Oliver Stone's visceral, angry tragedy

Tony Montana commenting to I'm Tony Montana! You f. wit' me, you f.' wit' da best:

There's something special about this movie [Scarface] over all others of its genre.

The Godfather films (first two of them, at least) are superior cinema to Scarface. Scarface also can't match the rich character development and humanity of any of the Scorcese gangster films.

What makes Scarface different, I am convinced, is Stone's script. He adapted a boring old 1930s movie of the same name and turned it into a visceral, angry tragedy. At the time Stone wrote the script, he was himself struggling with cocaine addiction and used first hand experience to create the paranoid world of Tony Montana. What's special about Scarface is the excessive intensity of its apocalyptic nightmare on one hand and its delicate sensitivity on the other. It is a long film, perhaps too long. But the pacing slowly slowly draws the viewer into the downward spiral into oblivion. Remarkably, none of this is accomplished with dramatic irony or cunning plot twists. It's a pretty straight forward narrative. The tragic element is unapologetically formulaic. And it's so darn compelling. Because each step of the way, before the story ups the ante in shock value, the viewer is already there psychologically as he follows Tony toward his inevitable fate.

A coked-up, struggling young Oliver Stone gave birth to his own alter-ego and in doing so, wrote the script of his life. Argue with me if you will, but Stone's Tony is more Jewish than Sergio Leone's Noodles.

In the movie, there is one identifiably Jewish character, Frank Lopez, a Cuban Jewish gangster who wears a chai necklace and tells Tony, "You know what a chazir is? A pig that don't fly straight." I always thought the cultural reference to be cute but gratuitous and even a bit misplaced. Looking back, it's obvious that Stone wanted to make this a Jewish story but couldn't do so overtly. So with the "chazir" line Stone winks at those of us that are in the know. The line is not gratuitous or misplaced. It's a fleeting glimpse into the core of what the film is really about.

It's interesting, this was the "neo-Hitchcokian DePalma's first gangster film. His second attempt at the genre, Untouchables, was also written by a Jew, David Mamet. Although there, the law enforcement official (Elliot Ness) is the protagonist and the gangster (Al Capone) is the one-dimensional villain. But there is nothing Jewish about Kevin Costner.