“Did you ever kill anybody, Charlie?”
Penelope Ann Miller’s Gail asks this of Al Pacino‘s Carlito Brigante throughout Carlito’s Way, a thoroughly impressive piece of studio entertainment from Brian De Palma, the first of the director’s trio of films with accomplished screenwriter David Koepp (Mission:Impossible, Snake Eyes). Released a decade after Scarface, this film plays, in many ways, as a more intelligent, more mature counterpart.
The parallels are obvious. Both Scarface and Carlito’s Way are gangster films starring Pacino, directed by De Palma, and produced by Marty Bregman. Cocaine is a large motivator in both. Carlito is set in 1975. Scarface is set in 1980. There’s even a prevalence of cockroaches (said and seen) in either. It’s the differences that reveal how De Palma grew as a filmmaker painting on a large canvas. Gone is the over-the-top turn by Pacino as Cuban refugee Tony Montana, here replaced by a tragic, romantic performance as Carlito Brigante, a New York-born, Puerto Rican ex-con looking for a way out. Gone is the three-hour runtime full of superfluous camera moves and slow-motion explosions of violence, replaced by a comparatively tight 140-minute social examination of a criminal trying to assimilate into an environment built on corruption. And though by no means subtle, Koepp’s screenplay builds characters while Oliver Stone’s Scarface screenplay creates caricatures.
The Summer of De Palma continues with Carlito’s Way.
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