I’ve been unkind to Brian De Palma before.
But I was quickly informed that my blanket statement about De Palma’s lack of style in regards to “The Untouchables” doesn’t apply to his more well regarded masterpieces like “Carrie” and “Blow-Out.” Surely if I saw those I would be likely to change my mind.
Well no, I’m still wishy-washy about “Carrie,” De Palma’s early cult-horror classic starring Sissy Spacek as an abused teen with the power of telekinesis.
De Palma’s approach strikes me less as homage to genre filmmaking and more as him wallowing in overdone ideas without a distinct style of his own. He accentuates soothing facial features of certain women and teachers with delicate, foggy filter close-ups and wide shots and then amplifies the doom and gloom of religious persecution with ominous low angle shots and intensified soundtrack cues. The screeching violins of the “Psycho” score are incorporated not as a nod to Hitchcock but as a crutch every time Carrie uses her powers. He elicits a monumental performance from Piper Laurie as Carrie’s mom but bludgeons you with her presence due to its screechy, insane, sanctimonious tone, making for a truly delusional depiction of extreme Christianity.
What’s more, his way of building suspense is to just make a movie completely different from the one the movie will end up as. It’s all a manufactured element of surprise, one that’s been deadened and aged over time. He draws out the maudlin splendor and beauty of Carrie being showered with applause as the prom queen endlessly, only for it to transform into an avant-garde psycho-horror movie. It suddenly incorporates split-screen and deafening sound mixing to completely shift the movie’s trajectory, not gradually take you into the moment.
But the bigger problem I think stems from the fact that Carrie has no personality. She is so berated at school and by her mother that we know nothing of her interests, her quirks, her dreams or her desires. We feel only pity for her, and clearly so does the Robert Plant clone who ends up asking her to the dance. He doesn’t love her, but he genuinely has fun and wants her to have a good time, but little else.
He’s the one redeemable character in the film, and the remainder of the time is spent too heavily on the bitchy teenage girls and John Travolta going to parties and working out during gym class. It’s a hateful film right to the end when we read the graffiti label on the site of Carrie’s burial ground. We only care for Carrie because the rest of the characters are so exaggeratedly awful and because the pacing and tone is so melodramatic and maudlin that the movie is capable of surprising us with her range and power.
And yet when she unleashes all hell on her classmates, Carrie at that moment stops being a human whom we can sympathize with and becomes a demon. Her battle with her mother is an unfortunate epilogue.
“Carrie” is not the cult masterpiece I was expecting it to be. It continues to place me in a minority and forces me to take a staunchly contrarian stand on an otherwise respected director, but so be it.