Gangsta Rapping

By RICHARD SCHICKEL

As we are told more than once, Carlito Brigante (Al Pacino) gained his education almost entirely on the streets of Spanish Harlem. That is too bad. If he had spent more time at home watching the old Late Show, he would have known from the early gangster movies (especially James Cagney's) that there comes a moment in any criminal career when it becomes impossible to go straight, no matter how much you want to. It's an image problem with tragic dimensions.

Brian De Palma has, of course, seen Angels with Dirty Faces and The Roaring Twenties. No director knows the traditions of the violent genres better or is better at bringing them back to rushing life. And in Carlito's Way David Koepp has given him a script that works smart variants on the gangster film's classic conventions. Early on we find Carlito in court, about to be sprung after serving just five years of a 30-year rap, making a grandiose speech thanking everyone who has helped him. It's a fine bit, which, as the judge sourly comments, sounds a little too much like an acceptance speech at some show-biz awards ceremony.

This nice comic weirdness signals that business is not going to be conducted as usual. Carlito, like most reform-minded hoods, has a naive vision of the honest life. He hopes to buy into a car-rental agency. He also hopes to rekindle his old flame, Gail (Penelope Ann Miller), once a respectable chorus girl, now working topless in a go-go club.

But Carlito needs more than a good woman to avoid recidivism. He needs Pat O'Brien. You remember Pat O'Brien, Cagney's superego, trying to keep his wayward pal on a righteous path. What Carlito has instead is his friend and shyster lawyer, Dave Kleinfeld (Sean Penn, in a terrific performance). He is in too far with the Mob, and he needs Carlito's muscular help in a cockamamie plan to avoid gangland's vengeance. It goes awry, naturally, and Carlito's subsequent flight brings out the best in De Palma -- breathless, bravura moviemaking, intricately designed, but playing like a delirious improvisation.

Out of breath is a useful condition to impose on Pacino. Really good movie actors force you to lean in a little in order to catch their meaning. Pacino, + instead, leans on you, and though his boldness is sometimes impressive, in its calculated way there is also something overweening about it. There's almost no vulnerability about him, and that quality was what kept Cagney in a viewer's good graces. It is why Cagney's hoodlums seemed touched by tragedy, while Carlito seems touched only by technique. There is an irony here: an actor's bruising desire to transcend type is what prevents a very ambitious and otherwise skillful movie from transcending its genre.