"Scarface" the price of power.

As I mentioned a couple of posts ago, I've been taking advantage of this 2025 to revisit several classic films that I hadn't seen for several years. In fact, I discovered many of these films in the middle of my adolescence when my love for the seventh art was beginning to emerge and I was barely able to absorb a portion of its virtues.

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Considering my love for Gangster films, I thought that "Scarface" from 1983 would be a perfect way to continue the marathon, since it is a rather disruptive breaking point within the genre, contrasting with the elegance seen in classics like The Godfather, and playing with more irreverent elements (As we would see in Goodfellas and similar films many years later).

And to no one's surprise, the film directed by Brian De Palma, written by Oliver Stone and starring Al Pacino (which, by the way, is a remake of a work of the same name released in 1932) continues to be wonderful in every sense, starting from the brilliant soundtrack composed by Giorgo Moroder that perfectly represents the Miami of the 80s, to each of the performances that accompany us during its dense two and a half hours of duration, which are quite short in my opinion.

However, in this viewing I would like to leave aside its technical and artistic prowess, to delve a little into the way in which the film addresses the figure of Tony Montana, a Cuban migrant who arrives in Florida in search of the American dream, whatever the cost.

And while during all these decades the figure of Antonio has become (erroneously) a symbol of ambition and the search for power (an idea that is inevitably attractive to many), it is impossible not to see Scarface as a beautiful tragedy, which uses this excess and the irreverences that I mentioned previously as the engine for a horrible nightmare that we cannot stop watching.

As a little joke, when I saw the film I wrote a brief review on Letterboxd where I mentioned that I had decided to evaluate it with one less star (staying at 4), as a direct consequence of how annoying it was how stupid Tony was, and, obviously I do not think that the erratic nature of the film overshadows the quality of the film, but I do feel that it made my viewing a much more bitter experience, something that I ironically enjoyed.

As much as Tony Montana's progress can be enjoyable, one can suffer with those moments where his explosive character ends up playing against him, showing that his main enemy is not those members of enemy cartels or rival gangs, but himself.

This is why I feel the definition of tragedy fits him so well, and very few filmmakers have been able to execute this concept as well on the big screen as Brian De Palma.

Score taken from my Letterboxd account.