How ‘Scarface’ Went From Pariah to Populist

It’s amazing how something becomes embedded in popular culture, especially something that probably has no legitimate reason to be there in the first place. After all, the item under discussion today began life as a critically derailed affront to the sensibilities of moviegoers everywhere. Scarface was lambasted for its violence, politics, questionable casting decisions and performances, and its overall message of a drug-fueled, frenzied power struggle on the streets of Miami.

Indeed, Scarface was considered a black eye, a too-close-to-home comment on the Mariel boatlift, and a stinging, over-generalized indictment of the majority of law-abiding Cuban citizens and refugees in the US. Oddly enough, some 30 years later, few remember the thousands that came to America’s shores from Castro’s Communist house cleaning, but few have forgotten the film that immortalizes it.

Ah, Scarface, that subtle morality tale about crime not paying – at least, not always and definitely not in the end. Scarface is a supposed update of Howard Hawks’ 1932 ‘classic’ from the height of Hollywood’s original obsession with the crime genre. Scarface is the movie where a man gets a chainsaw to the head. Scarface has more F-bombs and blood splatter than in all of Quentin Tarantino and Martin Scorsese’s canon combined (well, that’s probably an exaggeration).

With a gratuitously Grand Guignol script by future conspiracy theorist Oliver Stone and some minor Hitchcock homages by director Brian De Palma, the resulting epic has shaken its scandalous initial release to become a blasphemous Bible in-home video. Indeed, it’s apparently the Gospel for every wannabe thug and rap impresario in the scene.

It’s all so surreal. How a film about the meteoric kingpin rise and cocaine-infused fall of a penniless prison assassin with a sister fetish turned into a lightning rod of revisionist cool is probably percolating in the brain of a thousand Ph.D. candidates right now. Everyone, from sociologists to film historians, is hoping to build their proto-pundit reputation by dissecting Tony Montana’s voodoo spell over society. It could be his animalistic machismo that both serves and subverts his goals. It could be the flash of easy money and pre-bling bravado. It may have something to do with the crawl up from the ground level determinism of the character, the desire to use all means – hook and crook – to get what he believes is rightfully his. Maybe Scarface is a really good movie. Maybe.

Or, it could just be the combination of acclaimed writing and amplified auteurism. Stone is a solid scribe. He can put pen to insightful and incendiary thoughts without making us shudder from the aftershock. His dialogue here, overdosing on memorable dismissals and curse-laden come-ons, should be mandatory reading for any action punchline pretender. Indeed, from a wordsmith standpoint, it’s not hard to see why the Scarface is so beloved. It’s the ’80s update of ’20s street slang sans the Bowery Boys backup. As for De Palma, he puts aside most of his Master of Suspense pretensions to give Tony and his cronies their own South Florida rhythms. While still playing into every media-driven stereotype and situation imaginable, he sets the standard for a million Miami Vices to come.

If you don’t know it by now, the story features Tony (a weirdly effective Al Pacino) coming to America as part of the boat lift. His criminal past is discovered, and he is sent, along with pal Manny (Steven Bauer), to Freedom Town, which is nothing more than a tent city under the I-95 highway. A favor for a high-profile friend lands them a green card and a chance at the American Dream. Eventually, they are recruited by this connection, drug and car dealer gangster Frank Lopez (Robert Loggia) and his sinister sidekick Omar (F. Murray Abraham).

Time passes, his street cred grows, and Tony tries to reconnect with his family, including naive sister Gina (Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio). He also points out future imports from Bolivian cartel head Alejandro Sosa (Paul Schenar). Eventually, Tony is doublecrossed, he makes a power play, and ‘inherits’ Frank’s territory, along with his comely coke whore gal pal Elvira (Michelle Pfeiffer).

Naturally, things don’t end well for our hopped-up little antihero, and like any tragedy, Tony wears his many fatal flaws just above his onion-wrinkled hands. He’s all Id, all unbridled desire and dogged determination. If it weren’t for a small impediment known as law enforcement, he’d be an Earthbound god. Instead, all of Scarface feels like the seven-layer set-up to an incredibly sick joke, one to be played out in a baroque mansion and among a mound of coke and the spray of bullets and blood. With De Palma, nothing is ever small. The emotional scale here seems as inflated as the well-timed blimp passing by Elvira’s bedroom window. Everything is elephantine, from the pratfalls to the payback.

As an actor, Pacino plays Montana with everything his questionable Cuban accent can muster. Some may buy his hokey Havana manner, but for the most part, this is a Jack Nicholson as a Guido hitman in Prizzi’s Honor kind of risk. Some parts sound just right. In other instances, he’s a coño away from a hate crime. It’s a titanic turn, the kind of performance that makes or breaks an actor. In his case, Pacino used it as a pass for the next few years, floundering between projects before regaining (and then re-losing) his footing in the late ’90s. Everyone else is excellent, from Abraham and Loggia to Bauer and Schenar. Even with little to work with outside outrageous ’80s hair, Pfeiffer and Mastrantonio redeem their underwritten female fixtures.

But the lingering mythology makes up most of 2011’s Scarface sentiment. The new Blu-ray contains a multi-part dissection of the movie that makes the case for its original greatness (okay…) and its ongoing legacy. While some components are missing from the discussion (Pacino is a no-show, and Schenar died of AIDS a couple of decades ago), the majority makes the case for Tony Montana’s place among iconic criminals. Even more interesting is the decision to include a DVD of the original Scarface for a kind of kooky compare and contrast. There are similar beats, but for the most part, Muni and company can’t compare to the amped-up urban throb of this splatter-shed ‘remake.’

However, the most important thing to remember about Scarface is how wholly entertaining it is. Nothing stays beneath the surface – from the hyperactive acting to the messy probity play going on. Everything is out, loud, and damn proud of its perversity. Scarface is sadistic and brutal, but it’s also a mere shadow of what really happened in the streets of South Florida during the Reagan era. Sometimes, staying power can be measured in meaningful illustrations. Scarface may be a symbol for a certain shortsighted get-rich-or-die-tryin’ temperament, but it stands as a slick popcorn puree of bootstrap Americana laced with lots of liquid WTF? Scarface shouldn’t be a cultural marker, but it is. That’s a perfect way to describe the movie. Scarface shouldn’t be a lot of things, and yet, it is.