A director reflects on his career

Brian De Palma takes us on a guided tour of his work.

I once met Brian De Palma at the Toronto International Film Festival. Amazingly, De Palma hadn't attended the festival to hawk new wares. He was sitting in the back of an auditorium in a multiplex the festival then used for press and industry screenings. Had I missed something in the program? Did De Palma have a new movie? No, De Palma told me. He'd come to Toronto to catch a few films. A director watching movies at a festival in which he did not have a film to promote? Yes, it's a rarity, but, then, so is DePalma.

De Palma, the simply titled new documentary by Jake Paltrow and Noah Baumbach, takes a straightforward approach to the director's life and work, leaving most of the analysis to De Palma himself.

De Palma discusses his career, and we see clips from his filmography, all annotated by the director, who acknowledges his debt to Alfred Hitchcock, hardly a secret to anyone familiar with his work.

De Palma saw Vertigo when he was a kid, and never looked back. He sees himself as the only true heir to Hitchcock, and it's clear that he understands the master's work and knows how to amplify and twist it to create his own cinematic vocabulary.

Box office results also play a role in De Palma's discussion, no small matter when it comes to determining how a director's career will progress. De Palma's identifiable style isn't enough to ensure that he'll latch onto big studio projects -- which he says he no longer wants.

De Palma does, of course, talk about those big-ticket movies (Scarface, The Untouchables and Mission Impossible), as well as the smaller, European-based movies that he currently favors, 2013's critically derided Passion.

I was heartened to hear De Palma say that he didn't think he could make a better movie than Carlito's Way, a film starring Al Pacino. I'd call it one of De Palma's best.

Self-protection isn't the point here: De Palma can be critical of himself, and, of at least one actor. At one point, he talks about Obsession (1976), and what a pain in the butt Cliff Robertson was.

De Palma, by the way, was the first director to use Robert De Niro in a feature, 1968's Greetings.

For a man whose movies can be steeped in eroticism and violence -- and some would say misogyny -- De Palma sometimes seems more like a nerdy cinema buff than a cunning auteur. When talking about things that either surprised him or threw him off his game, he tends to use an exclamation that sounds like it's coming from a Boy Scout.

"Holy mackerel" is one of his favorites.

A documentary such as De Palma can serve as an occasion for a critic to ruminate about a director's body of work. No need. Paltrow and Baumbach's movie does that for us, offering valuable insights into both the art and business of film and illuminating the mixture of choice and chance that makes a career.

A lukewarm serving of 'Passion'

Director Brian De Palma's latest, a sometimes silly thriller.

If you want to understand something about the important differences between Brian De Palma's Passion and the French movie that De Palma has re-made -- Alain Corneau's 2011 Love Crime -- think about the difference between Rachel McAdams and Kristin Scott Thomas.

Thomas projects the sophistication, maturity and canny intelligence required for a Dangerous Liaisons-style battle set in the high-stakes world of corporate intrigue. McAdams doesn't project that kind of depth, at least not in De Palma's overtly kinky version of a movie that even Thomas and Ludivine Sagnier couldn't entirely pull off.

Here's the basic set-up in De Palma's movie: McAdams plays the ambitious head of the Berlin branch of a global advertising agency. Noomi Rapace, the Swedish actress familiar from Prometheus and the original The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, portrays an advertising acolyte who finds herself in a quasi-erotic, intensely competitive relationship with her unscrupulous boss (McAdams).

If McAdams doesn't entirely convince, neither does Rapace, who seems to have difficulty finding the core of a character that never quite computes, and, by the movie's end, De Palma has added the kind of twists that can be as confounding as they are revealing.

The French version focuses on a less-then-glamorous agro-business that's interested in expanding into new markets. De Palma chooses advertising, which affords him ample opportunity to play around with ideas about image, reality and the ways in which sleek surfaces can conceal savage impulses.

The cast is augmented by Paul Anderson, as Christine's lover and accountant, and by Karoline Herfurth, who appears as a loyal assistant to Rapace's Isabelle.

At times, Passion seems to be aiming for the kind of augmented suspense that De Palma has displayed throughout a career that has produced mixed results -- from Carrie (yea) to The Black Dahlia (nay) with stops at movies such as Scarface and The Untouchables in between.

De Palma's work deserves to be taken seriously, but Passion makes for a forgettable (and sometimes silly) entry into the director's expansive filmography. As someone who respects De Palma, I wish it were otherwise. And, yes, I find something a little sad about a late-career movie that's not likely to gain De Palma much traction.