De Palma

Somehow in a retrospective of Brian De Palma’s career you’d expect some split screens, or long tracking shots, or other visual elements commonly employed by the venerable maverick filmmaker.

Yet the approach of De Palma is scaled back to the bare minimum. This documentary tribute from directors Noah Baumbach (Mistress America) and Jake Paltrow (The Good Night) simply seats its subject in front of an unlit fireplace and allows him to tell stories.

And that’s what De Palma does, sharing a series of entertaining anecdotes from his life and a career that spans more than 40 years. He’s candid both about his successes like Blow Out and The Untouchables, as well as his failures including The Bonfire of the Vanities and Mission to Mars.

Along the way, we learn about De Palma’s affinity for split screens and his disdain for car chases, and how he was influenced by Hitchcock and New Wave filmmakers from France and Italy during the 1960s.

There are some especially amusing references to his early career, when his inner circle included Steven Spielberg, Martin Scorsese, and Robert De Niro. De Palma also dishes about bad experiences working with the likes of Orson Welles, Cliff Robertson, Sidney Lumet, and Oliver Stone. Plus, he offers a drop-the-mic dismissal of subsequent Carrie adaptations that followed his 1976 version.

The film provides an insightful glimpse into how the industry changed for better and worse in the past few decades, through the eyes of a filmmaker who has always pushed the envelope in terms of sex and violence.

The approach here is strictly chronological, without any attempt to bring outside perspective beyond the single interview. Baumbach and Paltrow miss some opportunities to add depth in spots (considering the polarizing nature of De Palma’s work among both audiences and critics), and most of the negatives are glossed over compared to discussion of his achievements.

The result is like a slickly edited greatest-hits compilation of DVD commentary tracks that would be equally at home on the small screen. Still, although it’s a film by his fans and for his fans, De Palma has value for just about any movie buff who can appreciate its subject’s longevity and versatility behind the camera.

Rated R, 107 minutes.