This Is 40 (Judd Apatow, 2012)

In Knocked Up, Pete (Paul Rudd) and Debbie (Leslie Mann) played a side role to Seth Rogen and Katherine Heigl’s unstably formed relationship. Mann played Heigl’s sister, and the rough patch of Pete and Debbie’s established bond ran parallel to the shaky formation of ties between the leads. Yet their arguments quickly crossed the line from the disruptions that test a relationship’s mettle to obvious, serious problems between two people clearly wrong for each other. Their eventual reconciliation is meant to show that Rogen and Heigl can and should make it too, but the desperate, artificial consolation left lingering fears of a futurish, even more nightmarish breakdown.

Enter This Is 40. Approaching their nearly simultaneous 40th birthdays, Pete and Debbie have regressed further in the last five years, their prickly resignation at spending the rest of their lives with each other now wholly removed of any evidence of true love save a few, futile lines of dialogue. In the Knocked Up DVD commentary, Apatow noted that Mann, his wife in real life, would never be able to stand Rudd’s lackadaisical, unserious approach to problems. This tension between the actual actors was visible in their supporting appearances in that film, and it seeps into every frame of this (over-)full-length examination of Pete and Debbie at a crossroads. The result is a terrifyingly toxic film in which the usual Apatow humor falls flat in the face of its nightmarish depiction of an entire family in freefall.

Rise of the Planet of the Apes (Rupert Wyatt, 2011)

Rise of the Planet of the Apes, a fear du jour-updating reboot of the apes-take-over-Earth franchise, has just enough creativity in it that its problematic whole is all the more frustrating. The only actor who genuinely fits into his role comfortably is animated out of the picture, while a good third of the film feels like padding to establish questionable, simplistic motivation for a primate proletariat revolt. Yet when the film clicks, Rise of the Planet of the Apes finds a surprisingly effective tone between the sentimental and vicious.

Swapping out fears of nuclear holocaust for the less definite disease paranoia, Rise of the Planet of the Apes repositions the root of man's fall as the noble but misguided attempt to alter nature. Will Rodman (James Franco) is a scientist for a pharmaceutical firm who engineers a virus to repair the brain, effectively curing Alzheimer's and other brain-degenerative diseases. It's a lofty goal, and one that doesn't particularly need the addition of Will's Alzheimer's-stricken father (John Lithgow, making the most of an almost unwritten part) to sell the importance of such a breakthrough. But when an aggressive test chimp forces the closure of the research, Will secrets away the ape, Caesar, who inherited his mother's altered genes and exhibits intelligence even beyond that of a young human.

Brian De Palma: Raising Cain

One of the more depressing critical threads that wove its way through the positive reviews of the recent Transformers film was that, for the film's glaring flaws, somehow its garish orgy of grease and gears constituted "pure cinema," as if the form's zenith is achieved solely by throwing money at the screen. By the same token, I would actually somewhat agree with the idea that the most cinematic moments in film tend to be the ones least connected to reality and tethered in some fashion to camp, even trash. The florid visual melodrama of Powell/Pressburger, Nicholas Ray or Martin Scorsese capture, for me, the essence of the artform, usually in the gaudiest, most brazen of moments. But if trash is one aspect of "pure cinema," skill obviously constitutes the X factor that finds the art and beauty within cinema's capacity for otherworldiness.

Going through Brian De Palma's canon has convinced me that, in the modern age, no one is better able to make pure cinema from the unlikeliest and most repellent of sources than De Palma, not even the wonderfully garish Tony Scott. Thus far, my favorites of his films—Hi, Mom!, Phantom of the Paradise, Body Double, etc.—have been the trashiest, transgressing all boundaries of moral and aesthetic taste while still displaying a keen satiric and visual prowess. His late-'80s strain of pure Hollywood features, even the intelligent and affecting Casualties of War, lack the madness De Palma pushes to the brink of abandon, and I found myself wishing for a return to the more gauche side of his filmmaking.

Brian De Palma: Blow Out

Blow Out represents a breakthrough for Brian De Palma. After farcically and satirically pulling apart the bonds of cinema for nearly two decades, the self-reflexive director at last found a way to incorporate cinema into a narrative without breaking up the movie. There are still jokes in Blow Out, but they tend to be of the cosmic variety; the closest anyone comes to an outright punchline is one character's innocent assertion "I don't watch the news. It's too depressing." Instead, De Palma structures his gags as dark, wordless payoffs, all of them carrying a bitter, emotional irony that feel like punches to the gut, something only rarely felt in De Palma's canon up to this point.

As with Dressed to Kill, De Palma does open his film with an extended gag, in this case a POV shot of a mouth-breathing killer stalking a sorority hall, his magnified breathing and racing heartbeat raising tension as scantily clad coeds fail to notice him. At last, he moves into a Psycho pose in the shower, pulls back the curtain, raises the knife, and the woman lets out the most hysterically fake scream you ever did hear. The camera shifts to tripod-mounted third-person in an editing studio for exploitation features as soundman Jack Terry (John Travolta) chuckles at how bad it is to his teed-off boss. What was I saying about this not being a funny movie?

Brian De Palma: Obsession

At the time of its release, Obsession was by some degree the most refined of Brian De Palma's films, an ironic twist given how it is perhaps the most compromised of his pictures to that point. Rewritten to avoid certain controversies, and then slashed to the bone per the wishes of legendary score composer Bernard Herrmann, Obsession differs so thoroughly from the vision of its writer, Paul Schrader, that he disowned it during production. The cuts, however, make for a streamlined production, perhaps too truncated but nevertheless taut, and it's no wonder that the film proved the director's first noteworthy hit.

Patterned after Hitchcock's Vertigo, Obsession's moments of De Palmian trickery are few and far between. Instead, he captures the high melodrama of a past age and, more importantly, never treats it as anything less than silly. He does not look down upon the style, mind you, but he sidesteps the critical mistake of attempting to play the absurdity in the serious manner of 1970s cinema. Instead, he plays the film just straight enough to embrace the melodrama, and more than any other De Palma film to this point, Obsession keeps the audience wanting to watch the story rather than jump through his aesthetic hoops.

Opening with a lavish party for real estate developer Robert Courtland (Cliff Robertson) and his wife Elizabeth (Geneviève Bujold), Obsession communicates the heavy trimming upon its script immediately as it jumps along rapidly through establishing character moments and a sudden, random abduction of Elizabeth and daughter Amy by unknown assailants. They leave a note demanding $500,000, enough money to bankrupt Courtland, but police encourage him to place shredded paper in a suitcase along with a tracking device instead of the money. When the kidnappers discover the ruse, they enter into a car chase with the police that ends in a horrific crash that kills Elizabeth and Amy.

As you can guess, Robert is devastated, and the Vertigo influence enters the film when Courtland's business partner, Robert LaSalle (John Lithgow), encourages him to take a trip to Florence, Italy. Consumed by sorrow and unable to think of anything but his dead wife and child, Courtland agrees, without question for the sole reason that he met Elizabeth in Florence years ago. When he arrives and enters the church where they met, Courtland finds, to his shock, a woman restoring the paintings there who looks just like his wife. Sandra (also Bujold) hesitantly warms to the man's instant and passionate fixation upon her, but soon she enters into a relationship with the man and even acquiesces to his attempts to turn her into his wife.

At this point I found myself for the first time agreeing with De Palma's detractors that he appeared only to be recreating his influences, not working with them. Though it may be the director's tightest work yet, Obsession openly displays Herrmann's creative wishes, and one has to think that he had a hand in paring the film down until it played more like a Vertigo retread.

And yet, De Palma undermines the brevity of his shortened film, and in the process he subverts Hitchcock by introducing a complex romanticism into the Vertigo story. To better understand the split between the moments of outright plagiarism and the artistically fulfilling offshoot of his own vision, look at the contrast between the basilica of San Miniato in Florence and the replica memorial Courtland erects as the gravestone for his wife and child. One is a copy of the other, of course, but it reconfigures the meaning of the original into terms that are emotionally resonant for this character. A visual metaphor for De Palma's entire approach to the film, this juxtaposition lays the framework for a much darker yet more genuine exploration of Hitchcock's themes even with the most insidious implications of the plot left on the cutting room floor.

Where Hitch alerted us with an entire act left that Judy was Madeleine, De Palma holds off the revelation until nearly the end, by which point things move too swiftly for us to consider Courtland's psychological state. But by that point, we do not have to, because the director has used the preceding time to make a film not about the armchair psychiatry Hitch detested yet put on the screen so often but the emotion. Hitchcock had to suck us into his world with his tricks to torture us, but De Palma does not project Courtland's agony upon us but merely at us, asking to consider the horrible pain of a man left with nothing.

Compounding this despair is the truth of Sandra's identity, not Elizabeth as we might have guessed but his daughter, Amy. What layers of incestuous subplot existed in Schrader's script are left more to a dark corner of the mind, but the slight change in role proves the most ingenious alteration between the two works. The subject of Vertigo was obsession as much as it is in this one, but De Palma shows us how we all use grief to cover up truths that could cure us of our fixations. LaSalle, who organized the kidnapping to bankrupt his partner and assume total control, found Amy alive and raised her to hate her father, brainwashing her with the memory that he did not pay the ransom money and thus did not care enough for her or her mother to part with his money. Courtland, meanwhile, is so consumed by remorse that he does not ever consider that the woman he courts may look like his wife because she shares her genes. Both of them are blind to the irony of their lives: Amy/Sandra collaborates with LaSalle out of hatred for her father by entering into an Elektra complex with him, while LaSalle did effectively kill his partner's interest in the company though he did not bankrupt the man.

The spirals of the main characters, eventually looping into an extended déjà vu that reconfigures events around the truth, crescendos emotionally, demonstrating how we do not fully understand how much we love something until we've lost it. When Sandra fakes her kidnapping so LaSalle can have a second chance at ruining his partner and she can see whether her father actually brings cash this time, the mounting tension of Courtland's frenzy demonstrates that he's learned his lesson. He secures the money, only for LaSalle to swap out the suitcase for a fake, and he performs the same money drop. When he finally learns of his partner's deception, Courtland kills LaSalle and takes the money straight to the airport, where he hopes to kill Sandra for her role in cheating him. However, he breaks open the suitcase in front of her before he can shoot her, and Sandra/Amy can now see that her father did get the money after all and shouts "Daddy!" with glee. One might expect De Palma to have this ending, in which a child and parent are reunited through money, to be cynical, but there is no moment in the film as flamboyantly melodramatic nor as emotionally genuine as his nearly endless, whimsical circle around the hugging father and daughter.

The opening credits of Obsession contain the most overt indication that De Palma is directing. He intersperses a shot slowly tracking toward a building where the party is being held with slides containing pictures charting Elizabeth and Robert's relationship. Once the credits end and De Palma at last moves inside the mansion, we see that the characters are watching the slide show, which abruptly ends with the card, "And they lived happily ever after." He starts the film at an ending of sorts, and one that steels the viewer for the inevitable heartbreak. Elsewhere, however, De Palma is elegant, his tracking shots, pans and tilts graceful as they pore over numerous shots of art and of the heavenly haze around the characters (provided by Vilmos Zsigmond). For the first time, the romanticism that can be plainly seen in works such as Carlito's Way peek from behind De Palma's bag of tricks, and his technique is used toward a purpose, a purpose greatly aided by Herrmann, who may have hindered the director and writers' visions but contributed one of his finest and most context-appropriate scores as repayment. Hell, De Palma even gets one of his few unimpeachable performances out of an actor, in this case Lithgow, whom we can see here starting to perfect what eventually became his stock and trade: weak-bodied but able-minded schemers and villains. In a film built on dramatic and tragic irony, the greatest twist of Obsession may be that it is at once the most indebted to the work of someone else even as it makes the greatest case yet for De Palma as his own artist, someone who can think beyond his list of references to break them down and reconstruct them into something that can stand proudly alongside the works he plunders, even the masterpieces.