RAISING CAIN
A film review by Mark R. Leeper
Copyright 1992 Mark R. Leeper
Capsule review: Bizarre Gratia Bizarre. Brian De Palma directs his own not-ready-for-primetime script. He sew together big swaths from PEEPING TOM, PSYCHO, and others, then does not have the plot thread to hold them together in a decent story. Very much a lesser effort of a decent filmmaker. Rating: low 0 (-4 to +4). (Warning: some spoilers occur in this review.)
At one point Brian De Palma was a clever and innovative filmmaker. PHANTOM OF THE PARADISE is a terrific tour de force. Arguably it was De Palma who put Stephen King on the map with his excellent adaptation of CARRIE. De Palma also proved he could do Hitchcock thrillers as well as Hitchcock himself. In fact, when De Palma's OBSESSION played concurrently with Hitchcock's FAMILY PLOT, I claimed it was OBSESSION that Hitchcock should have been prouder of. I also think that in spite of some of the obvious faults, SCARFACE is probably the most exciting gangster film of the last ten years. But De Palma borrowed too often from Hitchcock, and his films like BODY DOUBLE became too predictable. Also he was the wrong director for BONFIRE OF THE VANITIES. You have to be very careful giving an escapist director a film of social comment. Now he is back with a non- Hitchcockian thriller that he wrote himself., but he is making a mess of things. (It may be overstating things to call it his script; De Palma heavily plunders other films such as SYBIL and PEEPING TOM.)
Carter Nix (played by John Lithgow) is a child psychologist who so loves his baby daughter that he has taken two years off of his practice just to study her. In fact, he constantly has cameras on her so that she never has a private moment. (Yes, a directed steal from Michael Powell's PEEPING TOM.) But we find out very quickly that Carter is stealing babies for a psychological experiment. His wife Jenny (played by Lolita Davidovich) knows nothing of this and is carrying on her own secret life (with the accent on "carrying on"). The first mild absurdity happens in the first sixty seconds of the film, when a friend (played by Teri Austin) offers Carter and daughter a ride and just happens to have a spare baby seat in the car. This is only a tiny absurdity and De Palma could have explained it, but chose not to in order to condition the viewer to accept larger and larger absurdities without explanation. The climax of the film is a flabbergasting lulu requiring precise split-second timing to convince the audience that no events as shown could ever occur on planet Earth.
De Palma's script makes clear that he did not have enough story to fill a film. While the RAISING CAIN length of 97 minutes is not actually outlandishly short, the film is only that long due to a lengthy sequence that is nothing but a throwaway adding zilch to the story but a gratuitous car accident. At some point this film was probably written to be a tour de force for John Lithgow playing multiple roles, but in fact he just gives weak impressions of James Spader and Max Von Sydow (with exaggerated Swedish accent while playing a Norwegian). This new film makes De Palma appear to be no so much raising cain as just being less able. I rate it a low 0 on the -4 to +4 scale.
Mark R. Leeper
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