Used to Be a Bad Guy
Carlito’s Way at 30

2,011 words

I ain’t going back
To living that old life no more.
— Old Crow Medicine Show, “Wagon Wheel”

The street is watching. She is watching. — Carlito’s Way

2023 has been quite a year for the anniversaries of some of my favorite films and, in these trying times, old movies are a solace. Watch a loved film one more time and you know in advance you are going to like it. It’s a cinematic comfort-blanket. That movie again, or risk being angered by the news? Your choice. And this is a movie about choice, plus it’s another birthday boy. I reviewed Martin Scorsese’s Mean Streets at Counter-Currents here on its 50th birthday, and Mike Leigh’s Naked here, the latter sharing its 30th birthday with Brian De Palma’s 1993 gangster movie, Carlito’s Way.

Carlito’s Way is the story of Carlito Brigante, played by Al Pacino, a Puerto Rican drug dealer released early from a 30-year jail sentence after shady plea-dealing and legal wrangling by his lawyer, played by Sean Penn, who in this film sports one of cinema’s strangest hairstyles. Like all good movies — and nothing Aristotle wrote in the Poetics contradicts this — Carlito’s Way features hubris, catharsis, and ultimately, nemesis. The movie starts at the end, always a brave gambit by the director and producers.

The opening speech Carlito gives to the judge who is forced to release him from jail is strangely comic, but then we get into the serious arc of development of what is a hard and harsh movie. Carlito is a bad guy, but one who wants to reform. He just wants to get out of what gangsters traditionally call “the life,” buy into his friend’s car-rental business, and retire to the Bahamas. But, a few hours after his release, he agrees to go with his nephew on a drug deal, just to give the kid some kudos via Brigante’s reputation. This is one of the movie’s great scenes, and the shootout in the pool hall is filmed so precisely, and with such brilliant use of visual angles, I imagine film professors use it in their lectures. Things don’t go well, and Pacino is back in the same position as his character Michael Corleone in The Godfather, Part III: Just when he thinks he is out, he gets dragged back in.

Brigante subs money to a nightclub owner in deep trouble over gambling debts in order to run the club for half the profits and make his stash. But, just as he is settling in, his lawyer persuades him to help in springing a mob boss from jail. This sets up the movie’s internal dynamic, and Carlito’s fate is only a matter of time. The device of voiceover — always one of my favorites, if used well — accompanies his attempt to shed his past and build a new future.

You can buy Mark Gullick’s novel Cherub Valley here.

The film shares this theme with Abel Ferrara’s irresistible King of New York, in that it centers around an ex-con trying to do something positive by way of atonement. In the case of Christopher Walken’s character Frank White in Ferrara’s movie, he is a psychotic philanthropist, wanting to make money to buy a life-saving machine for a children’s hospital after his release from jail. He attempts to raise this cash by slaughtering every other criminal in New York, and does a more than passable job of it. Well, I guess there is a moral code in there somewhere. King of New York is a great movie, if you don’t know it.

Every film needs a love interest — God only knows how that works now in transworld — and Carlito watches his old flame Gail dancing in a ballet class before the pair get back together. He is standing outside in the pouring rain, holding a dustbin lid over his head to keep dry. Sorry, that’s English. A trashcan lid? A trashcan cover? (More of this transatlantic translation problem later). Penelope Ann Miller plays the part of Carlito’s ex with a charming fragility. Plus, she can dance. Some love subtexts can feel bolted on to movies to satisfy producer and audience demands. Personally, I like a love interest in a movie if it works and plucks at the old heart-strings, which this one does.

Like De Palma and Pacino’s other famous gangster movie, Scarface, made a decade prior to Carlito’s Way, cocaine is center stage. About the only scene in which Penn’s character is not snuffling up lines or bumps is when he is in hospital after being stabbed by a mobster. But it’s not drugs that are Carlito’s problem, it’s the hubris he brings on himself by failing to kill another dealer, one who he is forced to see as a younger version of himself.

It goes without saying that one man’s favorite cinematic actors are another man’s pseudo-thespian donkeys who should be doing cable TV dramas at best, but for me Pacino gives an acting masterclass here. He can do guile and naïveté all in one scene, control and loss of same in a moment. And most of all he can act with his eyes, which he can deaden or bring to life at will. Well, except for Scent of a Woman, for obvious reasons. Watch him in a scene in the underrated movie Sea of Love. Two flash twerps enter a Brooklyn shoe store and attempt to intimidate the strangely attractive Ellen Barkin (I say strangely attractive because she looks like someone broke her nose, but she still looks hot — although this principle does not apply to Megan Markle). For just over a minute, Pacino doesn’t speak, and yet the threat to the two guys — who exit the store sharpish — is very real.

Sea Of Love – Shoe Store Scene

Carlito’s Way is a good-looking film in terms of the wardrobe. The black leather coat Brigante wears is both stylish and strange. Walking down the street, fresh out of jail on what is obviously a hot day, everyone is wearing shorts and shirts and Carlito has on the Gestapo coat he wears for many of the scenes, even in the nightclub he runs. As a symbol of power, a long, black leather coat has its historical associations. As leisure wear, it is maybe not the best choice, but perhaps it symbolizes Carlito’s failed attempt to fit into the regular life.

As an actor, Pacino’s gold standard is still the first Godfather film, which I guess can be described as a family movie, if you get me. Physically, Pacino is not a big guy, but cinematically he very much is. In Carlito’s Way he dominates every scene he is in, which is pretty much every scene. But that is what a leading man should do. Hence the phrase, I guess.

Carlito smokes as much as Kleinfeld the lawyer does coke, and I don’t know if Pacino smoked cigarettes during the making of the film but . . . hold that. I do. As someone who is constantly quitting smoking — cigarettes here in Costa Rica are $2.50 a pack, which doesn’t help — I know a thing or two about recognizing actors who smoke in real life and those who don’t. For a start, the color of uninhaled smoke is different to the stuff that has been down and come back out. Also, the exhalation technique is different in the smoker who is just acting out the habit. Whether or not Pacino smokes in real life, he certainly didn’t during the making of Carlito’s Way. Take it from one who knows. If you are trying to quit, by the way, and you haven’t seen Iggy Pop and Tom Waits on that very subject in Jim Jarmusch’s Coffee and Cigarettes, I recommend it. That movie turns 20 this year, and Waits and Pop remind us smokers that a cig never tastes better than when you have just quit.

Back to the main feature. Carlito’s Way has some great dialogue. A punk in the nightclub — the brilliantly-named Benny Blanco from the Bronx — says, after Carlito sends his bottle of champagne back, “Maybe you don’t remember me, Mr. Brigante.” Carlito replies with the kind of line I would love the chance to use in real life: “Maybe I don’t remember the last time I blew my nose, either.” When the lawyer Kleinfeld gets in way over his head with an imprisoned mobster, Carlito shows him his life in a moment:

You ain’t a lawyer no more, Dave. You a gangster now. Whole new ball-game. You don’t learn it in school and you can’t have a late start.

You can buy Trevor Lynch’s Classics of Right-Wing Cinema here.

The camera work is also one of the stars of the movie. There are plenty of long takes, about which I have a pet theory. Movie watchers like long takes because our lives are shot in long takes. Unless you are under the influence of some spectacular narcotics of which I know nothing, life does not feature jump-cuts from scene to scene. The camera here ranges around Gail’s apartment like an uninvited guest.

Brian De Palma does like his railway station — or is it railroad station? — shootouts, and 1987’s The Untouchables features what has long been known to be an homage to Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin. The final chase and gun battle in Carlito’s Way is partly absurd, partly thrilling. As always, I offer a spoiler-free guarantee, but, as with most movies and indeed life itself, things don’t go as planned. And that goes for language, too.

I first saw the film when I was not familiar with American English, and one word threw me completely until all was revealed. Nowadays, having written for a few American magazines, I am getting quite fluent, but “color” for “colour,” “theater” for “theatre,” “writing Mom” for “writing to my mother,” and the outrageous way you people pronounce “aluminium” is entry-level, Stateside English 101. In a key scene in Carlito’s Way, a “booey” is mentioned. What on God’s green earth, I thought, is a booey? It is how Americans pronounce “buoy,” those things that bob around in the ocean, and which the English pronounce as “boy.”

As I have mentioned in previous film reviews, I don’t get out to the movies much these days — mainly because, in eight years, I have yet to see a cinema in Costa Rica. If I had, I would have piled in for the matinée. It is good for your Spanish, for a start. But movies come to you these days whether you see them or not, at least via the cultural response to big-league films. Modern films don’t exactly look like an inviting pasture, so I will keep hold of the Netflix subscription money and perhaps spend it on cigarettes instead. At least I know what I am getting. I watch old favorites over and over. They are like albums you love. You don’t listen to an album once and think, “Well, I loved it! Now I will never listen to it again. That’s it. Much as I loved it on first listening, never again.” I have never understood why movies should be seen as any different.

The point of a cinematic trailer is to get you out of the house and into the cinema, or “movie theater” as Americans charmingly call it. Now, with Gutenberg 2.0 (aka the Internet), many movies are available without having to pay for popcorn or even put on shoes, and the trailer to Carlito’s Way is here, while the whole movie is for free over here.

I can’t recommend Carlito’s Way enough. It has style, class, and grit; is great to watch if you are an aficionado of camerawork; and also features a cameo from the excellent actor Viggo Mortensen as a wheelchair-bound criminal who wears a wire to a meeting with Brigante in a plea-deal attempt to entrap the Puerto Rican, another scene worth rewatching.

There is a feeling of Greek tragedy about the story of a man who wishes to correct his life only to find that the forces of fate are stronger than his attempts could ever be. So, for anyone who likes a rough, tough gangster flick, wish Carlito’s Way a happy 30th by giving it a watch.