SCREENWRITER JOE BARTON SAYS HELLO TO HIS LITTLE FRIEND — AL PACINO/BRIAN DE PALMA’S SCARFACE — FOR THE FIRST TIME

IT’S TAKEN ME 34 years to see Scarface, surprisingly, given that it centres around two of my favourite things — doing cocaine and shouting at people. I actually thought that I had seen this film but it turned out I’d just fallen asleep in front of the telly and woken up halfway through Carlito’s Way. But even without having technically watched Scarface, it was easy to feel like I had. The poster and “Say hello to my little friend” have entered the cultural lexicon and the whole thing induced an almost Proustian memory of playing GTA: Vice City as a teenager, to the extent that whenever Pacino walked past a car I instinctively pressed triangle on my Playstation controller to try and make him steal it.

Tony Montana has become something of an icon, with his crazy suits and all his money and his being-married-to-michelle-pfeiffer-ness.

So I was surprised when it turns out Scarface is actually an incredibly fucking depressing film about a horrible little shit. I did a quick Google search for ‘“Tony Montana tattoos” after I finished it. There are a lot. Perhaps I’m drastically misreading this film (entirely possible) but… really?

A basic analysis is that it’s about the American dream gone sour. Interestingly, it never really shows Tony enjoying his success. As soon as he starts to make money he spends it in the world’s grimmest nightclub where he seems to be having a terrible time, even before someone tries to murder him there. Then he marries Michelle Pfeiffer’s Elvira, who despises him from the moment they meet to the moment she leaves. Then he locks himself in a mansion with mountains of drugs and no natural sunlight and gets shot more times than Sonny Corleone, Bonnie and Clyde and Robocop combined. He also buys a tiger at one point but not even that seems to cheer him up. Compare it to something like Goodfellas, which made being a criminal look like huge fun for a while (they make pasta sauce in jail!). Here, there’s none of that and I think it’s a braver film for it. Goodfellas’ most technically impressive sequence involves Ray Liotta being nice to backroom staff and getting a good seat in a nightclub; Scarface’s involves Al Pacino watching his friend get chainsaw-ed to death in a bathtub. Therein lies the difference.

So the basic story is a rags-to-riches-tofloating-face-down-in-the-water feature. Tony gets to America and sets about trying to launch a criminal empire, joined by his perpetually horny mate Manny. I liked Manny. There hasn’t been a more obviously doomed randy-gangstersidekick since Charlie off Casualty cracked on to Helen Mirren in The Long Good Friday. Manny is eventually undone by falling in love with Tony’s sister Gina. I feel like the people with Tony Montana tattoos are conveniently ignoring his relationship with Gina, which is violently oppressive at best and violently-oppressive-butalso-pretty-fucking-incestuous at worst.

This might also be the most Al Pacino movie that Al Pacino has ever Al Pacino’d in. I think you’re legally obliged to describe him as a tour de force, or considering how many drugs he’s on, a tour de France (pause for applause). Although it’s easy to concentrate on the “Say hello to my little friend”-ness of it all, there are some more subtle choices being made for the character. When Tony visits his mum and Gina after several years away he slouches in his seat like a sulking schoolboy, his desire to be welcomed home as a returning hero dashed by his mother’s desire to tell him off for acting the twat.

The whole thing feels incredibly operatic. Brian De Palma has never directed a scene he didn’t think could be improved with a long, epic establishing shot. There are more cranes in this film than a Frasier reunion. Also it was written by Oliver Stone. Oliver bloody Stone! Can you image how off their tits everyone must have been making this. The wrap party must have been insane. For all we know, it’s still going on.

In summary — I think this is a surprisingly intelligent film that has been culturally reduced to a five-second clip of Al Pacino blowing people up with a grenade launcher. I’m probably never going to watch it again. But I do still want to find out how Carlito’s Way starts.

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