Brian De Palma is simply a gun for hire

Careers in Hollywood often follow the pattern of a typical EKG. Some spike up, then drop sharply, then zoom back up again. Others go along a more modulated path. Still others flatline; those usually go unnoticed, until a sheet is pulled over them.

Tom Cruise’s career, for example, has consistently hovered among the peaks, until his recent travails and ouster from Paramount. The same can be said for Mel Gibson, whose image — figuratively speaking — could use a defibrillator. After his debilitating J-Lo period, Ben Affleck is slowly rising again.

A director’s road is usually fraught with even more uncertainty, because audiences generally don’t turn out because of his name but rather because of the product and the stars in it. And among directors who have toiled for an extensive period in the movie business, there is perhaps no individual who has had more wild ups and downs than Brian De Palma.

This week, De Palma unveils his latest work to the general public, an adaptation of James Ellroy’s fictionalized account of America’s most notorious unsolved murder, “The Black Dahlia.” The reaction to the film, at least in early reviews, has been mostly one of disappointment. Whereas Curtis Hanson brought a sense of realism and restraint to another Ellroy adaptation, “L.A. Confidential,” the word on “The Black Dahlia” seems to focus on a heavy handed visual style and an overly melodramatic story.

A shooter, not an artist
Is De Palma one of our greatest living directors? Or is he just a gifted gun for hire riding on the reputation of an occasional popular success?

In order to be considered a great director, logic suggests that said director must have stood at the helm of at least one great movie. By that simple standard, De Palma doesn’t quite qualify.

He showed promise while dividing critics in his early work, some of which were Hitchcock knockoffs that elicited almost equal amounts of derision and admiration. “Carrie” was the most commercially successful of this period, but he also scored at the box office with titles more closely associated with his Hitchcock obsession, like “Dressed to Kill,” “Blow Out” and, of course, “Obsession.”

Usually when De Palma’s directorial chops are mentioned, the film that comes to mind most often is “Scarface,” released in 1983. Shot from a script by Oliver Stone, it not only connected with the zeitgeist of the decade — especially the rampant use of cocaine and the Reagan-era lust for capitalism — it has continued to attract new generations of devotees fascinated by the violent and bloody rise and fall of Tony Montana (a curiously accented Al Pacino).

Overlooked in most discussions about the film is that De Palma’s “Scarface” is a modern remake of the 1932 version directed by Howard Hawks and Richard Rosson, of which the script was adapted by Hawks and Ben Hecht from a novel by Armitage Trail. And, of course, De Palma’s “Scarface” benefited from the craftsmanship of Stone, who did his best screenwriting during the period from 1978 (“Midnight Express,” for which he won an Oscar) through “Salvador” (1986), “Platoon” (1986), “Wall Street” (1987) and “Born on the Fourth of July” (1989).

Therein lies the essential problem with De Palma. He’s a shooter, not an artist. Hand him a superb script and he’ll shoot the daylights out of it. He has a vibrant visual style that is similar to the operatic feel Francis Ford Coppola brought to his finest films. But that’s where the comparison ends.

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