THAT TIME DE PALMA UPENDED THE "TOMATOES" WAY OF THINKING
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De Palma interviewed
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Underfunded, sketchily written, and heavily cut (maybe one reason the writing seems sketchy), Brian De Palma’s Domino still puts contemporary thrillers to shame. The story is standard-issue right-wing melodrama with some loop the loops: Two Danish cops, Christian (Nikolaj Coster-Waldau, fresh from Game of Thrones) and Alex (Carice van Houten, same) hunt a Libyan immigrant named Ezra Tarzi (Eriq Ebouaney) who killed Christian’s partner (who was also Alex’s illicit lover) — not fully realizing that Tarzi is being protected by the CIA, led by Guy Pearce’s Joe Martin. Why does the agency allow Tarzi to hack a bloody path through Europe? Because he can do (and is very talented at doing) what the CIA by law cannot: locating, torturing, and killing ISIS operatives in a quest to kill the sheikh who murdered his humanitarian father.The script is full of little digs at liberals (the sheikh was released from Guantánamo; Denmark is so fashionably leftist), but De Palma doesn’t seem interested in the politics. For him, Domino is a late-career exploration of ideas that have obsessed him for 50-odd years. One is the hypnotic pull of subjective camera footage. The ISIS terrorists use filmed violence to turn people on, at one point sending a young woman to document her murders on the red carpet of the Netherlands Film Festival (“Ending the lives of infidels is a great thing. Scaring the millions of others who see it live on TV is something even greater!”) and planning a massacre in a bullfight arena that will be shot by a hovering drone.
Most of all, De Palma proves that greatest suspense (and horror) come from helplessness, a sense of impotence. Christian sees his partner bleeding out and the suspect escaping over a slate roof and is torn between his dual duties, but De Palma doesn’t quicken the pace the way most directors would. Instead, time stretches out, gravity pulls harder, and the air seems to thicken, agonizingly. The showstopper climax has the stately, “Bolero”-like rhythm of the first sequence of Femme Fatale, while also recalling the nightmarishly protracted tragedies of The Fury and Blow Out and so many other De Palma films. The heroes have to work out complex spatial-temporal equations at lightning speed — but slowed down by factors of two, then four, then eight, until your heart feels like it will explode.
What has pissed off early audiences (and many critics) about Domino is that the payoffs fall short of the buildups. A swift kick in the groin is unintentionally comic. A major character dispatched too abruptly makes De Palma seem glib. I’d like to see his full cut someday. Meanwhile, you should ignore the terrible reviews. I’d like to think the crates of tomatoes that are a running motif and figure in the plot are a tacit acknowledgment that the Tomatometer doesn’t always tell the truth.
That film didn’t turn out as well as Brian probably would have liked, but that’s another one where there’s a big scene at the end in the bullfighting arena, and the terrorists are there, and I had put in this sort of action temp score. And then when Brian saw it, we put in Bolero. And it’s interesting because he really wants the visuals to command the audience’s attention. And he wants to pick and choose the places where the music leads you in a certain direction, or makes you… or emphasizes what he thinks you might want to feel for the character at that time. And so the Bolero was just something that could keep the audience involved, but really the visuals are what are so engaging. That was true in that scene, and obviously true in the opening scene of Femme Fatale, as well.
Production issues plagued this, Brian De Palma’s most recent feature, and the filmmaker all but disowned the final result. So it’s difficult to give the picture a full-throated endorsement. But out of its messy making and compromised completion, one can still find enough traces of De Palma’s snazzy, baroque style — inventive camerawork, creative compositions, ingenious set pieces and cheerful indifference to plot — to warrant at least a curiosity peek. It’s far from top-tier DePalma, but at least it has some personality, which is more than you can say for most thrillers these days.
This stranded film may indeed exist on an island within De Palma’s body of work, but if so it is an island of profound importance for the De Palma project, possibly a projection of where De Palma is heading with his art. The accidental nature of the lack of shooting days, or De Palma’s inability to oversee the final mixing and whatnot, can hardly wipe away what seems to me like a reasonably close facsimile of what De Palma originally intended to create, a film that was perhaps intended as a new step forward in his work—a step, perhaps, that goes beyond anything he’s ever done. Beyond in what direction? I have no idea. It is perhaps not beyond but deeper within his own artistic persona, so deep that it can only manifest itself on the surface in Domino’s austere images seemingly stripped of the usual ornamentation one is used to in De Palma. Next to something like Passion, Domino appears almost as post-cinema; compared to De Palma’s recent work it is disarmingly straight-forward, no narrative tricks à la Passion or Femme Fatale, no mystery between dream and reality or anything like that. It is instead bluntly barreling ahead and, I’d say, reaching for a new and deeper understanding of reality and the film image that captures it.
"The question of what to watch while social distancing is ultimately less important than a lot of other things," Nayman begins. "But it’s also a reality that for a lot of people on self-imposed quarantine, renting or streaming movies will be a safe, significant time-filler—which is why it might be worth taking a bit of a risk in terms of what we’re watching. A case can be made that the time has never been better to rewatch old favorites or catch up with the classics, but what about some movies whose bad reputations previously made them seem like a waste of time? Here are 10 movies that are not only better than you’ve heard, but worth tracking down—and maybe talking or arguing about with your fellow shut-ins now that you’ve got the time to do so."
Nayman tops off his list at the end with De Palma's latest:
DominoI wrote about Brian De Palma’s hot mess of an anti-terrorism thriller when it (barely) came out last year; if Domino was already DOA the second it hit VOD, it’s only been pushed further into the dirt ever since. The reason I’m recommending it again out of all the underrated movies out there is that it’s exactly the kind of film that benefits being watched when there’s time to process and think about it—to look past its thrifty production, evidence of meddling, and after-the-fact editing and look at what De Palma has to say about surveillance, governmental ethics, and violence as media spectacle circa 2020. The paradox of Domino is that on some level it’s a cheap, opportunistic, and wildly contrived genre movie. But it has enough directorial excellence in its DNA to, in some moments, look like a masterpiece, the same kind of outrageous, red-blooded entertainment De Palma was engineering at the time of Carrie and Scarface. Domino was a magnet for bad buzz and bad reviews, and yet it’ll endure on the strength of its bruised, submerged artistry.
Nayman on the Split-Screen Shot in Domino - The Ringer
Nayman - The Wild World of Brian De Palma
Adam Nayman on the "Formally Innovative" Redacted
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