Noah Baumbach and Jake Paltrow (2015)

I dithered about whether to go to De Palma.  I’ve seen in their entirety only five of Brian De Palma’s twenty-nine feature films (Carrie, The Fury, Dressed to Kill, The Untouchables and Casualties of War) and don’t feel I know even those five well.  Noah Baumbach’s and Jake Paltrow’s documentary has an unusually simple format:  its protagonist speaks to camera and there are no other talking heads.  Brian De Palma, although his words are obviously addressed to Baumbach and Paltrow, appears to be unprompted by questions from them.   Whether what he says is genuinely free-flowing or is the result of skilful editing, De Palma is very engaging company.  His opinions and memories are interspersed with numerous, mostly brief illustrative clips, both from his own movies and from the work of other directors to whom he refers:  the clips seem very well chosen.  De Palma adds up to comprehensive coverage of his filmography – every movie he’s made gets more than a cursory mention, at any rate.  I admired Baumbach’s and Paltrow’s trust in their format and the instrinsic interest of their subject, and I’m very glad I saw their film, even though it must mean a lot more to De Palma cognoscenti than it does to me.

The absence of questions has some frustrating effects, though.  As the film’s economical description of his early life and career make clear, Brian De Palma is a near-contemporary of Coppola, Lucas, Scorsese and Spielberg; when he started out in film-making, he knew them all well and regarded them as approximately kindred spirits.  De Palma expresses disappointment about the critical and/or commercial fate of individual films that he’s made (especially Casualties of War – the best of the five I’ve seen).  He doesn’t offer a view on the fact that each of those other four directors has, all in all, enjoyed greater success than he has – almost regardless of how you define success.   De Palma’s films have performed inconsistently at the box-office.  He has never himself received an Oscar nomination, either for directing or for writing.  Many critics deplore what they see as his taste for pyrotechnical violence, with women often on the receiving end of it.  A more troubling consequence of Baumbach’s and Paltrow’s approach is that it gives De Palma an easy ride in answering this last charge.   He says at one point that he always aims to make a film in the way he feels is right for the material he’s working with.  This dodges the question of why he’s often been drawn to material that gives him scope for expressing his flair for (arguably) misogynistic bloodshed.

Some of his best-known pictures are variously indebted to Alfred Hitchcock (Obsession to Vertigo, Dressed to Kill to Psycho) and De Palma asserts very definitely that he is the true, even the sole, inheritor of the Hitchcockian language of visual storytelling.   He’s interesting (and right, I think) in asserting too that Hitchcock’s later films – from The Birds onwards – are evidence of declining powers.   De Palma uses this as an illustration of his view that directors do their best, lastingly remembered work in their ‘thirties, forties or fifties’.  He himself is now seventy-six and the one piece of new footage of him outside the interview room is rather shocking.  It shows an old man in the street, heavier than De Palma appeared to be from the shots of his head and shoulders, and moving with real difficulty.  He’s still making films, nevertheless, or, at least, trying to.   Although a project listed for 2017 release on IMDB under the ominous title ‘Lights Out’ now looks to have been abandoned, Brian De Palma’s name has more recently been attached to the screen adaptation of a novel called ‘Truth and Other Lies’.

5 October 2016