DE PALMA (Noah Baumbach, Jake Paltrow). 107 minutes. Opens Friday (June 17). See listing. Rating: NNNN
Arriving alongside TIFF’s retrospective, Noah Baumbach and Jake Paltrow’s feature-length documentary tribute celebrates the cult director by sitting him down and letting him recount his life story, mixing in clips from his films as illustration.
It’s a ride through a broad filmo-graphy that, while varied in terms of stories told, always finds room for elaborate homages to the cinema that shaped it. Plenty of directors have riffed on Hitchcock’s Vertigo, but only Brian De Palma has straight-up remade it twice – once as Obsession and again as Body Double, which also folded in the first act of Rear Window just for funsies.
There’s no outside commentary, which means De Palma’s defences of later-period junk like Snake Eyes, The Black Dahlia and Femme Fatale go unchallenged, but that doesn’t really matter. The guy’s a hell of a storyteller.
