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"Save your paranoia for public TV!" The luxuriant opening depicts a zesty horror cheapie with a POV prowl scotched by a coed's inept shriek, setup for a most bitter punchline. The Philadelphia sound man (John Travolta) is a "communication whiz," his previous undercover stint with the police supplies a junction with Lumet's Prince of the City. The recording scene at night is a sinister-lyrical Eden, frog and owl and wind in the trees, into it plunges the car carrying the governor and his illicit escort. "The bang before the blowout" becomes his obsession, the trail of assassination and cover-up is followed with the vulnerable scandal bait (Nancy Allen). JFK, Blowup, Chappaquiddick, The Parallax View, Watergate... "Listen, why the fuck does everything have to be a conspiracy?" Cinema's and history's façades, for Brian De Palma it's a matter of taking things apart and putting them together. The paraphernalia of picture and sound is cunningly foregrounded, the makeshift flipbook of images gives way to the Moviola, rewound and accelerated and slowed down as needed. (An endless circular pan gives the protagonist's panic, followed by an overhead view of the studio littered with unspooled tape.) Exploitation and inquiry, the indie office above the porno theater, "this conscience shit" falling on a corrupt system's deaf ears. The doppelgänger is the government operator gleefully moonlighting as a strangler (John Lithgow), every bit as compulsive about his work. De Palma's cri du coeur, the haunted sadness that complements the ruthless bravura. "I'll make sure everyone in this fucking country hears and sees it too." To seek the truth is to careen through the pomp of patriotism, Minnelli's Some Came Running informs the climax—too late the hero amid fireworks, red, white and blue suffusions in a fulsome Rauschenberg effect. Nothing left for the shattered artist but to fold pain into artifice. Cinematography by Vilmos Zsigmond. With Dennis Franz, Peter Boyden, Curt May, and John McMartin.
--- Fernando F. Croce |