Are(R) You(U) In(N)—RUN (Away)? Piety and Prudence in Brian De Palma’s Carlito’s Way

Brian De Palma’s film Carlito’s Way tells the story of a man chased by furies—a chase in which he attempts to flee from his fate, but from which he cannot escape. He cannot run away. Despite Carlito’s ingenuity and skill, and despite his rules that make his way—rules which give him the capacity to see all the angles being played, it is a chase that cannot be won. His way has its limits.

Newly freed from prison on a legal technicality regarding the prosecution’s alleged illegal evidence gathering, he is free due to “illegal wire-tapping” as Carlito’s lawyer and friend Davey Kleinfeld puts it—but these wire tapping maneuvers are “unfortunate investigative techniques” as the reluctant judge who must set him free says. Either way, Carlito says that he is “Free it last! Free at last! Thank God Almighty, I’m free at last!” He screams this ironic Puerto Rican criminal inversion of Martin Luther King’s great paean to the divine on his way out of the courthouse and toward his new life. Carlito takes the whole civil rights movement for himself even if it is an arrogation not worthy of effort.

The film’s opening credits reveals the fated denouement of Carlito and his way—a device that echoes the beginning of Billy Wilder’s classic Sunset Boulevard. In this scene Carlito got shot twice at close range, and we the audience see him dragged away on a stretcher, as he speaks his final words in a voiceover. “Somebody is pulling me down to the ground.,” as the opening credits conclude. The film is told as a dying man’s flashback. Filmed in blue filtered black and white, with 360? camera swirls—it is evident from this scene that Carlito will not make it out. The scene ends with Carlito’s point of view as his gaze finally settles on a bright orange travel poster depicting a peaceful tropical beach scene with the words “Escape to Paradise” emblazoned on it.

In a classic scene in Carlito’s Way, Davey Kleinfeld (the lawyer/friend of Carlito) invites him to a party at his Hampton estate, where he says there will be lots of props as visual aids. The invitation is for more than a party—the whole scene is for the purpose of propositioning Carlito to assist him in a crime. Kleinfeld needs assistance in springing Taglialucci from Riker’s Island Prison barge in his boat and he needs Carlito’s assistance. With his code of the streets—a code in part based on one’s ultimate loyalty anyone who has provided prior assistance—Carlito cannot say no to the prison swim out. He cannot violate the code that he follows, even though he actually wants to get out of this situation. He wants to escape his past, and the doom that slowly encircles him throughout the movie. His “way” is his an unwritten and unspoken code shown throughout the movie; though, this way makes him incapable of saying no to Kleinfeld’s ridiculous propdoition. When asked, “Are you in?” by Kleinfeld, Carlito cannot run away from his friend. The audience wishes he ran in fact. But as he tells his girlfriend Gayle, “Dave’s my friend. I owe him.” He cannot flee this debt of obligation. Besides, we know from the opening scene that he is dead anyway. It is a brilliant conceit.

Whatever debts he owes are real debts. Prudence would say otherwise, but the pious man that Carlito is does what he does according to his way. As stylized as this presentation of piety is, one must wonder how one would choose if one were in the same situation. Yes you must have killed Benny Blanco from the Bronx when you had the chance, but what would you have done if your intentions were to get out of such corruption in the first place? Carlito wants out, but the furies chase him.

That’s why De Palma puts the Joe Cocker song “You Are So Beautiful” as the final/beginning vision of what Carlito sees on his death bed. There must be a paradiso. Regardless, when the Joe Cocker song plays, it must be one of the most heart breaking scenes in recent cinema that I know.

Just thought I’d give a good movie recommendation.

De Palma actually becomes more hopeful in his film Femme Fatale. I’ll write on that one soon.