Brian De Palma Returns With Passion: Genius, Hack, or a Little of Both?

Of all the established directors out there, I find myself consistently struggling with where to place Brian De Palma. There have been times in his career where he shows pure brilliance, and even more times where De Palma has delivered some of the most insanely idiotic pictures in film history. He is back once again, directing his first film in over five years, Passion. The trailer, released this week, suggests a possible return to form for De Palma is on the cards, which means either it will be a seductive thriller or an outlandish embarrassment. Check it out below; http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2_nqydxjppg A stylish and creative eye, Brian De Palma is sometimes consumed by his flair for the melodramatic to an annoying fault. Though he is never one to shy away from edgy material, and when he hits the mark he is as good as anyone of the disciples of the 1970s American film movement. Do his strokes of genius outweigh his misfires? Is Brian De Palma a mad genius, or is he a hack who gets lucky from time to time? I would argue he is a combination of both, some sort of brilliant hack. A savant of schlock if you will. Brian De Palma was a key cog in the film revival of the 1970s which saw the likes of Francis Ford Coppola, William Friedkin, Peter Bogdonavich, Dennis Hopper, George Lucas, and Steven Spielberg burst onto the Hollywood scene with fresh ideas and invigorating directions in which to carry the industry. The 70s were a breath of fresh air for new voices and visions. De Palma found influence in the films of Alfred Hitchcock, sometimes blatantly plagiarising his work over the years while managing to tell his own tale. He didn't find his footing as quickly as his peers, making smaller films like Sisters and Obsession while Coppola was picking up Oscars for his Godfather films. But in 1976, De Palma cemented his spot in film history by directing Sissy Spacek in Carrie. The landmark film is vintage De Palma, where he first implemented his now famous split screen shots where characters in the foreground and background were in focus simultaneously. Carrie was a major success, an inventive and gritty thriller, and De Palma took off on the roller coaster of a career unmatched by most in its ups and downs. Some of De Palma's better work includes the 1980 John Travolta thriller Blow Out (what I consider to be his masterpiece), Dressed to Kill, the cult classic Scarface, the 1987 gangster picture The Untouchables, Carlito's Way, the underrated Vietnam film Casualties of War starring Michael J, Fox and Sean Penn, and the brilliant franchise kick-starter Mission: Impossible. Most of us are familiar with the majority of these films. A list as prominent as this should be enough to label De Palma one of the greatest of all time. The only problem is, there are a great number of terrible films littering his career, filling in gaps between the aforementioned greatness. But most of these terrible movies are so bad, so bombastically absurd, there is some sort of twisted genius seeping through each and every one of them. While I named Scarface above, I would argue it is one of the better bad movies we have as a society, a marvel of excess and hammy performances that has become more of a cult hit than an actual good film. It is perhaps the easiest movie of all time to vastly overrate. But one of the most over the top bad films on De Palma's list has to be the 1992 thriller Raising Cain, starring John Lithgow as a child psychiatrist with multiple personalities and serious daddy issues. The film is a parade of the melodramatic and absurd, a hyper-violent, over-stylized mess of a film. And speaking of De Palma's endless homages to Hitchcock, there is a blatant ripoff of the car sinking scene in Psycho. It was a box office and critical failure, and was swept under the rug. But there are some wonderfully exuberant performances and wildly out of control scenes in Raising Cain. It is a film full of raw energy that borders on idiocy at times. The same could be said for Snake Eyes, another crazy thriller starring the king of crazy himself, Nicolas Cage. Another disastrous picture, Snake Eyes has some technical mastery, including an opening continuous scene that goes on beyond ten minutes and has an insane amount of moving parts for an unbroken, single shot. The shot is an impressive enough feat to make Scorsese or PTA shake their head in disbelief. And then there is Mission to Mars, a confounding attempt from De Palma to impersonate Kubrick. What a confounding and mystifying film, generating laughs and question marks where it is supposed to raise big questions. De Palma's more recent films have been, well, just bad. Despite Roger Ebert's powerful praise of Femme Fatale back in 2002, there is no saving this cheap and annoying thriller where the rug is pulled out from the audience's feet near the end. It is a cheap twist dressed up as an international thriller, and all of the visual flourishes have been done by De Palma before, in better films. De Palma followed this garbage with The Black Dahlia, an adaptation of a James Ellroy crime thriller that is flat and boring from start to finish. And Redacted, his 2007 war film, generated arguably the most hatred De Palma has ever garnered from critics and audiences. The film came and went and was an unmitigated disaster. But here is De Palma, back in the saddle and perhaps returning to a level of comfort. He has always been at home making melodramatic and seductive, sexual thrillers. The trailer for Passion reminds me of one of his earliest films, the underrated Dressed to Kill. One of the criticisms of De Palma has been his tendency to blatantly steal from those before him, most notably some exact shots of Hitchcock. And the train station scene in The Untouchables is a direct reference to a scene from Battleship Potemkin. There is a fine line between homage and theft, and De Palma most certainly toes that line closer than most. But no matter what he borrows from his predecessors, De Palma seems to be able to ramp up the shot to eleven, making it his own. Sometimes, making the shot his own undoes the threads of his picture in favor of style, not substance. But there is a place for Brian De Palma in the history of American cinema. I'm still not quite sure, however, where that place may be.