KILL BILL to know she made the right choice. As of the January 9, 2001 draft, what De Palma has cooked up (he's the sole credited writer) is a revenge film with a few action set pieces and a problematic structure that will piss audiences off to no end.
The script kicks off on the red carpet outside the Palais Des Festivals Et Des Congres at a major premiere during the Cannes International Film Festival. As the various celebrities arrive and sweep past the Paparazzi, we meet LAURE ASH, posing as one of the photographers, "our Femme Fatale." This is Rebecca Romijn Stamos, and I have no idea how she'll do with the part. I think she's entirely too American, all things considered. She's French in the script. It's very important, too. Pretty much the whole plot hinges on the fact that she's French. I've met Stamos, and she's very charismatic, very hot, and very American. She'll be fun in the first scene, at least, though. She catches the eye of a starlet on the arm of the director of the film that's premiering. She and the starlet start to flirt. Laure makes sure to show off her ass when she bends to reload a camera. It's shameless. Laure also plays to the security cameras outside the building, cameras that are basically looking right down her shirt. As she works to take pictures of the starlet, Laure's nipples pop out of the top of her shirt, and all the guards gather around the security monitors to watch. This distraction allows her co-conspirators to get into place around the grounds. She's working with two guys, RACINE and WICKS. Not sure who's playing either one. Laure follows the starlet into the building, then into a bathroom, where the two of them start getting it on in one of the stalls. Laure uses the sexplay to strip the starlet of her extravagant jewelry, and everything seems to be going fine at first. When things get complicated, Wicks breaks in on Laure and the starlet and moves to kill the starlet. Something in Laure feels guilty, and she stops Wicks, hurting him badly. During the blackout that follows, part of their plan, she and Wicks struggle, and she finds herself having to savagely attack both of her partners. She leaves Wicks and Racine for dead, and just barely escapes being picked up by authorities.
Even in this opening, which I hoped was going to be wicked and smart and funny, a sequence that would fully utilize this great location and this great knowledge De Palma must have of what that scene is like, things feel muted, as if De Palma doesn't really have any great ideas for action scenes right now. It's pedestrian, and that's the one thing De Palma's work has never been. Even when it's been awful, it's been gloriously awful, off the tracks bad. This script is just dull, lifeless. Laure goes through the mechanics of running, setting up a trip out of the country using a passport that's not hers, and it's all handled in a sort of ponderous, eventual manner. There's a shadowy figure following her, but De Palma tells us right away... it's Racine. He's not dead. He plays games with Laure, calling her as an anonymous friend who wants to help her escape safely. These games bring her to an outdoor cafe, where she runs into a man named Nicolas Bardo, one of the biggest paparazzi photographers in the business. This got my hopes up again. De Palma's done some great stuff exploring the theme of voyeurism, and I was hoping Bardo would be a window into the particular and heartless world of being a paparazzi. No such luck. Bardo's job is a device, something that's referenced once or twice, then forgotten. He's introduced in a sort of perfunctory manner, then shuffled off so Racine can finally catch up with Laure. He attacks her, she escapes, and in doing so, she takes a nasty fall.
Again... it's not really coming to life for me as a reader, but it's not bad. It's just sort of plodding along up to this point, and then we reach page 25 or so, and the film asks us to accept the first GIGANTICALLY ANNOYING PLOT POINT of the script. An old couple just happens to be walking right where Laure falls, and she happens to look exactly like a friend of theirs, and they take her home in the confusion. Laure is shocked to see photos of her exact twin, but she rolls with it, playing along. The old couple treats her with kid gloves, and Laure has no idea why. It's like they're surprised to see her. They put her in a bedroom, pamper her, and back off to let her sleep. Laure gets up and wanders at one point, finding a CRYSTAL BALL in another bedroom as well as a pendant with a tiny crytal ball on it. After she finishes searching the apartment, she just happens to turn on a TV talk show in time to hear the Moderator of the show ask, "Can we see the Future? In a crystall ball? On the palm of our hand? Or in a dream? And once we know it, can we change it?" That's Brian's big announcement for what's going to happen in the film, and it does indeed play out over the course of the movie, leading to what has got to be one of the most dramatically unsatisfying conclusions to a script that I've read in recent memory.
I don't want to give away much more of the premise. Basically, Laure manages to find a way out of the country, and years later, she finds herself dragged back into the country, where she's afraid someone will recognize her and either try to kill her or try to arrest her. Laure has to go to extreme measures to protect the new life she's built, and she won't let anyone get in her way. There's not a single suspense scene in this script to rival anything De Palma's done before. It's a profoundly disappointing script. I wanted so much to like it, and I tried hard to imagine just what he might bring to the project visually. De Palma is, after all, a visual storyteller first and foremost, and he's working with the extraordinarily gifted Thierry Arbogast. This is just such a painfully convoluted story. It pains me to think that this is the sort of thing he's going to spend the rest of his career making. I read another script of his a few years back, a script he co-wrote with David Koepp called BLACKWATER, and it was this same kind of preposterously plotted suspense oriented dreck without anything to say or anyone to watch. It's sad to watch someone so obviously talented just spin his wheels at a point in his career where he should be further along, where he should be making great films. I sincerely hope he makes something of this one, but I've got a feeling I haven't had since I read UNBREAKABLE. I knew as soon as I set the script down that film was going to divide audiences with its ending, that some would love it and others would hate it. I don't think there will be any division on FEMME FATALE. I think it's going to piss off audiences uniformly. It's a giant cheat, it renders everything that happens pointless, and it makes no great point about anything. It's just an empty exercise from someone who is capable of far more.
"Moriarty" out.
