director/producer
Brian De Palma
screenwriter
David Koepp
story by
Brian De Palma
David Koepp
cinematographer
Stephen H. Burum
music
Ryuichi Sakamoto
editor
Bill Pankow
cast
Nicolas Cage (Rick Santoro)
Gary Sinise (Kevin Dunne)
John Heard (Gilbert Powell)
Carla Gugino (Julia Costello)
Stan Shaw (Lincoln Tyler)
Kevin Dunn (Lou Logan)
Michael Rispoli (Jimmy George)
Luis Guzmán (Cyrus)
Mike Starr (Walt McGahn)
mpaa rating: R
running
time: 98m
u.s.
release: 8/7/98
video
availability: VHS -
DVD
other brian
de palma films
reviewed on this website:
- the
black dahlia
- mission: impossible
|
Snake
Eyes is about as meaningless
as can be, but it's one of the few movies this summer that I
have no problem recommending. The key to appreciating the film
is to be in on the joke -- that is, the ongoing in-joke that
is Brian De Palma's career. He plays with the audience, he plays
with the critics (and sure enough, the critics have panned Snake
Eyes), and God knows he plays with the camera. De Palma devotes
full widescreen close-ups to things that mean nothing, and he
gives us teasing, blurry glimpses of crucial events. It's all
play, all movie. And De Palma's exerting such ingenuity and energy
over a half-baked thriller plot is part of the joke.
De Palma is in command of his material here (he concocted the
story with scripter David Koepp) in a way he wasn't in his last
film, Mission: Impossible,
an empty blockbuster dependent more on impersonal special-effects
thrills than on the diabolical perceptual fake-outs that are
De Palma's specialty. In Snake Eyes, De Palma hauls out
some of his favorite thematic toys to play with: technology,
voyeurism, conspiracy/assassination, seduction. The whole movie
is on a slant, either shot on a diagonal axis or diagonally bisected,
so we get triangles within the rectangular frame -- and within
the triangles are the squares of countless monitors and TV sets.
De Palma is back working with the geometry of paranoia.
The story itself is a multiple-viewpoint study of one event that
De Palma practically blows off in the first half hour -- he's
more interested in the twenty-minute tracking shot that opens
the movie. The tracking shot serves two purposes: it puts De
Palma ahead of every other director who's done it (you can almost
hear him echoing the movie's hero: "I am the king!"),
and it sketches in the main characters. The shot follows corrupt
Atlantic City detective Rick Santoro (Nicolas Cage) as he strolls
through a packed stadium on the night of a big boxing match.
Rick talks to many people, many of whom turn out to have nothing
to do with the action. It's the people he barely notices or doesn't
talk to much who turn out to be important -- like the mysterious
woman in white (Carla Gugino) sitting next to him, or his friend
Major Kevin Dunne (Gary Sinise), who's in charge of security
at the stadium.
The Secretary of Defense is at the fight, and he's shot in the
throat despite Major Dunne's best efforts to protect him. Why?
Who's behind it? I have a feeling De Palma doesn't care, and
he doesn't care if you care. (If you do care about such mundane
plot-centered stuff, he's saying, then you're a sucker.) In Snake
Eyes, as in vintage De Palma, the artifice of moviemaking
itself becomes a joke -- only more so here, because it's so visually
oriented and visually loaded. De Palma keeps adding lies within
lies, like a Chinese box of ambiguous sights and sounds. Characters
remember things differently or don't even see things very well;
one way or another, everyone is blinded or laboring under their
incomplete piece of the puzzle. By the time De Palma breaks out
his trademark split-screen, it's a great comic flourish: only
by seeing double can we see the truth.
De Palma also has a star who can match his flourishes. Allowed
to run loose in this teeming playpen of a movie, Cage struts
and hoots his way through a flamboyant peacock's performance
that helps to make up for City of Angels.
Towards the end, Cage's Rick Santoro takes a turn into tormented
sincerity, one of De Palma's few false moves here. Rick's sense
of being betrayed doesn't touch us as it's meant to. And his
final scene isn't necessary. The scene that plays through the
end credits, though, is one of the wittiest and slowest-building
jokes De Palma has ever played. In Snake Eyes, De Palma
is so confident of his own deceptive mastery that he can make
you sit there looking for meaning, laugh at yourself when you
realize there is none ... and, while you're laughing, you almost
miss a clue that does mean something. Or might
mean something. De Palma is also confident enough in his comic
instinct to laugh at those who sit there puzzling over his film.
It's a movie. It's a joke. Don't you get
it? |