MOVIE REVIEW: ‘De Palma’ provides retrospective of director’s work, if not baring his soul

ANALYSIS/OPINION:

“Holy mackerel!”

Of all the salty language and oft-depraved imagery seen throughout filmmaker Brian De Palma’s extensive career, it comes as somewhat of a surprise that the Philadelphian, when interviewed on camera in the new documentary “De Palma,” would utter such a PG-rated superlative.

And he does it a lot.

The new film, opening Friday in District theaters, follows the typical hagiography approach of re-examining a director’s career through his output. The poster offers him up as “one of America’s greatest storytellers,” a rather generous appellation given that Mr. De Palma’s output has entailed some truly great works (“Scarface” and the underappreciated “Casualties of War”), many competently made thrillers and genre exercises (“Mission: Impossible,” “Carrie”) as well as more than a few absolute stinkers (“Snake Eyes,” “Femme Fatale”).

Mr. De Palma is one of the most schizophrenic of American auteurs of the past 45 years and, let’s be frank, his contribution to cinema history is less about the quality of his work than it is his self-anointed mantle as the inheritor of Alfred Hitchcock. In no uncertain terms — he even admits this in the film — after Hitchcock died, no one was making those types of films anymore, so why not him?

OK, fine. “Dressed to Kill” certainly had the Master’s fascination with dangerous blondes and the sexually repressed men who desire them, and “Body Double” might even be called a low-rent version of “Rear Window.” But Hitch’s films they were not, nor could they be. Mr. De Palma also in the film freely acknowledges that “Blow Out” is neither remake nor re-envisioning of Antonioni’s “Blow Up,” but if I made a film called “Space Wars” that featured a young boy and a princess ….

Point being, Mr. De Palma is not, as many of his critics contend, a complete raider of other directors’ talents, even if he is a frequent “quoter” of his influences. The most notorious of this is in “Casualties of War,” featuring the identical shot of Michael J. Fox as a Vietnam soldier gazing on his back at a ceiling fan, set to the strains of a helicopters blades, just as Francis Ford Coppola did a decade earlier with Martin Sheen in “Apocalypse Now.”

But maybe such aping from his colleagues was to be expected, given that Mr. De Palma was one of the so-called “Film School Generation” that included such giants as Steven Spielberg, George Lucas, Martin Scorsese, Mr. Coppola, Woody Allen and others. They freely traded scripts and ideas back and forth in those halcyon days in the 1970s when the studio system had collapsed and, for a time, anxious studio heads like Robert Evans, eager to take advantage of the young turks while also making sure to please the shareholders, gave those young men free reign with studio cash — thereby resulting in the last great golden age of American moviemaking.

“There will never be anything like that again,” Mr. De Palma says, as sure of the closing of that chapter as the gray hairs on his and his colleagues’ heads — all now in or approaching their seventies — attest. It’s a moment of greatness and anti-nostalgia in a doc that, for the most part, plays it safe and looks back longingly. (If a film about the Film School Generation has not yet been made, surely it must — and soon.)

The problem with “De Palma,” helmed rather well by Noah Baumbach and Jake Paltrow, is that their subject is, incredibly, not camera-friendly. Mr. De Palma’s speech is forced and bland, his timbres somewhat grating to the ear. His anecdotes are often loping, and he lacks the innate charm that has made Mr. Scorsese, Mr. Spielberg and Clint Eastwood so endlessly engaging as public figures for decades. There is reason Mr. De Palma has remained behind the camera rather than in front of it, and he lacks a natural storyteller’s grace and poise that, too often, has crept into his filmic output.

And yet there are interesting tales here, not the least of which is that Mr. De Palma, starting out in New York, made films with a then-young actor named Robert De Niro, who is seen in clips from his ’60s films long before he became Mr. Scorsese’s avatar. But much beyond that is familiar, with Mr. De Palma reiterating for the world the not-exactly-new news that Mr. De Niro is shy off-camera.

Ultimately, “De Palma” is a competent, well-made documentary about a man whose career as a filmmaker has been marked by ups and downs, trials and triumphs, hits and misses and all the usual glitz and showbiz marriages (one of them to his frequent star, Nancy Allen, and another to producer Gale Anne Hurd). Nothing is particularly revelatory or psychologically shocking, and its subject exits the doc much in the same way he entered: aloof and mysterious, yet eager to continue making movies for as long as audiences show up.

Rated R: Contains adult language and clips from Mr. De Palma’s oeuvre depicting the usual masquerade of murder, sex, more murder, yet more sex, and the subject frequently uttering “Holy mackerel!,” his apparent catchphrase.