Viking Night: Scarface
By Bruce Hall
May 10, 2011
BoxOfficeProphets.com
This is a simplified picture of Cuba in 1980. Faced with a collapsing economy and the threat of insurrection, Fidel Castro decided to allow over a hundred thousand unhappy citizens to simply leave. He put them on boats, pointed them at Florida and said “have fun!” But he wasn’t talking to the refugees, he was talking to the citizens of Miami. Because being who he is, Uncle Fidel also emptied his prisons, sending many thousands of killers and lunatics along for the ride. Most of the exodus were honest, hard working people who simply wanted a shot at opportunity. But some of them were the type who had allowed the hardships of Communist oppression to give them a sense of entitlement. And now they were entering an environment where if you were willing to give up your morals, you could make an endless amount of money. If you were one of these men, you felt the world owed you something. Therefore the world, and everything in it, was yours for the taking.
Two such men are Tony Montana (Al Pacino) and his friend Manny Ribera (Steven Bauer). They escape Cuba only to land in a refugee camp in Florida. They work their way out by executing a hit for a well connected drug lord named Lopez, and when freed, the two go to work for him. Lopez is a successful but cautious gangster, one who flies under the radar by putting his drug fortune into legitimate business ventures. But Tony and Manny aren’t businessmen. Tony in particular is a stone cold sociopath - impulsive, aggressive and completely incapable of remorse. Manny is no less of a criminal but he has a conscience, and secretly longs for stability and legitimacy. The ways in which this will divide them is clear from the start, but for now they’re inseparable as they take on their first big job for the Lopez syndicate.
Things go south but Tony and Manny prevail. And the drug world being what it is, Tony’s ruthless nature immediately establishes him as both monkey crap insane and as a potential leadership candidate. Every legendary outlaw has his first defining moment where it becomes clear to everyone in the room that the man they’re seeing is destined for great and terrible things. Tony’s moment comes quickly and thanks to that, he and Manny are made trusted enforcers for the Lopez operation. The two become proteges of Lopez’s right hand man, Omar (F. Murray Abraham). Omar is an older, even more pretentious version of Montana so predictably, they clash. Tony therefore deprives Omar of his job and his life.
Lopez makes the mistake of mistaking Tony’s audacity with courage, which ends up being a mistake. Montana is a caveman in a suit; a primordial nut job with an insatiable taste for vice. He’s a child in a man’s body, incapable of observing boundaries and curiously unaware of his own mortality. Tony therefore deprives Lopez of his job, and his life. AND his frosty, indifferent wife (Michelle Pfeiffer). Somehow the fact that it rhymes makes it seem even that much more heartless. But when finally in control of his own destiny - not to mention a multimillion dollar crime empire - Tony turns out to be his own worst enemy.
The cruel irony of avarice is that the more you have, the more you want. And the worst fate imaginable to such a person is running out of things to covet. Scarface (Tony’s nickname, thanks to a distinctive cut over his eye) is a textbook cautionary tale where the first half chronicles the rise, and the last half covers the fall. Early in the picture, Manny warns his friend that too much ambition can be a bad thing and that sometimes, you’re better off being happy with what you have. Yet Tony is more comfortable putting the past behind him, forgetting his roots and giving him no point of reference for his behavior. Tony is not a man, he’s pure “id” made out of meat and draped in silk.
Which by the way, makes Al Pacino the perfect guy to play him. There’s nobody better than Pacino at navigating the razor’s edge between slightly overacting and laugh out loud funny. There are a lot of people who despise Scarface for its graphic violence and for Pacino’s alleged histrionics. But we’ve all met people like Tony Montana; some of us just never realize it. We’ve all known someone who is convinced of their own infallibility, oblivious to reason and logic. We’ve all known someone who would almost certainly destroy themselves in 72 hours if you handed them 50 million dollars. There’s nothing funny about Tony Montana. For the drug kingpins at the top of the so called “Cuban crime wave” life was just an endless stream of champagne, lobster and violence. The cutthroat nature of the business meant that your days were numbered, there was considerable incentive to live it up while you could.
The truly disturbing thing to me is that the colorful villains at the center of Scarface (and Miami Vice, the television show that borrows its mojo from this film) are largely based on people who really existed. The universe of vice and indulgence depicted here is not an invention of Hollywood; stuff like this really happened. But that’s not even really the point. When you get past Pacino’s fireworks and Oliver Stone’s twisty screenplay, what you have is a movie about how the trappings of a king can destroy not just a weak man, but everything and everyone around him. Parables work best when the examples are stark, an in my opinion this is what makes Scarface so effective. The suggestion (dressed up as a crime drama) is that when you don’t have your fundamental values in order, success can be more of a curse than a blessing.
We discover that Tony’s sternly devout mother and naive, doe eyed little sister made it to America ahead of him, and he hasn’t seen them in years. When he finally appears, draped in silk and throwing money around, his mother sees him for who he really is. His sister sees him for the loving older brother he once was. Sadly, both of them just want back the man they remember. Happily, Scarface itself is literally the cinematic embodiment of its central character. If you can get past the noise and the flash, at the center it’s just about a little boy who can’t seem to run out of ways to disappoint his family and ultimately causes them all to pay for it. If you can think of it on those terms, I believe it really works.
It takes a lot of vanity to make someone forget that each of us is pawn to someone, and that when you bite off more than you can chew, you choke. It’s just simple physics. Scarface is about just these things and it’s an excellent drama if you can allow yourself to take it seriously. And I happen to think that you should. The story at the center of it is one that anybody could stand to learn, and we all know that the higher the fall, the harder the landing. It’s the kind of story that’s just made for the movies. It’s Shakespeare with chorizo, sinfully indulgent and satisfying.