A real Blow Out

Not sure why it took two people to direct this one documentary — maybe Noah Baumbach did the heavy lifting while Jake Paltrow got coffee? In any case, the resulting 110- minute stroll through the career of director Brian De Palma is a fascinating journey.

The film dispenses with all but the bare bones of De Palma’s childhood — born in 1940, raised a Quaker, watched his dad perform orthopedic surgery — before leaping into his school days, early student films and documentary work.

The style is simple. De Palma, seated, walks us through his oeuvre, while the film provides judicious cutaways to clips from the films in question. He worked with a pre-Taxi Driver “Robert DeNero” ( as the credits for The Wedding Party listed him), convinced Alfred Hitchcock regular Bernard Herrmann to score his 1973 film Sisters, and tussled with the studio on the budget for Carrie, which became an unexpected hit in 1976.

Now aged 75, De Palma isn’t really out to settle any scores, though he does mention that he had writer Oliver Stone removed from the set of Scarface for interfering with his directing by talking to the actors. And he’s casually combative about what some see as his, um, lesser works. On 1990’s The Bonfire of the Vanities: “Nothing wrong with the movie; just don’t read the book.” 2000’s Mission to Mars? He was brought in late, after all the mistakes had been made in the script and the budget. He’s since mostly worked outside America.

The film will appeal mostly to fans of the director’s work, but even the more general cinephile will find much of interest here in its plainspoken ways. Late in the film, De Palma lets us in on a little secret of filmmakers’ careers: “We don’t plan them out.” And he points out that the work he leaves behind will be remembered for the ugly and the bad, not just the good. “It’s like a record of things you didn’t finish.” ∂∂∂