Seductive Compromise: 40 Years Of Scarface

The movie opens with a title card description of why 125,000 Cubans fled their home country for Miami, Florida because of Fidel Castro and how 25,000 of them had criminal records. A Black screen over a bleak music cue. Somber and ominous transmitting a sense of dread. An invitation to what promises to be an unforgettable trip and simultaneously a warning that it’s not all going to be fine. The appeal of entering the dark side while frightening is still potently seductive, and The 1983 remake just as the 1932 original Howard Hawks masterwork Scarface steadfastly achieves at seducing the audience. Alluring them to want to keep watching. Tempting them to keep going even though much of what they’re going to see is repulsive and unappealing, which is ironically a major part of the appeal. It’s a compromise. You show us something unusual and vibrant like we’ve never seen and no matter how unpleasant it gets we’ll stick with it through the duration. The opening scene of Cuban refugee and self-pronounced “political prisoner” Tony Montana a character feverishly brought to absorbing life with spellbound fervor by Al Pacino being interrogated by DEA agents and Miami Police Officers looks to be framed right out of a 1970’s Sidney Lumet picture. The rest of the film is pure 80’s pop cinema from Brian DePalma. A VHS copy of Scarface may be the only thing needed in a time capsule to verify what was the 1980’s. The “me first” attitude, the greed, the attention seeking clothes, the unruly hair styles, the blaring colors, the synthesized music, the money, the casual sex, the violence, the cocaine. Playing off of The Godfather’s epic summary and influence of a man from another country being ripped apart by violence escaping to America only to end up ripping other people apart with violence. It’s an elementary story structure depicting a simple rise and fall yet within that construction Scarface is like going to the gaudiest carnival and most savage circus combined and viewing it all from the front seat of a lit-up roller coaster at night rising to its highest peak and then dropping us into the abyss and down to a glittery and busy ocean floor. Tony Montana comes to the land of the free to do whatever he wants. What he wants is the world. What he gets is a transitory excursion through the most craven and degraded parts of society and human character while briefly gratifying himself in the instant stimulus and pleasurable excesses of a world that he thought he wanted but eventually he completely loses sight of and allows to turn on him. Seemingly born without compassion, a conscience or even a highly functional central nervous system. Tony is unforgiving and cold as stone. Apathetic and defiant to give in even in the face of a friend having his head thread bared by the blade of a buzzsaw. For an average person it’s hard to see the fun in any of it. The drugs, the booze, the life set in darkness, the losing control of oneself in a bewildered mist of decadence and debauchery. All powerful mechanisms which eventually lose their initially potent punch leading to more of all of them having to be constantly ingested to keep the person going. Yet instead of adding they are all absorbing themselves and subtracting from the individual’s character or what’s left of it. Tony could be working in a kitchen, making enough money to get by as an everyday Joe. Sure, it’s not going home in a Mercedes to a mansion but it’s also not having to look over his shoulder for lascivious faces coming at him with guns and chainsaws. But Tony wants everything, and Tony has everything, but he ends up a prisoner in his own everything. The giant bathtub in his mansion hideaway, his own mind, and his own reliance on cocaine. The woman who he stole from his previous boss who’s now also succumbed to the appetite of the white Peruvian marching powder and now she and Tony supposed to be married to each other are only married to the drug that used to get them high and now has brought them to their lowest point ever. Tony and the other men of this drug world live in a constant state of hideouts. Everywhere is a place to disappear. Their large homes, their fancy cars. Even when they are pleasingly tucked inside extravagant restaurants and nightclubs being waited on hand and foot with champaign and caviar, they are in places to hide from the law and from the other degenerate and highly motivated men who are after their business and product. Only finding one another doesn’t seem too hard and soon an attempt on Tony’s life is made in a hail of machine gun fire that Tony escapes unscathed from in the booth of a nightclub in one of the most beautifully executed cinematic scenes of violence ever put on film. Possibly only right behind the dazzling end sequence of the film. Brian DePalma might be our greatest filmmaker of filming violence as entertainment. His great affection and influence and a knack for generating Hitchcockian suspense combined with his own intensely vivid and turbulent cinematography and choreography is a beautifully stunning violent ballet. Scarface distinguishes its main character’s rise and fall from prior gangster films like The Godfather and future gangster films like Goodfellas as Scarface’s main protagonist doesn’t fall to sin from grace, but Tony Montana falls from utter disgrace to total wickedness. He’s never the good guy, always the bad guy as he announces to a captive audience leaving a restaurant “Take a look at the bad guy, because its going to be a long time before you see another bad guy like this one again.” Tony Montana is a first ballot hall of famer cinema bad guy and as in other mafia and drug films Tony breaks the core rule of don’t get high on your own supply, but Tony doesn’t even need drugs to get high, Tony is high on everything mostly himself. The selfishness that exudes from the character of Tony Montana is staggering as even his best friend and own sister become victims of his irrational and self-reliant wrath. We should hate Tony Montana enough to easily want to abandon him but Pacino’s performance as Tony Montana is so brutally charismatic and mesmeric that we stick with Tony long after he crumbles. Scarface as it’s made takes on the personality of its main character. Like Tony it’s rendered brutal, garish, and unkempt. It’s irrational all the while being extravagantly alluring while remaining cheap and gaudy. It also breaks its own rules. It gets high on its own supply. Once Tony gets so high that he is at the top there’s only one place for him to fall. An army of men with guns is closing to make sure that fall happens sooner rather than later. Tony is left alone with just a big pile of cocaine and a big gun. Afterall, he’s a big man now and he needs both. The men are coming. The bigger they are the harder they fall, and Tony has some long falling to do. The initial release of Scarface on December 9th, 1983 was met with almost immediate dismissal and condemnation from the majority of foremost American film critics. Reviled at the time, Scarface wasn’t exactly a bomb. But being lambasted by critics who also vigorously lamented its excessive use of foul language and ultra violence initially kept audiences at bay for the most part. With a fairly modest budget of $25 Million Scarface went on to pull a return investment of $45,000 at the American Box Office at $65 million worldwide. Scarface in theaters may have come out at the wrong place at the wrong time. However, its release on Home Video was perfect timing at the perfect place. The paradise Tony Montana was looking for. Middle class Americans were buying up the first home video recorders and cameras and more movies were being released on the home video market in VHS and BETA formats. Video rental stores began popping up in your town. Some movies were wildly popular, and Scarface was one of them. At any given video store, the lone copy of Scarface was always rented out, so video store owners ordered more and all of those were rented out too. Years went by and like its main character the movie built its reputation and through more and more home viewings and more word of mouth that carried Scarface from the bottom of the ocean floor where movie critics had thought they buried it. Like Jaws it appeared again on the sea’s horizon jumping out of the water from nowhere to bite them in the ass. Critics who derided Scarface had to do a big about face and now speak and write about the movie in a positive and respectful light. Having become too influential to dismiss and too popular to ignore Scarface and all of its lifeblood began to seep into the culture and especially into the rap and hip-hop ethos. References to the movie, the character of Tony Montana and the lessons within the film became saturated within rap lyrics and arose to encompass the overall attitude of hip hop rising. It became the most popular movie poster to have hanging in your home. It went from being the VHS tape you had to have to being the DVD you had to have, and you had to have every new version. It became a major go to Christmas gift. It became one of the most quoted movies in modern history. Movie fans saved Scarface from a lifetime drowned in the void of failure. Like the main character of the movie Scarface the movie is an uncommon success story but this time the rise happened after the fall. While certainly an acquired taste and easily argued as a good movie or a bad movie. Scarface was way too colorful, vibrant, and extravagant to simply be ignored forever at the bottom of the sea. Eventually someone was going to find it. Afterall one man’s trash is another man’s treasure. Too many movie fans found Scarface the treasure that had been so rashly left behind that they dug it up from a shallow grave. Scarface remains an important film and a significant lesson in filmmaking, mostly in the revealing a disposition relayed to filmmakers that you can take huge risks on the highwire, and you don’t have to be safe because even if you fall into the bed of spikes that is the movie critics the audience can be your safety net. Scarface mostly succeeds because filmmakers and actors involved cared about the material and took and huge swings. For the makers of Scarface, it must have been akin to being a baseball player and hitting the ball as hard as you could and thinking you hit a foul ball then later being told that you actually hit a homerun and the umps just had bad eyesight, but the fans saw it perfectly well. Scarface isn’t perfect filmmaking, but Tony Montana isn’t a perfect man. Forty years of being one of the most viewed and venerated films in the world isn’t a stroke of luck. It’s respect and balls.