Carlito's Way

Les truands sont fatigués, as Truffaut would say. He enters as he leaves, the hoodlum on a stretcher under fluorescent lights, Al Pacino reflecting on Scarface as well as The Godfather Part III. "The fuckin' J.P. Morgan of the smack business" now just wants to keep clean, Spanish Harlem in the Seventies ain't what it used to be. A second lease on life means chasing the dream of selling cars in the Caribbean, hopes are swiftly tainted in a majestic set piece: A botched drug delivery in the pool hall behind a barbershop, a collection of sinister integers (knife, billiards, mirrored sunglasses, freezer case, door ajar) made to dance to "El Watusi." "But it's like them old reflexes comin' back..." The contemplative gangster taking stock in tandem with Brian De Palma, sanguinary firebrands in melancholy middle-age. The perfidious shyster (Sean Penn) has little use for his "self-righteous code of the goddamn street," the combustible upstart (John Leguizamo) was him two decades ago, his doom is comprised of loyalty to one and mercy for the other. The ballerina turned stripper (Penelope Ann Miller) is a light in the gloom, he wears the metallic halo of a trash can lid while watching her in a rain-drenched Greenwich Village out of Minnelli. A lethal pall hangs over their fragile lyricism in this grand oneiric elegy, "my Puerto Rican ass ain't supposed to have made it this far." Low angles for bulbous Mafiosi under a constellation of disco lights, high angles for escalators at the Grand Central Station rat maze. De Palma reprises the ethereal spiral from the opening at the close, the kind of Romantic conviction that transforms a tacky billboard into a paradisiacal portal, a matter of soul. "You don't get reformed, you just run out of wind," cf. Walsh's The Roaring Twenties. Cinematography by Stephen H. Burum. With Luis Guzmán, James Rebhorn, Viggo Mortensen, Ingrid Rogers, Jorge Porcel, Richard Foronjy, Joseph Siravo, Adrian Pasdar, Frank Minucci, John Agustin Ortiz, Jaime Sánchez, and Paul Mazursky.