When Brian De Palma’s Raising
Cain bowed in American theaters during the summer of 1992, it was
anticipated by fans of the director as a welcome return to the sort of
formalist genre contraption he hadn’t indulged in since the creative blow-out
(forgive me) of Body Double eight
years earlier. However, when the lights came up, even within the ranks of the
De Palma faithful there was polarization. A handful defended it as one of the
director’s masterpieces, while a greater number seemed to consider it at best
middle-tier De Palma, a fully committed attempt to deal with typical De Palma-esque
narrative elasticity and thematic concerns such as time, chronology and dream
logic, all in the context of an examination of the morphing perimeters of
American masculinity and parental responsibility which somehow, in the end,
seemed as out of balance as its psychically fractured protagonist. Meanwhile,
the general public largely shrugged and Raising
Cain was left behind as a flawed but fascinating artifact, another
redheaded stepchild within a directorial career in which the misfits seemed to
be beginning to outnumber the prodigies.
Slow, insinuating lap-dissolve to 2012. Enter Peet
Gelderblom, a film and television director based in the Netherlands who has,
since his earliest experiences with the De Palma remained
unrepentant in his admiration for the filmmaker. Here I’ll disclose that Gelderblom,
who founded and administered the well-respected (and now shuttered) film site 24 Lies a Second, was the very first
person I “met” online, after he wrote to express support for my writing and my
fledgling movie blog. Gelderblom offered me a chance to write something for 24 Lies a Second, an experience which
deepened my confidence and our friendship, and we spent a lot of time in those
early days of the blogosphere enthusing and debating our love for Brian De
Palma’s films. (We once had a memorable exchange over the merits of Body Double, Gelderblom for the
defense and me serving as the prosecution.) Some 20 years after the release of Raising Cain, Gelderblom, who had always
thought the film vastly underrated, found his interest in it piqued once again.
De Palma had mentioned in the press on several occasions
over the years his disappointment not only with the audience’s tepid reception
of Raising Cain, but also over his
experience with the film itself, more precisely his own decision to juggle the
original chronology of the story, a bet-hedging move based not in his instincts
but entirely on the preview audience testing scores. In the theatrical version
of Raising Cain De Palma shows his
cards almost immediately, beginning the film with a kidnapping sequence that
reveals the twisted nature of his lead character, child psychologist Carter Nix
(John Lithgow), right out of the gate, consequently assigning the film’s chronicle
of Carter’s wife’s Jenny (Lolita Davidovich) and her extramarital romantic
entanglement to subplot status. But an original draft of De Palma’s screenplay demonstrated
to Gelderblom that the director had originally intended, before being infected
by the influence of those audience test screenings, to begin Cain with Jenny’s story, creating an illusory gossamer of trust and stability
on which to project Jenny’s ongoing deception, a scrim which would mask the
frightening familial schism yet to be exposed by the revelation of Carter’s
dual nature.
So, following his own inquisitive directorial impulses as
well as his curiosity as a true believer in De Palma and Cain, Gelderblom uploaded the theatrical cut of the movie from a
DVD and, using the digital tools at his disposal, began to rearrange the pieces
of De Palma’s elaborately designed but structurally compromised puzzle
according to the master’s original plan. The result was made available online
for casual cinephiles as well as fellow true believers who would, thanks to
Gelderblom’s efforts, now have a chance to see and judge Raising Cain not by the weak tea of the theatrical cut, but instead
by a version which would, as intended by its writer-director, seduce the viewer
with a sly deconstruction of romantic desire, hint at underlying
marital/familial tension, and then lower the boom. The film’s subliminal
preparation preserves the impact of the somewhat unexpected explosion of Carter’s
violent behavior (if you pay any attention to the film’s advertising, you’ll
know going in that Carter’s placid and caring fatherly exterior is not the
whole story), but also makes that explosion less inexplicable, more connected
to what is going on with the Jenny story—it’s the piece of the puzzle which has
finally found its place.
Even De Palma himself noticed, proclaiming that Gelderblom’s
cut was “what we didn’t accomplish on the initial release on the film. It’s
what I originally wanted the film to be.” That’s a pretty heady reception for
what is essentially a fan edit, albeit one much more seriously intended than
what one usually associates with such a label. So much so that De Palma
insisted Gelderblom’s labor of love and passion, now dubbed Raising Cain Recut, be included on
Shout!/Scream Factory’s splashy deluxe Blu-ray release of Raising Cain, which was released last week.
Were the theatrical cut the only element on the Blu-ray, it
would still be something for only De Palma’s most ardent fans to get excited
over. But with the inclusion of Gelderblom’s recut, the Blu-ray has been elevated
to the level of an event that anyone interested in cinema ought to find
compelling and fascinating enough to want in on, a rare opportunity to see an
alternate cut that speaks to the filmmaker’s actual vision, a cut which isn’t simply an opportunistic marketing
tool comprised mostly of gore shots extended by a second or two or filler
scenes whose cutting-room-floor destiny is revealed to have been entirely
appropriate. (Gelderblom necessarily had no access to deleted scenes and could
only work with material in the existing cut.) By reordering Raising Cain in such a way, Gelderblom
has not only provided evidence for the elevating of the film within the De
Palma filmography, but has also shown how De Palma’s original vision more
organically connects the film with other works from the director’s past and,
speaking from the perspective of 1992, his future.
The placement of Jenny’s romance-novel story front and
center, with its long buildup and apparent lack of concern for anything
remotely sinister, immediately recalls the surety with which De Palma teased
out the first 45 minutes of his masterpiece Dressed
to Kill. (Would that Cain had a
moment in store nearly as shocking as the fate of poor Angie Dickinson.) Cain refers back to Dressed to Kill thematically, echoing familiar De Palma concerns
and, maybe even more importantly, how we as an audience perceive and process those
concerns. In any given moment, Cain, like
many a De Palma failure and masterpiece before it, seems to challenge its
audience on simultaneously levels of operatic excess, parody, social commentary
and self-conscious stylistic analysis.
But it also refers back specifically to Dressed to Kill in more apparently superficial ways, which may
stand out a touch more now that the two films seem more structurally akin. Midway through Cain we’re introduced to Frances Sternhagen as Dr. Waldheim, a
psychologist with ties to Cain’s sinister father whose function is largely as the
director’s delivery system for his usual boatload of unwieldy exposition. But
De Palma signals a wit designed to distract from the character’s obvious
purpose. Waldheim is revealed to be a slightly cranky cancer patient in a long,
unnatural looking wig which she tugs at and complains about almost immediately:
“It makes me look like a transvestite.” (Calling Michael Caine!)
And she delivers that exposition during a beautifully
sustained traveling shot during which she constantly has to be prompted by
police detectives to stay on the prescribed path, lest she proceed along in one
direction while the camera continues to travel another. It’s one of De Palma’s
best visual jokes, and it’s enlivened by the new cut’s priming us to connect
back to Dressed to Kill, a film whose
own parody of Psycho’s conclusion-- Nancy Allen’s meticulously detailed
woman-splaining of the intricacies of replacing a penis with a vagina during a
transgender medical procedure while a horrified woman eavesdrops from the next
table-- was also pretty hilarious.
The entirety of Cain’s
nature as having been constructed as a puzzle of slippery perceptions,
self-projected identity crises, shifting directorial perspectives and the lies
or half-truths those perspectives conceal or reveal, directly connects it to
the gleefully contrived, deliberately deceptive raison d’etre of Femme Fatale (2002), perhaps the last De Palma to receive anything resembling critical
acclaim. Cain’s constant doubling
back on itself, especially as recontextualized by Gelderblom’s cut, is a modus
operandi most definitely in harmony with Femme
Fatale’s sophisticated visual gamesmanship. (Detractors might also suggest
that Cain and Fatale also share a lack of the sort of emotional power which
characterizes De Palma’s deepest work.) Even the conclusions of the two films
seem similarly composed, twin geographical mappings of the manipulation of
vehicles and bodies through man-made and natural obstacles (the blinding sun on
city streets in Fatale, thunder and pouring
rain in a motel parking lot in Cain) that
end on supernaturally distended encounters with heavily foreshadowed and very
sharp objects of impalement. And in his own appreciation of Gelderblom’s
repositioning of Cain, critic Sean
Axmaker describes the conclusion of Cain’s
climactic sequence as coming close to an absurdly amplified castration joke,
and as such it certainly works as further foreshadowing of the movie’s final gender-flipping
zinger.
Of my own objections to Raising Cain, the only serious one that Peet Gelderblom’s otherwise
astounding Recut cannot fully address
is my occasional aversion to the overt theatricality of John Lithgow’s
performance, as Carter Nix, but also as his brother Cain (the part of Carter
that does all the dirty work) and especially dear old dad, Dr. Nix—Lithgow in
old age makeup that, especially on Blu-ray, reveals just how good Dick Smith’s
job on Max Von Sydow in The Exorcist
really was. Lithgow is an actor who often seems constitutionally incapable of
dialing anything down, and I’m sure he gave De Palma precisely the level of
baroque that was asked for, perhaps even a bit more. However, much like Jack
Nicholson’s embodiment of Jack Torrance, Lithgow already seems crazy at the
outset, when we’re supposed to be relaxing into the honeyed voice and manner of
reason and “normalcy” he supplies for Carter in caring-daddy mode. He signals
the revelation of Carter’s awful secret just as much as De Palma’s flawed ordering
of scenes in the theatrical cut did.
However much we may want to back away from Lithgow in the
early running, De Palma’s deep focus and fish-eye lenses shove us ever closer
as Carter morphs into Cain, who is admittedly at least more fun to watch. And subtracting
that makeup job, Lithgow has the look to make Dr. Nix a terrorizing and
intimidating presence. But his thickly applied Norwegian accent as the sinister
paterfamilias, several degrees too ripe, put me in mind of Lithgow’s insanely
over-the-top Dr. Emilio Lizardo from The
Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the Eighth Dimension. I know Lizardo
was supposed to be funny, but I was
never sure about Dr. Nix or, if he was, what the joke was.
Lithgow as the Nix boys doesn’t fully undermine De
Palma’s vision though—at times you can almost feel De Palma getting off on how
far his actor is willing to go, perhaps even being inspired by him, and Lithgow
is certainly a vivid contrast to the lovely but slightly bland Lolita
Davidovich, who has almost as much screen time as her leading man does. Lithgow’s
Carter makes you uncomfortable for the wrong reasons, and even if the actor’s
performance reflects Cain’s overly emphatic efforts to maintain the illusion of
fatherly concern and normalcy and does start to make sense within the fulfilled
schematics of Raising Cain Recut, I
couldn’t help but speculate on what a slightly less eager, perhaps more
carefully modulated Carter might have been like-- say, if the histrionic
elements had been cross-pollinated with the quiet, focused purposefulness of
Lithgow’s shadowy assassin in Blow Out
so as to stand as a more stark contrast against the mental circus eventually overseen
by Cain and company.
Perhaps it’s easy to overstate the unique import of what
Gelderblom adds to the legacy of Raising
Cain, but I think the most telling observation might be how swiftly the
recut version seems to have eclipsed the original in my mind. In preparing to
write about the Blu-ray, I had originally intended to watch the two versions of
De Palma’s 1992 film back to back. But after finding Raising Cain Recut to be so much more satisfying and
well-sustained, I realized that my interest in that compromised theatrical cut
was fast dwindling and that further visits to the world of Carter Nix and his
demented approach to child psychology would have to come courtesy of this
richer, more dramatically complex version.
I don’t suspect that Gelderblom’s efforts will convert anyone
who has a serious aversion to Cain’s
gleeful mixture of narrative absurdity, flaunting of dramatic convention,
fascination for the blurring of the line between conscious and dream states,
and unflappable indulgence of its creator’s conspicuous directorial
perspective. (Gelderblom, in his video essay on the recut, also included in
this wonderful Blu-ray package, correctly describes De Palma as “the polar
opposite of an invisible narrator.”) But for those compelled by De Palma’s
methods and curious about the relative ease with which a filmmaker’s intentions
can be undone or watered down the inclusion of Peet Gelderblom’s Raising Cain Recut will elevate this new
Blu-ray package to a standing among the best and most important releases of the
year and will certainly provide ample grist for further fascination, focused
both on De Palma as a singular cinematic visionary and the passion among his
audience that vision can inspire.
And if it proves nothing else, the recut throws into
relief just how ahead of its time Raising
Cain, even in its jumbled form, really was, seen 20 years on, in the wake
of time-shifting classics like Memento
and Pulp Fiction. How fortunate then that this controversial
director’s vision can now be reintroduced to a new generation and perhaps more
thoroughly appreciated on its own terms, all thanks to Peet Gelderblom, who has
taken De Palma’s misfit child and, like a good father, ushered it to full
maturity, split personality and all.
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Press play to watch Peet Gelderblom's featurette Changing Cain, which is also available as part of Shout!/Scream Factory's new Blu-ray release of Raising Cain.
Changing Cain: De Palma's Cult Classic Restored from Peet Gelderblom on Vimeo.
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