In the Flesh: Scarface

How I made it this far in life without seeing DePalma’s Scarface is a pretty good question, but man, there’s nothing in the world like Al Pacino in this movie. He’s like a speak-n’-spell having a psychotic break, his slack facial expression and robotic, repetitive way of talking growing more and more disconnected from reality as his wealth and status increase. He says “okay?” and “mang” so many times and with such numb disregard for the expression and body language of whoever he’s talking to that it becomes more like the sound an insect might make, a mindless rattle of wings against chitinous casings. The camera is seldom away from him, leaving viewers unable to escape his dead-eyed stare, his slumped posture and social awkwardness. His utter lack of game when pursuing Michelle Pfeiffer’s Elvira is like something out of a slow-burn psychological thriller, the final stage of his courtship a pro forma death threat delivered without the slightest hint of self-awareness.

Pacino’s tics and flat affect carry over even into the film’s infamous final sequence in which an outgunned and outnumbered Tony shreds half a Bolivian death squad with a high-powered assault rifle before dying at their hands. “You like to play rough?” he mutters to himself again and again as he slaps a clip into the firearm. “Okay. Okay. Okay.” He’s frightening not because he seems particularly cruel or ingenious, but because of his blunt indifference to the world around him. Early in the film he watches a Colombian drug dealer carve his friend to pieces with a chainsaw — a torturous death he might have prevented had he given up the money he’d been handed for the deal. Chained and spattered with the other man’s blood, he waits for backup and a chance at success rather than lifting a finger to help the other man. And when he has it, when it leads inevitably to more success, to more money, to more power, it only serves to magnify the essential nullity of his nature.

It’s strange to think that Breaking Bad, which used a clip of Scarface’s final sequence to foreshadow its own violent finale, was ultimately so much less successful at deconstructing the archetype of the violently entitled man than a sleazy DePalma movie from the 80s with a bunch of Italian guys playing Cuban gangsters. The cold, purposeless wanting at the heart of Tony Montana feels so much truer to the nature of the wealthy in America than the criminal career of Walter White, whose last-minute journey to self-awareness sabotaged much of the horror of his preceding rationalizations and almost supernaturally repellent greed and arrogance. Tony has no self-knowledge; his whole life is spent in flight from it, clawing at normative ideas like marriage and fatherhood even as he numbs himself out with coke and booze until he’s hardly able to crawl through the day. DePalma is wise enough to never discuss Tony’s origins, but Pacino so successfully evokes whatever cesspit of trauma and brutality he crawled out of with his every look and gesture that it becomes the entire character. Wherever it was, that hole in the earth where cockroaches like Tony Montana seethe over mountains of filth, eating each other in the dark, he never really left it.