Carlito 39;s Way Scene

[Billy Cregin]

Theback room of the barber shop is a small, dingy place, one bulb, barred windows painted black, with a door to a bathroom. THREE DOMINICANS, eighteen or nineteen years old, good-looking, expensively dressed, are playing pool with TWO NEIGHBOURHOOD GIRLS, a little younger, sexy.

Quisqueya and Guajiro walk away. An important detail: light from the bathroom is not diffuse, but a straight angled line to the bar. This entire scene, I believe, is given far greater christian overtones than in the book or draft script, and the bathroom light is almost like a mystic sign pointing to where death will fall.

Sean Penn is known as a method actor, just like his "Carlito's Way" co-star, Al Pacino. Even before he became a five-time Oscar nominee (and two-time winner, for "Mystic River" and "Milk"), Penn was so dedicated to giving an authentic performance that he went method for his comedic role as the surfer dude Jeff Spicoli in "Fast Times at Ridgemont High." In "Carlito's Way," however, Penn's determination to get a certain scene right tested director Brian De Palma's patience.

The actual boat scene in "Carlito's Way" is a pivotal one, which Carlito himself likens to "a point of no return." It sees him and Dave shoving off with Frankie Taglialucci (Adrian Pasdar), so they can pick up Taglialucci's mob boss dad, who has escaped from a prison barge and is waiting to be rescued on a buoy. Dave winds up double-crossing and killing both Taglialuccis, leaving him and Carlito marked for mob retribution.

In voiceover, Carlito says Dave crossed a line and he's there with him, so that means he's along for the ride "to the end of the line." It's as if he's speaking of the experience of filming that earlier scene leading into the boat trip, too. De Palma continued:

"There's an instance where the actor has a fixation with what his performance is, and it doesn't really make sense to you. And since Sean is such a talented actor, I usually go along with him. But it got to the point where the sun was going down, and I had to shoot another sequence. He was never happy with that scene. Maybe later on, when he saw the movie, he saw it from the correct perspective. But he was not happy that day. I worked with Sean twice, and I think he's done some of his best performances [for me]. But there was that one day where he was not happy with what I was doing."

Penn's performance in that scene has a manic edge, in keeping with his character's cocaine-sniffing, and ultimately, it plays well enough. Though Penn may not have been satisfied that he achieved what he was going for, his curly-haired, chameleonic turn in "Carlito's Way" remains one of the more unique roles in his filmography.

As in the scene of laundry mat, it was very difficult to change the life while working without legal documents. Employer paid only the minimum wages, and sometimes took more money away from the payment as a processing fee. In the film, Rosario got fired from a housekeeping work, without notice and got shrunk payment but she just needed to accept the situation because there was no way to fight or argue with the employers. She needed to save money by eating very cheap food. She was eating a cracker with a piece of chili in the movie. There is no hope to live a better life without legal documents.

While being an undocumented worker, being arrested is the most unwanted incidence. In the film, there were scenes of passing border. Mother was swimming the river, Carlitos was hiding himself in the seat of a car, and both are life threatening action. They cross the border successfully; however, they will never feel free form the stress from being arrested. In the scene of tomato field, there were inspection from INS, the people were arrested violently, and some people got hit by officers. I felt this was not right. Close to the last scene, Enrique got arrested by police officers. He was a good person, did not relapse into crime, but was arrested. We can observe A violent immigration arresting video and ICE (U.S. Customs and Immigration Enforcement) news.

The idea of having to live with such a fear is something I can not imagine. I love this movie because it gives the audience an insight into what immigrants in the US deal with. When she gets fired from her job as a housekeeper and is basically exploited that truly hit home for me. So many immigrants live in fear and people truly take advantage of their situations things like what she went through happen all the time and it is horrible. I do appreciate however that This film showed that side of things because it is something you do not often get to see.

Sara,

I love this movie because this film reflects the struggle of both immigrants and single mothers. This type of film should be mainstreamed, in my opinion. This would raise awareness of the issues that surround the Latin community.

Sarah,

Your movie choice seems to reflect a lot of personal fears you had when you came to the U.S. as an international student and were working to make sure you could get by. Movies like this are important because someone like me, who has not had to face those kind of fears, has a greater understanding of the exploitation that happens here in the U.S. The media rhetoric often portrays immigrants in an unfriendly or unwelcoming light but ultimately most immigrants here are just trying to create a new opportunity for themselves.

I watched 'Carlito's Way' on ITV 3 Friday night. In one of the scenes, Carlito is portrayed looking through a dance studio window at his lover, Gail, as she and her fellow dancers practise ballet routines to certain piece of classical music.

You know, the scope of the internet never ceases to amaze me. It is, arguably, the pinnacle of human engineering achievement, so far. In less than thirty minutes, from the comfort of my room, I have communicated, remotely, with people who know the answer to a question that tormented my sleep last night. More, I have now located a source if I should wish to buy the music, and have even downloaded an MP3 of a shortened version of it to listen to.

I wonder how those who condemned Galileo for daring to state that the Earth revolved around the Sun, and not vice versa, would have reacted to a prediction that one day a machine would enable cross-global chatter on serious matters such as world poverty to frivolous ones such as 'Name That Tune'.

Ten years after they made "Scarface," Al Pacino and director Brian De Palma are back with "Carlito's Way," another large-canvas portrait of a professional criminal. Carlito Brigante, is older and wiser, however, than "Scarface's" Tony Montana, and for a time seems to be luckier.

We meet him at the legal hearing that will free him after only five years, on a technicality. His lawyer, a flashy lowlife named Kleinfeld (Sean Penn), sits by with a smirk as Carlito expansively addresses the judge and courtroom on the lessons to be learned by his release.

The speech paints him as a self-righteous blowhard and something of a showboat, but we begin to see a deeper side of Carlito as he returns to the streets where he was once famous. Facing 30 years in prison, where he expected to die, he got a chance to do some thinking, and now he decides he wants to go straight. A friend has offered him a share in a car rental business in the Bahamas.

To finance his investment, Carlito takes a job at a flashy nightclub, where he's thrown into contact with all the people he should avoid the most. And he meets a young punk who always introduces himself as "Benny Blanco from the Bronx" (John Leguizamo), the kind of hothead Carlito once was. Benny brings out the worst in him.

The movie is narrated by Carlito himself, who explains his hopes, his strategies, and especially his mistakes. One of those is surely to have chosen Kleinfeld as his lawyer. The acting here, by Sean Penn, is a virtuoso tour de force - one of those performances that takes on a life of its own. Penn is hardly recognizable beneath a head of balding, curly hair. He gives the lawyer a spoiled narcissism, a sneakiness and smarminess, and we watch him steadily losing control to cocaine and greed.

He looks up an old girl friend named Gail (Penelope Ann Miller), who says she dances on Broadway but neglects to explain it's in a strip club. They love each other, after their fashion, but we never sense much depth in their relationship; each one is caught up in the details of personal survival.

Brian De Palma in his best films is a muscular director who relishes over-the-top behavior, and here he paints a gallery of colorful gangsters and lowlifes. The hoods in the movie look borrowed from a production of "Guys and Dolls," the nightclubs look recycled from "Saturday Night Fever," and Al Pacino himself seems to be inspired by his Oscar-winning role in "Scent Of A Woman" (there are times when his Puerto Rican accent migrates uncannily toward the voice of the crusty military man he played in that film).

Carlito wants only to keep his nose clean, make some money, and get out of town. But his values, his friends and his circles are criminal, and the screenplay paints him into an inevitable corner - he's betrayed by his compulsion to stand by his friends.

Two of the set-pieces in the film are among De Palma's best work. One involves an insane scheme by the lawyer to rescue a hood from the Riker's Island prison barge. The other is a cat-and-mouse chase leading to a shootout in Grand Central Station. There have been a lot of shootouts in railroad stations in the movies, mostly routine, but De Palma finds endless variations as Carlito tries to elude his pursuers. And the visuals are as striking as the ambush in Chicago's Union Station that was a high point of De Palma's "The Untouchables." "Carlito's Way," like "Scarface," is first and last a character study, a portrait of a man who wants to be better than he is.

In "Scarface," the hero's ambitions led only to power, lust and greed. Here something more complicated is taking place; Carlito has grown enough to see himself from the outside, to understand some of the mistakes he made, to plot a way to escape from what seems like the inevitable fate of people in his position. Yet step by step and scene by scene, his fate is sealed.

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