Dark Horse De Palmas: Snake Eyes versus Raising Cain ("director's cut")

A post of Robin Bougie's the other week listing a "fan edit" of Raising Cain as one of his favourite De Palma's got me briefly excited to revisit that film, which I'd always considered a lesser De Palma. While it is full of the stylistic excess and Hitchcockian cinematic flourishes of his "signature" work - with no less than two sequences lifted directly from Psycho - I always found the theatrical cut - which I saw first run in the 1990's and have never since revisited, tho' I have had a DVD around of it for years - to be dramatically inert and borderline incoherent; I wanted to like it, but I didn't. The idea of a fan edit, re-sequencing the film to follow De Palma's original vision (taken from a leaked early screenplay), seemed to burst with promise and delight, and it excited me even more that De Palma had himself given the re-edit his thumbs-up, having included it as a "director's cut" on the Shout Factory blu-ray that came out a few years ago. I had ignored the release at the time, but got really excited to see it, even moreso after swapping a few messages with Robin; I quickly purchased the blu-ray, took at home, and discovered that:

a) the fan edit is indeed vastly superior to the theatrical release, becoming dramatically far more effective (and also even more incoherent, since it tells much of its story in flashback and leaps from dreams to reality in truly demanding and disconcerting ways)

b) it has one awkward transition, since there was  no cutting room material to work with (not even in De Palma's command, apparently), but otherwise does look and play like a professionally-done cut of the film (something I was actually slightly concerned about before I saw it) 

c)  it is formally one of De Palma's more interesting films, since in either cut it uses its fundamental incoherence to undermine our sense of stable identity (relevant to the theme of MPD)

d) it still is a lesser De Palma, if you want to actually be emotionally engaged by a story. I mean, I've loved Frances Sternhagen since I saw Outland in the theatres, and I love Psycho, but having an extended riff on Psycho's clunkiest scene, where the psychologist (in Raising Cain, the role played by Sternhagen) explains Norman's split personality... I just didn't need that, and unless you're the type of movie lover who is gonna get excited about riffs on Hitchcock for their own sake, it's gonna play exactly like what it is: excessively clunky exposition that bogs down any sense of human drama. It's also really, really hard to connect with some of the characters, with Lolita Davidovich - whose perspective is fronted by the new arrangement of the film - playing more of an archetype than a human being. I was curious to have seen it, was glad to watch the extras, and tip my hat to the re-editor, Peet Gelderblom, but no way is this film ever going to displace MY dark horse De Palma favourite, which is Snake Eyes. (Note that fans of Raising Cain on Facebook, including Bougie, think I'm as weird as I think they are for this choice). 

It is hard for me to defend Snake Eyes, because it's a film I love deeply, and to this day do not understand why no one else seems to. To me - besides Nic Cage being a vastly more entertaining overactor than John Lithgow - it's a fascinating portrait of innocence and corruption, America-style, with the film's formal qualities doing much to echo its themes. Cage plays an innocently corrupt, full-of-himself, unashamedly crooked Atlantic City cop named Ricky, who shakes down drug dealers, places illegal bets, brags about screwing around on his wife, flirts hornily with two other women, and boasts constantly throughout the first 13 minutes of the film, while repeatedly saying he should run for office (ha!). All the while, he grins, dances, cheers, and otherwise reveals that he really and truly does not realize that HE IS ONE OF THE BAD GUYS; he loves himself, and his life, too much to actually take this in, and somehow has been allowed to get away with this for years. The plot of the movie turns on his discovery of how compromised he is, his "I Ain't No Nice Guy" moment, and how he comes to terms with it,,, all of which is very interesting and entertaining for me, but even moreso because the first 13-and-a-half minutes of the film formally echo the unbroken flow of "innocent corruption" that has been Ricky's life up til that point, by at least pretending to be shot in one seamless, breathtaking 13-and-a-half minute long flow. Just like Ricky - form mirroring content - De Palma cheats throughout this sequence, disguising several edits in camera pans, at 2:45, 4:30, 7:22, 10:16, 11:30, and 12:45, sometimes in the process of jockeying back and forth between a character looking and what the character sees, but never so obtrusively to break from the sense of breathless, exuberant continuity. Only when the assassination attempt happens - the "here comes the pain" moment in the film, where in fast sequence a boxer fakes a knockout, a politician is shot, and Ricky in horror realizes that he has blood, literally, on his hands - only THEN do we break from the flow into a couple of quick shot-counter-shot cuts and a "god's eye view" overhead of the arena. I once, in taking George Rosenberg's History and Aesthetics of Cinema at SFU, was tasked to write about a minute of my choosing in a film, highlighting all the thematic elements present in that minute and connecting them to the text as a whole; at the time I chose a scene from Pasolini's Accatone, but if I had a chance to do the assignment again, I would pick the moments immediately before, during, and after the scene where Ricky's (and our) flow is broken and we learn that all is far from right. 

I am not, I should add, saying that I think Snake Eyes is De Palma's best movie, by any objective standard. I mean, I don't even begin to know how to measure that, though probably for overall significance and richness I'd have to give the credit to Blow Out (which was Bougie's pick for #1, and could as easily have been mine). I actually think it's kind of morally dishonest to go about proclaiming your loves as if they were the only and correct loves, as if the films you like are somehow by virtue of your liking them objectively better than the films other people like. Taste is subjective, and should be, and the less we try to compete with each other about such matters, the better the world is - y'all can love Raising Cain as much as you like, you know? But man, do I love Snake Eyes; it is subjectively my very favourite De Palma, the one I return to most frequently, the one I have the most fun watching; and it doesn't even need a fan-edit-cum-director's-cut, because it's perfect just the way it is! 

BTW, Domino, De Palma's new movie, is now on Netflix, but De Palma didn't have final cut and apparently was not involved in post-production, so, like, how good could it be? In fact, not very: I saw it the other night, and there is very little about it that impressed me; a few good set-pieces, and easier to finish than Passion, but nothing really worthy of the master. I hope he makes one or two more great movies before he retires (looking forward to his project tackling the whole Harvey Weinstein thing...).