CARLITO'S WAY. Al Pacino, Sean Penn, Penelope Ann Miller and John Leguizamo. Directed by Brian De Palma. Category II. On the Panasia circuit.
THIS under-publicised film represents a powerful return to form by the erratic but always intriguing Brian De Palma. It also sees Al Pacino finally tackling a character worthy of his talents, after a series of flimsy 'comeback' roles during the early 1990s, culminating last year in his first Oscar for probably his weakest performance in Scent of a Woman.
In Carlito's Way he has made full amends but ironically, can barely expect to even get nominated for working on a De Palma gangland movie. Yet it represents the actor at his extraordinary best and marks the creation of his third fully-formed and quite unforgettable screen mobster after past adventures in the Godfather saga and Scarface.
Carlito Brigante (the very name evokes the kind of Latin strut and swagger nobody can cut quite like Pacino) is in some ways an amalgam of the preceding pair: the weary, remorseful Michael Corleone of The Godfather Part III and Tony Montana, the remorseless, cocaine-kingpin anti-hero of De Palma's controversial 1983 reworking of the Scarface legend.
As in both previous films, the era is the sartorially-challenged, coke-frosted 1970s. Like Montana, Carlito is an Hispanic hardman who made his name as a big-time drug dealer and is most at home in the tacky milieu of the Travolta-esque discotheque. And like the ageing Corleone, he wants out but keeps getting pulled back in.
Carlito is more a sum of these two parts, though. Sporting a tight black beard and at least some modicum of dress sense compared to those around him, the solemn, fiercely-dignified Carlito is of course endowed with a trademark Pacino personal idiosyncrasy:a slight speech impediment. The result is that he stresses his syllables with unnecessary severity and though sometimes intrusive, it works. But what ultimately carries the character is not the fancy acting, but an incandescent inner intensity that virtually burns out of the man's eyes.